9801296 Koschmann The CSCL conferences were introduced to provide an international forum for research into the ways that technology might be used to enhance collaborative forms of instruction as well as more fundamental research into how people learn in collaborative settings. CSCL '97 will take place in December of this year and will be hosted by the University of Toronto and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Special program support is sought to address three concerns relative to the conference-the need for capacity-building within the research community, the need to construct a bridge to the teaching community, and the need to provide a community memory aid that will document what is accomplished at the meeting. To address these concerns, three programs are proposed: the Doctoral Consortium, the Teacher Participation Program, and the CSCL '97 Virtual Conference. The Doctoral Consortium is planned as a pre-conference activity. It will bring together Ph.D. students from a variety of institutions to discuss their planned dissertation projects with a selected set of faculty members drawn from the various fields related to educational technology. The Teacher Participation Program will have two major components-Classroom Visitations and the Teachers' Panel. The Classroom Visitations are one-hour immersive experiences designed by classroom teachers to acquaint conference attendees with the ways that CSCL technologies have been used in actual classrooms. Five Classroom Visitations are planned over the course of the conference. The five teachers who develop the Classroom Visitations will also participate in the Teachers' Panel, a plenary event designed to foster discussion among teachers and researchers about the direction of future CSCL work. The CSCL '97 Virtual Conference is designed to create an archival "community memory" of the conference, focusing in particular on some of the special and emergent events. The intent is to create a montage of digitized images, video, a udio, and text, which will be available following the conference both through the conference website, and on a CD-ROM.
