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Beyond Adoption to Invention:
Teacher-Created Collaborative Activities in Higher Education
Mark Guzdial, Jochen Rick, and Colleen Kehoe
EduTech Institute and GVU Center
College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA 30332-0280
404-894-5618
guzdial@cc.gatech.edu
Submission to Journal of the Learning Sciences
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Beyond Adoption to Invention:
Teacher-Created Collaborative Activities in Higher Education
Abstract
The potential learning benefits of the Web are diminished due to the complexity of
creating interactive, collaborative Web-based applications. The CoWeb is a collaborative
website which allows users to create collaborative applications with great flexibility. The
CoWeb facilitates open authoring where any user can edit any existing page or creating
new pages. Using the CoWeb, both teachers and students have invented a wide variety of
educational applications. Thus, the CoWeb serves as an example of an educational
technology that has led to teacher inventiveness.
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Beyond Adoption to Invention:
Teacher-Created Collaborative Activities in Higher Education
I. Introduction: Supporting Open Authoring on the Web
There seems to be relatively little argument that the Web could have educational
benefits. Creating Web pages can be a motivator for students due to the potential world
wide audience that a Web page can reach (Blumenfeld et al., 1991). Web pages can offer
user interaction, so that they are more than just passive conveyors of information.
Combining the wide audience and interaction, it can enable collaboration (Guzdial et al.,
1997) which can support complex and motivating student work (Blumenfeld et al., 1991)
and the development of improved, shared conceptualizations (Jeong & Chi, 1997;
Roschelle, 1992).
The technical aspects of making the Web actually work for learning are real challenges,
leaving out for the moment the more enormous challenges of figuring out what to do with
the Web to facilitate learning. The barriers to using the Web for educational applications
are considerable. Using the Web requires mastery of concepts such as HTML, servers,
FTP of files, and server-side scripting, client-side plugins, or Java applets for
interactivity. While the potential to utilize the Web as a powerful medium for
communication is real, the HTML language for creating these links and for formatting text
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and graphics serves as a gatekeeper to prevent the least technical users from accessing the
Web’s potential. The interactive aspects of the Web are particularly complicated for
teachers and students to access, requiring complicated programming of CGI scripts or
Java applets. In short, the most powerful aspects of the Web also have the greatest
barriers to students and teachers.
Where will Web-based educational applications come from? Literature from the
computer-supported collaborative learning conferences suggests that it will be researchers
and developers (e.g., Hall, 1997; Hoadley & Roschelle, 1999). Past experience in
educational technology suggests that the source will not be the teachers—the early days
of Basic and Logo showed that teachers are too time-constrained and lacking in
technological training to build their own classroom technologies (Solomon, 1986).
Research on facilitating adoption of collaborative practices suggests that teachers need a
lot of help making the transition (Soloway, Krajcik, Blumenfeld, & Marx, 1996).
Historical studies of higher-education teachers show that they are especially reticent to
develop and apply innovations because the administrative and cultural barriers are so high
(Cuban, 1999).
Surprisingly, we are finding exactly the opposite of this phenomenon
occurring—university faculty at Georgia Tech (and elsewhere, but we are only studying
Georgia Tech) are inventing their own Web-based collaborative activities that they are
using in their own classrooms. This phenomenon is different than simply adopting the
technology (e.g., Moore, 1995, Tyack & Cuban, 1995), but has moved beyond to
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inventing new applications with the technology—applications that the developers had
not considered.
We (the authors and our collaborators) have placed into classroom use a very simple
forum for communication and collaboration called the CoWeb, for Collaborative Website.
The CoWeb is not an advanced technology, and it does not support the creation of
interactive elements the way that other tools do, e.g., AgentSheets (Repenning, 1994).
Rather, the CoWeb supports a simple but powerful notion of open authoring. Any user
can edit any page, and any user can create new pages, with links from and to any other
page. There is no distinction enforced in the software between teachers and students, and
there is no explicit scaffolding built into the tool to structure what students do, how they
do it, or even how they learn with the space. On the other hand, what the CoWeb does do
is to make it as easy as possible for teachers and students to create collaborative Web-
based activities. For this one aspect of the Web, the CoWeb does resolve the issue of
providing access with very few interface barriers.
We originally began exploring the CoWeb as an extension of our research on anchored
discussion and collaboration (Guzdial, 1997; Guzdial & Turns, 2000). We had shown that
collaboration spaces directly linked to media of interest to students (anchors) tended to
create more sustained discussion than traditional classroom newsgroup discussions. But
in our work, the anchors were always created by teachers. Was it the anchor, or the fact
that the teacher said to go there? Could students create anchors? Through the CoWeb, we
were able to explore how other students might discuss anchors created by peer students.
While we found that students did use and explore peer-defined anchored collaboration
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(Guzdial, 1999), that became almost peripheral to our discovery that teachers were
actively and continually creating their own innovative applications.
Our finding is unusual in the Learning Sciences community. We are not reporting on
an experiment, nor an invention. The concept of this kind of Web-based open authoring
was developed by Ward Cunningham in his WikiWikiWeb (Cunningham & Leuf, 2001).
Though we have created over a dozen iterations on our version of Cunningham’s tool in
the last three years to make it work better for classroom applications (Guzdial, Rick,
Kerimbaev, 2001), the core ideas and features that are making it so successful in
encouraging teacher innovation are not ours. Rather, we are reporting on a
discovery—that the CoWeb is an example of a kind of application in which teachers
actively invent their own uses. This is unusual, and we believe that studying the kinds of
applications that teachers are inventing and the kinds of affordances that the CoWeb
offers can help us understand how to better facilitate teacher inventiveness.
In the next section, the CoWeb is introduced. The following section lists several of the
activities that have been implemented on the CoWeb at Georgia Tech. We have identified
25 kinds of activities that have been invented in the last three years of use. Many teachers
tailor the basic forms for their own classes (Collaborative Software Lab, 2000). We
highlight a handful of the activities here. Finally, we conclude with our observations and
speculations on what is leading to this kind of teacher inventiveness.
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II. CoWeb: Open Authoring on the Web
The basic idea behind the CoWeb is that any page is directly editable by any reader of
that page and that any editor can create pages in the website. Ward Cunningham is the
inventor of this kind of website, as implemented in his WikiWikiWeb
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. The CoWeb was
designed as a kind of WikiWikiWeb. The CoWeb is written in Squeak
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, a new and highly-
portable form of the Smalltalk programming language (Ingalls, Kaehler, Maloney, Wallace,
& Kay, 1997), so our version of the tool was originally called Swiki for Squeak-Wiki. The
CoWeb is a more descriptive term of the end product, however, and has become the more
common name.
The CoWeb is an open-source project, in that we make the CoWeb application and all
of its development material available for any user
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. The CoWeb has been adopted by
other institutions, both academic and professional. While we have heard about similar
invention at other sites, we focus here on the work of Georgia Tech teachers.
A CoWeb looks like a fairly traditional web site. Figure 1 is a screenshot of the front
page of a CoWeb. A CoWeb page can have essentially any kind of media or formatting
that any other Web page can. A key feature of a CoWeb page, however, is the link in the
upper left corner of Figure 1, “Edit this Page.”
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http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki
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http://www.squeak.org
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http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/swiki
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When the reader of the page seen in Figure 1 clicks “Edit this Page,” she gets a new
page that looks like Figure 2. The text appearing in the scrollable text area is actually the
text of the page in Figure 1. The reader can edit this text—perhaps correcting some of the
text, adding new text, making a comment, or linking to other pages within the CoWeb or
elsewhere on the Web. When the user clicks the “Save” button, the page will be updated
to reflect the changed text.
While editing a CoWeb page, users can create new pages. The user types a title for the
new page (e.g., “My New Page”) between asterisks (e.g., “*My New Page*”) in the text
area. When the page is saved, the title text (without asterisks) becomes a link. Clicking on
the link opens the new, blank page. The user can then edit the new page by choosing the
“Edit this Page” link. The user never has to deal with creating files or making the files
accessible by a Web server.
Editing a page is a simplified form of editing a traditional Web page.
• As can be seen in Figure 2, CoWeb pages can be written using the same editing
conventions used in email. Text can be entered as paragraphs (with or without
pressing the return key at the end of the line), and a blank line separates
paragraphs.
• Links to existing CoWeb pages are entered the same as new pages, with the
title between asterisks. For example, *Front Page* entered on a CoWeb page
would create a link to the top of the CoWeb site.
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• Links to external Web pages are entered as the URL between asterisks, e.g.,
*http://www.cc.gatech.edu*. When saved, the link becomes a hyperlink that
will take the user to the page at the given URL address.
• Images can also be incorporated into a CoWeb page using the same technique
as creating links. The user enters the URL for the image between asterisks
(e.g., *http://myserver.edu/myimage.gif*). When the page is displayed, the
image will be fetched and displayed in the place of the image URL on the page.
Images can also be uploaded directly to the CoWeb through an Attachments
page, and a simplified form of reference is supported (e.g., *+myimage.gif+*).
• If the user does know any HTML, it can be intermixed with CoWeb-style
text. As the user learns more sophisticated HTML (e.g., tables and even
JavaScript), these can be entered into the page as well.
The CoWeb provides supports that facilitate use of the site by users, all of which
were originally invented in Cunningham's WikiWikiWeb.
• A “Recent Changes” page is available for every CoWeb. It lists each page by
title in the CoWeb by the day on which it was changed in reverse chronological
order (i.e., today is at the top). “Recent Changes” serves as an automatic table
of contents for the CoWeb and as a mechanism to alert users when another
user has changed an existing page or created a new page.
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• The entire CoWeb is searchable from any page in the CoWeb. This enables
users to find what others have done, even if long ago and far down the “Recent
Changes” list.
The CoWeb offers only a little in the way of security. Each version of each page is
saved, so it is possible to restore a page to any previous point of time. Pages can be
locked to prevent editing by others, but in practice, very few pages are locked. The most
powerful security measure on the CoWeb seems to be the power of social conventions.
People do not normally destroy one another’s contributions. People generally identify
themselves with their contributions. In our three years of use, with over 100 CoWebs, we
have had only a couple incidents of malicious behavior, all quickly repaired. On the
original Wiki by Ward Cunningham, users make sure that ideas are not lost—if someone
inadvertently (or otherwise) deletes important text, “housekeepers” make sure that the
text is repaired. In this way, even protection becomes a collaborative task (Cunningham,
1998).
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Figure 1: A Page in a CoWeb
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Figure 2: Editing the Page Seen in Figure 1
III. Uses of the CoWeb
We have three rough categories that we have been using to describe the kinds of
activities that we see being invented for the CoWeb:
• Distributing Information activities uses the whole class as information
gathererers and reporters, where the CoWeb becomes the storage place for the
gathered information.
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• Collaborative Artifact Creation activities use the whole class as co-designers
and co-creators of one or more artifacts, where the CoWeb is either the vehicle
for this creation or is a medium for supporting that creation.
• Discussion and Review activities use the whole class (and perhaps external
visitors, as well) to discuss topics and review artifacts or ideas, where the
CoWeb is the medium for this discussion and review.
A. Distributing Information
Information source. The first use of the CoWeb for many faculty is simply a course
website. The CoWeb lends itself to being a course website particularly for those faculty
who are uncomfortable with traditional methods of managing a website (e.g., creating and
editing files). But even faculty who are comfortable with technical concepts like HTML
and FTP appreciated the CoWeb as an information source, as one CS professor noted
when he wrote me, "I just love this CoWeb! I just like the interaction that it enables. It's
basically just a whiteboard that everyone can write on. Protections are always kind of a
pain."
Most of these CoWebs, however, get expanded into collaborative information
gathering. For example, several CoWebs host pages for movie, restaraunt, nightclub, and
music reviews. The CoWeb becomes a public common ground where useful information
can be noted and left for others.
Collaborative Hotlists. In several classes, the CoWeb is used as a collaborative
bookmark or hotlist space. The teacher may create a top-level structure (e.g., “Links
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about X” on one page, “Links about Y” on the other), but then the entire class finds
information, posts links into these pages, and extends the structure with new pages for
new kinds of bookmarks. If the CoWeb gets reused in multiple terms, the information
gets expanded by future classes. The result is that the CoWeb becomes a useful resource
for anyone on the topic of the class.
B. Collaborative Artifact Creation
Collaborative Writing. In a human anatomy class by Mindy Millard-Stafford,
students were asked to do collaborative writing projects on the CoWeb. The teaching
assistant created a page for each topic that groups could choose from. On each of the
pages, the assistant created four or five spaces for signing up for the given topic. Students
in a group would edit the same page to enter their text for the group project.
In another variation of this project, Millard-Stafford asked students to create a
collaborative glossary. As she and the students found terms of interest in their readings,
they were added to a CoWeb where the poster (and others) could provide definitions. In
addition, links between related terms were easily added.
Cross-Class Projects. In one application of the CoWeb, the interaction of junior and
senior students was the explicit goal. Two classes in Chemical Engineering were paired
using the CoWeb. The Senior level course had students designing a chemical system then
constructing a simulation of the system. The Sophomore level course was on analyzing
exactly that kind of simulation. Because of curriculum paths, it was possible for the
Seniors never to have taken the Sophomore level course. The two Chemical Engineering
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faculty teaching the classes decided to require a cross-class project where Seniors would
create the simulation, pass the data to the Sophomores who would analyze the simulation
and return the results to the Seniors, who would use the results to complete the
simulation. The CoWeb provided an open forum for sharing data, deciding on formats and
other issues for such a technical collaboration, and working together on the solution.
Cross-Term Communication. Rather than start out with a blank space, teachers can
reuse an existing CoWeb for the class (or teaching a related class). Since CoWeb pages
cannot be deleted, the teacher would create new pages (e.g., "Old Front Page"), copy
references to the past content into the new page, then restructure the CoWeb for his new
class. In one case, the same CoWeb was used for the first and second courses in human-
computer interaction. In another example, a CoWeb was used for both the graduate and
undergraduate versions of the same class (in that order, so that graduate level discussions
and examples were available in the space to the more novice students). In this activity, the
artifact being collaboratively created is the CoWeb itself and the collaboration extends
beyond class boundaries.
The result is a sense of "termlessness" (Koschmann, In Press) to the CoWeb and to
the content of the course itself. The course is not limited to a single term, but extends
across time. Student comments and server logging data indicate that students do visit the
older content. Students see quite explicitly that the course domain extends beyond just
this one course instantiation, and there are multiple ways to explore the domain. The
older content serves as examples, even when not structured explicitly as cases. We hope
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to explore in later studies exactly what students might be gaining from collaborative
spaces that break down the perception of classes being limited to a single term.
Choose-Your-Path Adventure Game. In two class CoWebs, students created an
adventure game about one of their assignments, as a Web-based “Choose Your Path”
book. A student created a situation (in one class, based on the current assignment) with a
set of links representing choices that the reader might select from. Other students added
to the set of choices and created a variety of pages in the adventure game. In one class,
almost three dozen pages were created in this adventure over a 48 hour period.
C. Discussion and Review
Anchored Discussion. One of common uses for collaboration spaces at Georgia Tech
is anchored discussion. An anchored collaboration is a good structure to use for review
activities, but is also useful for supporting focused discussions. Common examples of an
anchored discussion are students studying for a final exam by posting and critiquing
answers to sample questions, or students asking questions about an (anchor) assignment.
Anchored collaboration was particularly simple to implement in the CoWeb, since the
collaboration space can literally be the same space as the anchor. Anchored collaborations
have been used in Architecture for debates (Craig, ul-Haq, Khan, Zimring, Kehoe, Rick,
and Guzdial, 1999) , in Computer Science to discuss papers (Abowd et al., 1999), and in
several disciplines to discuss homework.
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Students did use the CoWeb for anchored, focused discussions. Students used a
mechanism of writing their comments at the end of an anchor or comment page, usually
signed. While there was no explicit support for tracking “threads” of comments (i.e.,
when one note comments upon another note, which comments upon another note
(Guzdial, 1997)), a variety of mechanisms were invented by users (teacher or students)
for marking threads.
Project case library. In some classes (e.g., CS, Mathematics, and Chemical
Engineering), students were invited to post their homework assignments after grading,
particularly if the grade was high. The CoWeb became a project case library for exemplary
projects (Guzdial & Kehoe, 1998). Students used these projects as examples of high-
scoring projects, as sources for ideas (particularly when two or more students posted
their unique solutions to the same problem), and, in programming classes, as sources for
code that could be re-used in new projects. Frequently, students were offered extra credit
as an incentive to post to the project case library. The amount of extra credit was often
linked to the amount of extra effort that the teacher felt that the student had put into
creating the case. Simply posting what had been handed in for a grade was not worth as
much as also including a discussion of the flaws and strengths of the project, for example.
In a class that the first author taught in computer science, the project case library
became a mechanism for communication across classes. Guzdial used the same CoWeb
for successive terms of the same class. Students in the second term using the CoWeb
reviewed the project cases from the first term and left notes on them. Occasionally,
students from the first term revisited the CoWeb during the second term, answering
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questions and sometimes changing and improving their cases. As the project case library
in this class grew larger (as of this writing, over 100 cases), some students began creating
indices or recommendations of their favorite cases, also for extra credit. The CoWeb thus
facilitated a kind of apprenticeship exchange, where more senior students came back to
help younger students (Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1989).
Professional and Peer Design Review. Starting in Architecture, but now being copied
in several classes, students are asked to post their work for others to review, sometimes
peers, but sometimes experts from the outside. This kind of review can perform several
roles. It can be a motivating activity that helps students view their work from a new
perspective. It can be an activity that highlights a particular aspect of the students’ work,
e.g., when the teacher sets the ground rules about what’s to be critiqued. It can be an
activity that allows a large class to see what others are doing, in order to benchmark their
own work.
We highlight one of these uses to provide more details. In one architecture class,
students were asked to create CoWeb pages for each of their projects, in a space called
CoOL Studio (Collaborative On-Line design Studio). CoOL Studio was designed and
developed by Architecture colleagues David Craig, Saif-ul Haq, Sabir Kahn, and Craig
Zimring. On one page, students were asked to post descriptions of their projects (“pin-
ups”) with scanned images of their drawings. On another page, students were asked to
identify research questions that they needed to answer in order to complete their designs,
such as the optimal size of hallways for a given kind of building and kind of use. The goal
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of this structure was to provide students with an opportunity to review each others’
projects and to help one another in answering their research questions.
On two occasions during the class, expert architects were invited to tour the students’
pin-ups and comment on the projects. For each expert architect, a “tour page” was set up
with the architect’s name on it. The architect was invited to visit each of the pin-up pages
listed on his or her tour, and comment on the pin-ups either directly on the student’s page
or on the tour page. This activity was judged to be fairly successful. The experts wrote a
surprising amount of commentary. They wrote sometimes left comments on students’
pin-up pages with particular advice, and sometimes they wrote on the tour page with
general advice that the expert felt that the whole class group needed. Students took the
reviews quite seriously, and the experts reported enjoying the experience (Zimring, Khan,
Craig, Haq, & Guzdial, 1999). Experts particularly enjoyed reading one another's postings
and seeing how their peers responded to the students' work.
Close Reading: In Composition classes, the CoWeb has been used to implement a
form of “close reading” (Holloway-Attaway, 2001). The prose or poetry being studied is
loaded into a CoWeb page, and students identify sections to discuss by placing asterisks
around the phrase of interest. The asterisk-identified phrases get turned into links to page,
where the section can then be discussed. Close reading is an activity that has often been
used in these classes, but the teachers (especially Greg VanHoosier-Carey and Lissa
Holloway-Attaway) used the CoWeb to make it a collaborative activity where students
could see each others’ annotations and expand on them. Holloway-Attaway has reported
(2001) that she found the students’ writing in the CoWeb to have higher quality than in
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comparable classes because the students directly related their writing to the piece being
reviewed. We are currently studying her hypothesis in a comparative study.
IV. Discussion: From Adoption to Invention
The CoWeb is a flexible tool, but that very flexibility may limit some of its
applicability, as described further in the next section. The point of the previous section is
to show that the CoWeb seems well-suited to the diverse nature of higher-education.
Activities using the CoWeb have been invented and tailored by a fairly large number of
teachers. We have only started to gather data suggesting that some of these activities have
been effective in supporting student learning (e.g., Craig et al., 2000; Holloway-Attaway,
2001). We believe that they can be effective, when adequately integrated into a classroom,
as described in the final section below where we consider why the CoWeb has been
successful in encouraging invention by its users.
A. CoWeb Tradeoffs
The CoWeb is only one of several Web-based collaboration tools that have been
created for learners. It is worthwhile looking at the tradeoffs that were chosen between
others and the CoWeb, and to see how those tradeoffs impact the kinds of applications
that can be authored with these tools. In general, the CoWeb does not structure the
process of collaborating as other tools do, which makes it desirable in some settings (e.g.,
with adult learners) and less desirable in others.
CoNote (Davis & Huttenlocher, 1995), SpeakEasy/MFK (Hsi & Hoadley, 1994; Hsi
& Hoadley, 1997), and CaMILE (Guzdial et al., 1997; Guzdial et al., 1996; Guzdial,
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Turns, Rappin, & Carlson, 1995) have all been used successfully in education contexts.
CoNote is a system through which students make annotations to existing Web pages.
SpeakEasy/MFK and CaMILE are both threaded discussion spaces. SpeakEasy/MFK is
a multi-representation tool where students are asked to make a statement about a
discussion question, and then engage in a facilitated discussion about the question.
CaMILE only offers facilitated threaded discussions, but it supports anchored
collaboration so that threads of discussion can be accessed from any page on the Web.
Both SpeakEasy/MFK and CaMILE offer a form of discussion facilitation where users
are prompted to identify the kind of note that they are posting, as a way of encouraging
reflection about the collaboration process.
These other collaboration spaces are perhaps better suited where the users need a
more focused and more constrained activity, such as elementary school or middle school
students. All three of these tools provide more support than the CoWeb. Students do not
need to know anything about URL’s, page editing vs. page viewing, or HTML. Usage in
these other tools is more controlled. Users of CoNote, SpeakEasy/MFK, and CaMILE
have to sign in, so that their identity is known and each user’s contribution can be
tracked. Users cannot delete or modify other users’ postings. The CoWeb offers none of
these features: It is more complicated to use, individual contributions cannot be identified
with certainty, and it is possible for one user to modify or delete another user’s posting.
On the other hand, the CoWeb has a higher “ceiling” than threaded discussion spaces.
It is not possible in these spaces to have persistent, user-created pages for collaborative
glossaries, nor is it possible for students to invent the activity of a collaborative adventure
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game. The CoWeb provides more flexibility in authoring activities, but at a cost in
cognitive load that may make it more suited to the adult learner—at least, without external
support.
B. Supporting Teacher Inventiveness
Why are teachers inventing these kinds of activities with the CoWeb? What is it about
the CoWeb that facilitates this kind of inventiveness? We are exploring these questions
(through interviews, cataloging the activities, and studying the inventions), and we have a
few suggestions.
Certainly, the CoWeb’s simple interface leads to it being used. It also helps that we
have been responsive in requests for new features (Guzdial, Rick, & Kerimbaev, 2001).
Further, it seems to mesh with teachers’ metaphors and understandings, e.g., the quote
earlier about the CoWeb being “just a whiteboard that everyone can write on.” However,
there are lots of tools with good user interfaces out there, and not all of them lead to
teacher invention.
Perhaps the most important factor leading to the invention we’re seeing is that we had
excellent early adopters. Success breeds success. When we had the CoWeb ready to test,
we contacted a group of teachers who were already experimenting with educational
technology. They did some things that led to early successes:
• The CoWeb was integrated into their classes. Students grades were linked to
its use. Teachers talked about and encouraged its use. The CoWeb wasn’t
created and then left for anyone to pick up if they wanted it.
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• The teachers themselves were already innovators. They were open to try
things, and they had some technological skill to fall back on.
• The teachers created a path for students to become familiar with the CoWeb
and then run with. All the successful uses involved some small, required
activity, and then some interesting activities that engendered students’
interest. Then the students, too, became agents of adoption and invention.
The early adopters, and those that came after, were interested in the CoWeb in part
because of social pressure. The Web is everywhere these days. The expectations for the
Web to be useful for learning are enormous, perhaps larger than any other media
introduction since the computer. Large numbers of tools that have emerged for using the
Web in classes (higher-ed, as well as K-12). Teachers feel this pressure (from students,
parents, administrators, mass media, and so on), and are looking for ways to meet these
demands. The CoWeb provides an easy way for teachers to explore collaborative Web-
based applications in their classes—where it’s easy to tune applications to the particular
needs of the teacher and classroom. There’s nothing about the CoWeb that induces
inventiveness. Our experience suggests that an easy to use tool, that meets particular
teachers’ needs and demands (such as ease of integration with one’s class), can lead to the
kind of inventiveness that we’re observing.
Acknowledgements
We owe many people thanks for their efforts in creating the CoWeb, its application,
and our growing understanding of it. The CoWeb would not have happened without the
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pioneering work of Ward Cunningham. The CoWeb was originally built upon the
Pluggable WebServer , which built upon the work of Georg Gollman. All of the work in
Squeak owes thanks to the “Squeak Central” team: Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, John Maloney,
Ted Kaehler, Scott Wallace, Andreas Raab, and Kim Rose. Our thanks, too, go to our
initial users and collaborators: David Craig, Sabir Khan, Pete Ludovice, Mindy Millard-
Stafford, Tom Morley, Matthew Realff, and Craig Zimring. The current version of the
CoWeb is written by Jochen Rick (on top the Comanche webserver by Bolot Kerimbaev)
with additions from Bert Freudenberg, Ted Kaehler, Lex Spoon, Stephen Pair, John
McIntosh, Bijan Parsia, and Ross Philipson, among others. Janet Kolodner and Jennifer
Turns have helped us in understanding what has been happening in the CoWebs, as well
as Amy Bruckman, Noel Rappin, Colleen Kehoe, and Nora Sabelli. Funding for portions
of this work has come from National Science Foundation grants RED-955045 and REC-
9814770, the Georgia Tech “Al West” Fund, the Mellon Foundation, Siemens, Sun
Microsystems, and Viant. Our thanks to reviewers of previous drafts, especially Jeremy
Roschelle, Ben Bell, and Mimi Recker.
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