The collaboratory is a graduate demonstration project
in the future of learning exploring one solution
to the problems and issues surrounding collaboration
in schools three to five years in the future.
In the real world, people collaborate on projects
and are evaluated based on their process and results.
In school, however, students typically
work individually and are evaluated with tests.
While most teachers recognize the value of collaboration,
the barrier in schools is that teachers have difficulty
managing team projects and evaluating
students who work in them.
Moreover, collaboration is hard to teach but easier
to learn in practice.
For a collaborative environment to succeed in schools,
it must address the following critical success factors.
Let students learn by doing.
Provide a context for collaboration.
Give students ownership.
Give teachers tools for management and evaluation.
The collaboratory is one approach to these issues.
It is a virtual, collaborative learning environment.
The collaboratory is a digitally created room
which a student team uses to work on a project
much like the way creative teams in business
use a shared project space.
It helps students learn to collaborate by embedding tools
to facilitate teamwork within the environment itself.
It embeds that teamwork within project-based learning
so that students learn by doing.
Collaboratory runs on CTV, an interactive TV
platform developed by graduate student Jeff Harris.
CTV allows students to use the collaboratory
at school or at home without expensive computers.
The collaboratory is optimized for the CTV controller,
an input device providing better control
in a rich, interactive environment than a mouse
and keyboard.
In developing the concept for the collaboratory,
initial observation was conducted at a Chicago
inner city public high school.
It demonstrated that collaboration
was a real opportunity for exploration.
Based on early concept sketches of the collaboratory,
physical prototypes were built to study various behaviors
associated with collaboration such as sharing
of tools, visual and verbal communication,
and multitasking.
Results from observational analysis
along with detailed research on collaboration in project work
led to the design of the collaboratory.
Each student team creates their own collaboratory
for their project collaboratories
for all teams working on a given class assignment,
for example, a 20th century history project,
are clustered in project neighborhoods.
Teams build collaboratories with walls representing
the six basic project steps of brainstorming, organization,
planning, research, development, and deliverables
along with two walls for communication and management.
Students can change or customize their collaboratory
at any time.
The collaboratory uses a three-dimensional interface
which allows students to organize information and use
tools in an intuitive way.
A functional behavioral prototype on a computer
was critical to test ease of use and to verify that navigation
became secondary to doing work.
The tools and resources fall into three general categories--
collaboration tools, project tools, and teacher tools.
Collaboration tools facilitate collaboration or teach aspects
about working together.
Many are needed to bridge the gap
between remote and local work.
In addition to standard collaborative tools
such as whiteboards and video conferencing,
the environment has an additional set
of tools, some of which are only possible with computers.
The intro panel appears upon entry
displaying messages and a log of activity
since the user was last in.
Recipes are high-level, step-by-step guide
for doing tasks involving teams such as facilitating a meeting.
Video Post-its allow asynchronous communication
like email but as the functional prototype
showed are far more powerful.
Hi, Jason.
Students understood messages quicker,
made fewer errors when doing tasks specified
in the messages, and did not have
to review the messages as they did with email.
Finally, avatars represent users within the space.
They not only show who is present
and where they are focused but also allow
spontaneous video conferences.
Project tools focus on making project work more
productive or understandable.
The collaboratory provides access to standard 2D computer
applications such as Inspiration by letting users plug in
to an application panel.
Wall mapping transforms data of one type,
for example, brainstorming lists,
into data within an application.
Bots are physical manifestations of macros
that perform routine tasks for the team such as automatically
archiving work done in a session.
The media panel is the team's shared repository
of digital information and allows
them to organize media in the manner which
best suits their work.
Students use the vortex to open portals
to information sources like the web and gather information.
Teacher tools provide quantitative and qualitative
levels of detail about work done in the collaboratory.
Trails gives the teacher a thumbnail view
of how students have been working
and what they've been working on.
It's particularly helpful in rapidly
seeing what all teams have been doing between classes.
Teachers can get the same information in real time
as they fly over collaboratories in the neighborhood.
Finally, teachers can look at deliverables by student
or look at detailed logs of their work.
Compared to typical methods of teaching and testing,
the collaboratory offers the advantages
of learning by doing, real-world skills, increased motivation,
higher productivity, and better results.
It also has the spin-off advantages
of respect for other skills, pride in work,
and reading is less of a barrier to learning.
One promising direction for future work in this area
is clearly its application to remote work in business.