This project blends an award-winning middle school science project with community mentors representing those perspectives in an innovative World Wide Web environment for doing just that. The science project involves testing the effectiveness of several types of artificial wetlands in abating the negative chemical effects of drainage from an abandoned mine in the Rocky Mountains. Over the last five years students identified those effects and their source, researched methods for abating the effects, and participated in the design and construction of the artificial wetlands. They are ready to tackle the next obstacle: integrating those results into an action plan that considers the needs of the communities with stakes in that plan. Students will form teams corresponding to each of these groups. They will research their team's perspective individually with guidance from the teacher and from representatives of those communities that have agreed to act as mentors. They will then bring together their individual results into a team perspective and the perspectives of all of the teams will be considered in the action plan. The teamwork processes required for these two phases is directly supported by the technology that will be used. The technological framework is expressed in a tool called WebGuide. This tool allows individuals to record and annotate their research into "perspectives". It then provides tools that support collaborative processes: proposing ideas, comparing and assessing ideas, negotiating, and reaching consensus. It provides an ideal environment in which students can actually practice these processes, observe how to do them well, and improve their skills. It also allows the community mentors to directly observe and facilitate these processes from their offices or homes. This is fundamentally different than throwing a group of students into a room with instructions like "do a team project". It actually provides an electronic venue in which they learn how to do team projects. Not only is the technology of this project ideally suited, the school is as well. The Logan School for Creative Learning is centered around a strong individually oriented and project based curricular approach. The project will clearly fit in to this situation; it will receive the support that it needs to flourish. This project will have an impact on advancing knowledge and building an important human resource for the Geoscience community. The approach will be guided by a specific case, but the system can work in many environments including K-16 classrooms, university research centers, government agencies, and NGO's. All of these groups have stakes in the environmental decisions of the future. This project will build the Web into a venue for sharing the information required to inform those decisions on whatever spatial scale required.
