Mentoring in a school environment

Notification and awareness: synchronizing task-oriented collaborative activity

“…Small groups of 2-5 students worked proximally as part of a larger distributed team involving 2-4 mutually remote school sites. The Virtual School enabled a variety of stimulating and productive collaborative activities involving within-grade-level and cross-grade-level student groups dispersed at different school sites, mentoring interactions with community science experts, and collaborative professional relationships among the participating teachers (Gibson et al, 1999;Carroll et al, 2000b;Dunlap et al, 2000). However, despite the various awareness mechanisms and notifications used to support students' collaborative work, breakdowns in collaborative work frequently occurred.…”

Designing our town: MOOsburg

“…We have identi"ed a Virtual Science Fair (VSF) as one such event, partly because it builds on related work, aimed at supporting collaborative projects in K-12 science education (Koenemann et al, 1999;Isenhour et al, 2000a). Science projects are diverse and can be created by a wide range of student participants; there is a history of mentoring activities in the community (Gibson, Neale, Carroll & Van Metre, 1999). We are leveraging the growing interest in community involvement in science education, building a virtual analogue of current science fairs that removes some of the time and location constraints of physical fairs.…”

“…By providing these types of capabilities, we hope to foster an environment in which informal mentoring and community involvement can take place. We believe that MOOsburg addresses many of the constraints that plague these interactions in the real world*time constraints, geographic location, convenience of interactions, visibility of results and e!ective evaluation of project focus and structure (Gibson et al, 1999). Mentoring is a process that is reciprocally bene"cial to both students and mentors.…”

Learning and Collaboration across Generations in a Community

“…School children may interact with community elders as mentors on school projects (Gibson, et al, 1999;Oneill & Gomez, 1998), but they have no reason to seek their guidance outside of these teacher-guided school settings. Senior citizens are often highly motivated and active online constituencies in community networks (Carroll & Rosson, 1996;Carroll et al, 1999;Ellis & Bruckman, 2001), but sending email or visiting a web page is qualitatively different from designing or building visual simulations.…”

“…Instead of attending a town council meeting, residents email questions or comments to town officials (Cohill & Kavanaugh, 1997). Elders who remember key historical events or perspectives share these in simple online forums (Carroll et al, 1999). Teachers who have traditionally worked autonomously within their own classrooms share their resources and strategies with other teachers using online tools (Kim et al, 2002).…”