Collaboratory

COllaboratory is an initiative which was included in the foundation course. The course engages students in a conversation about scholarship, fosters the building of information literacy skills, develops research abilities, and connects students to the community through service learning. COllaboratory has been a capstone activity to the year long course. The project brings together teams of college and K-12 students, museum staff, faculty and others from around the country to create museum exhibits reflecting research on a yearly theme.

Students are connected over electronic mail as well as become members of Walden3 a virtual community. Walden3 is a MOO (MUD, Object Oriented), which provides a text based platform for world-building and synchronous communication. It provides an online venue for team members to access each other as well as museum staff, librarians, and faculty. One important component of COllaboratory is that it encourages students to recognize learning as an ongoing endeavor, that education is as much a process as a product, and that connecting to the rest of the world serves to broaden perspectives, enhances creativity, and nurtures intellectual inquiry.