Based on Bram Stoker's novel "Dracula," this lesson plan presents activities designed to help students understand that some fictional literary characters become so famous that they enter popular culture in other forms (movies, games, toys); and that working on a product such as a game often demands collaborative effort. The main activity of the…

Colleges of business are particularly known for assigning large-scale team projects as a means of enhancing learning. Though students may assemble in one location for "traditional" classroom-based learning, time and distance may create challenges as students attempt to fulfill requirements associated with large-scale team projects. This study…

The SAGRES system is an educational environment built on the Web that facilitates the organization of visits to museums, presenting museum information bases in a way adapted to the user's characteristics (capacities and preferences). The system determines the group of links appropriate to the user(s) and shows them in a resultant HTML page. In…

It is important to build a community of learners so that cooperative learning takes place. This is more difficult to accomplish online, where the lecturer has to overcome the natural reticence of students to post in shared class spaces. This paper suggests contructive methods of ensuring the success of an online course. These include: (1)…

This paper investigates how computer support for vicarious learning can be implemented by taking a principled approach to selecting and combining different media to capture educational dialogues. The main goal is to create vicarious learning materials of appropriate pedagogic content and production quality, and at the same time minimize the…

In the academic year 2001-2002, Pace University (New York) Computer Science and Information Systems (CSIS) students developed real-world Web and pervasive computing systems for actual customers. This paper describes the general use of team projects in CSIS at Pace University, the real-world projects from this academic year, the benefits of…

Oklahoma Christian University has implemented a ubiquitous computing program where every student and faculty member are equipped with IBM ThinkPad laptops that are connected to a wireless network. The technological enhancements provided by this program helped to create an environment where collaboration between students and faculty could be…

Learning is an active, constructive and collaborative process, where people construct knowledge from their experiences in the world. People construct new knowledge with particular effectiveness when they engage in constructing personally meaningful products, that is meaningful to themselves or to others around them. The construction of knowledge…

The purpose of this study was to design and develop a multimedia-based anchored program and to examine the effects of students' and group characteristics on the problem-solving process in anchored instruction with the multimedia program in a situated learning environment. Sixty-eight students were assigned to small groups via a stratified random…

At Villanova University, the Senior Projects Course is designed to serve as a capstone course. Students are required to integrate the pieces of the discipline acquired from previous course work into a comprehensive, fully developed research project. This paper looks critically at one aspect of effectively managing a group project course: conflict…

Staff development in cooperative learning must focus on three stages of staff development (pre-training, training, and post-training) to achieve at least five purposes. The five purposes are: creating conditions for successful staff development prior to training; conducting high-quality training sessions that result in mastery of the conceptual…

This paper reports on a project created to improve high school students' academic success. Students in three schools in the suburbs south of Chicago were targeted. Lack of student success was attributed to several probable causes: teacher-student relationships, curriculum relevance and choice, family issues, teacher expectations, lack of…

The early childhood education department at Humber College in Toronto has developed a model for team collaboration that has been successful for 10 years. This model provides for the development of teamwork skills by their students by engaging them in assignments that require collaboration with college instructors and professionals outside the…

This paper introduces a method of storying called concentric storying, describing its development as a vehicle for both personal growth and professional development in preservice teacher education. Concentric storying is the process of deconstructing personal stories to reveal the core values and beliefs and acting as a catalyst for the…

This paper describes the outcomes of a program developed and implemented to increase work completion in social studies, along with attending and cooperative behaviors for suburban elementary school students with severe emotional disturbances (SED). The objectives of the program were to increase the work completion of at least 6 of the 8 students…