“How to Get Web Presents! Designing a Collaborative K-12 Web Project” by Julian

Since I first launched the collaborative ecology project, “A World Community of Old Trees,” on the Web two years ago, I have received hundreds of contributions from children and adults from all over the world. Each time I opened an electronic file, I felt like I was opening a very special present! What wonderful old tree would be inside?

Using “A World Community of Old Trees” as an example, this paper presents methods for K-12 teachers and students to design, maintain, and evaluate their own collaborative project for the WWW. For me, having a global Web project has been like hosting a party and inviting the world to join in! The purpose of this presentation is to share the excitement of the definite potential of the Web medium for global collaborative learning.

“A World Community of Old Trees” was specifically designed to provide an open digital space for the global community to identify, write about, and document with visual images, the most extraordinary trees in their environment. The project contains three major components: the Tree Gallery, with both scanned art and Web-specific imagery and accompanying descriptive text, the Tree Museum, where references to extraordinary trees are listed in the continually growing Print Sources and Web Sources sections, and Tree Talk, which contains tree ecology facts, personal narratives, photos, participants’ responses, and a built-in Comment and Survey Form about the project.