Today's technologies provide collaboration tools such as real-time video conferences, live-screen sharing, virtual worlds, group chat, Usenet news, and electronic mail. From a technological perspective, this arsenal of collaborative media is historically unprecedented. From an educational perspective, we are still striving to define the place for these new media with regard to the needs of learners. The collaborative media listed above were primarily technology-driven; the goal was to see what the new technology would support. Project-based education enlists these new technologies to facilitate learning.
Over the last year, many new, revised, and existing courses enlisted group projects to reinforce concepts and principles taught in class and covered in textbook readings. For example, in Howard Besser's "Image Databases" course which explored issues involved in managing visual information, students built an image database of approximately 650 T-shirts. This exercise gave students hands-on experience with organizing and presenting non-textual information through World-Wide Web technologies and forced them to choose standards for description of both objects and metadata and for indexing. It also grabbed the attention of the local news media which described Professor Besser's eclectic interests and his students' T-shirt database in a feature article on the front page of the local (Ann Arbor News) newspaper's "Connection" section. Other examples come from the seminar on the "Problems in the Administration of Archives" taught by SI lecturer Elizabeth Yakel in which students undertook imaginative and meaningful projects. One master's-level student (Cory Brandt) researched the feasibility and problems that a small business would encounter applying emerging archival electronic recordkeeping requirements and best practices in a small telecommunications business. Another student (Chris Zegers) studied the Museum Heritage Network, a developing virtual community, and recommended how this community should develop and select models for the organization and description of information to document a totally virtual community.
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