Volume 17. Proposals for Research
This collection gathers eighteen grant proposals by the author spanning approximately three decades and two very different domains of concern: environmental conservation and computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL). The first three chapters are proposals submitted on behalf of the Chatham Conservation Foundation—to restore a historic colonial homestead (chapter 1), study the preservation needs of a Cape Cod salt marsh (chapter 2), and apply for ecological restoration funding for the same marsh system (chapter 3). These chapters stand apart from the book's dominant concerns, but they share a common methodological sensibility with the CSCL proposals: each takes a rigorous, evidence-based, staged approach to a complex problem, building systematic analysis before prescribing interventions.
The remaining fifteen proposals trace the arc of the author's CSCL research agenda from its earliest formulations at the University of Colorado through its mature expression in the Virtual Math Teams project at Drexel University. The three earliest chapters (11, 13, and 18) emerged from the Center for LifeLong Learning and Design (L3D) at Colorado, where WEBGUIDE—a hypertext knowledge-building environment structured around group and personal perspectives—was under development. Chapter 11 is an early seed grant for WEBGUIDE itself; chapter 13 extends its logic to organizational memory and organizational learning within communities of practice; chapter 18 applies the same constructivist and community-of-practice theoretical grounding to the training of graduate researchers. Chapter 17 (POW!) represents a technical pivot in this same early period, separating WEBGUIDE's architecture into a reusable perspectives server to enable broader deployment in both educational and corporate contexts.
Chapters 12, 14, 15, and 16 represent intermediate proposals—reaching across institutions to build knowledge-building environment interoperability standards (chapter 12), explore Latent Semantic Analysis in collaborative software (chapter 14), grow a national KBE research community (chapter 15), and provide a theoretical framework for Lotus's distributed learning software (chapter 16). These proposals are smaller in scale but significant in ambition: they aim to knit the scattered KBE research community into a coherent field and to bring CSCL theory to bear on commercial practice.
The mature proposals—chapters 4 through 10—center on the Math Forum and Virtual Math Teams. They move from foundational community formation (chapter 8: catalyzing online workgroups; chapter 9: collaboration services for a digital library) through theoretical consolidation (chapter 5: theories and models of group cognition; chapter 7: a Sciences of Learning Center for engaged learning in online communities) to applied pedagogical design (chapter 4: computer-supported math discourse for teachers and students; chapter 6: adaptive support for underserved learners). Chapter 10 extends this vision to at-risk youth in North Philadelphia, connecting the CSCL research program explicitly to questions of educational equity and community health.
Taken together, the proposals document a sustained effort to move from theoretical frameworks and laboratory prototypes toward scalable, equitable, real-world implementations of collaborative learning technology. Running across the collection—from the early WEBGUIDE work through the mature VMT proposals—is the conviction that online environments can and should support genuine knowledge building at multiple levels of scale: by individuals, by small groups, and by communities.
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Restoration of the Founding Homestead of Chatham
Chapter 1: Restoration of the Founding Homestead of Chatham
This grant proposal, submitted to the Chatham Community Preservation Committee in December 2018, requests $87,000 on behalf of the Chatham Conservation Foundation (CCF) to restore the site of the 1664 founding homestead of William Nickerson at 0 Orleans Road. Nickerson was the first English settler to purchase land in what became Chatham, Massachusetts, and his original homestead site, now owned by CCF, adjoins the Caleb Nickerson House Museum. The proposal follows an ongoing archaeological excavation—funded separately by the Nickerson Family Association—that has uncovered thousands of colonial artifacts and definitively located the founding homestead for the first time. The CCF proposal seeks to restore ground disturbed by excavation activity, remove invasive vegetation from the entire parcel, and replant with native species to recreate a historically appropriate habitat. Three interlocking goals guide the project: preserving and enhancing a valuable open space, protecting significant archaeological and historical resources, and restoring the scenic quality of the entrance to Chatham from Pleasant Bay and Ryder's Cove. The proposal presents detailed cost breakdowns covering vegetation removal, native planting, and interpretive materials, and frames the work as a collaboration between CCF and the Nickerson Family Association to make Chatham's founding history accessible to the public.
Frost Fish Creek Salt Marsh Preservation
Submitted to the Chatham Community Preservation Committee in January 2020, this proposal requests $75,000 for the CCF's Salt Marsh Task Force to commission scientific studies of the Frost Fish Creek salt marsh—a 90-acre conservation area in North Chatham surrounded by CCF-owned land. A preliminary 2018 study by APCC identified multiple tidal restrictions and recommended six baseline investigations. This proposal funds only the first two: a hydraulic and hydrologic modeling study (A) to evaluate what would happen to water flow if existing tidal restrictions were removed, and a water quality modeling study (B) to assess whether removing restrictions would improve parameters necessary for salt marsh restoration. The proposal explains the ecological importance of the marsh—its direct tidal connection to Ryder's Cove, Bassing Harbor, Pleasant Bay, and the Atlantic—and documents how tidal restrictions and adjacent development have degraded the system through phragmites invasion, reduced salt marsh extent, and poor water quality. The results of studies A and B will inform subsequent decisions about whether to pursue the remaining four baseline studies (fish surveys, vegetation mapping, ground-penetrating radar, long-term monitoring transects) and eventually full restoration design and permitting. The proposal is explicitly staged and conservative in scope, providing a systematic analytical foundation rather than a premature commitment to interventions.
Frost Fish Creek Restoration Project Application to DER Priority Projects
Priority Projects
This comprehensive restoration application to the Massachusetts Division of Ecological Restoration describes Frost Fish Creek as a 90-acre Critical Natural Landscape and tidally influenced wetland system in North Chatham, designated in 1987 as part of the Pleasant Bay Area of Critical Environmental Concern. The proposal documents the site in detail, mapping three areas: a tidal restriction beneath Route 28 slated for replacement, a Bog area collecting residential and commercial runoff, and a Marsh area that could serve as a salt marsh migration zone under sea-level rise. Multiple culverts constrain natural tidal flow, and historical agricultural practices—including cranberry bog management—have weakened the system's ecological functions, as evidenced by phragmites invasion and poor water quality. The project aims to restore routine tidal action and healthy stream flow, improve water quality, reestablish fish passage, sequester coastal blue carbon, and expand recreational opportunities. Restoration scenarios include opening tidal restrictions, removing culverts, and allowing sea-level rise to drive salt marsh migration into currently upland areas. The application provides photographic site documentation, future flooding projections, and a hydrological narrative. It positions the work within regional conservation efforts and notes that CCF, Cape Cod's oldest land trust, owns the entire project area. This is the most technically detailed of the three environmental chapters and explicitly connects habitat restoration, climate adaptation, and community benefit.
DR K-12: Computer-Supported Math Discourse Among Teachers and Students
and Students
This full research-and-development proposal to NSF's DR K-12 program designs, develops, and tests an interrelated system of technology, pedagogy, and analytic tools aimed at fostering significant mathematical discourse among middle- and high-school students and their teachers. The project integrates four mutually supporting components: a custom open-source virtual learning environment combining the Virtual Math Teams (VMT) platform with a multi-user version of GeoGebra's dynamic math visualization software; problem-based curricular resources; online professional development for in-service teachers; and classroom implementation by those teachers with their students. The design-based research approach iteratively co-evolves technology and curricular resources through teachers' and students' collaborative learning experiences. In-service teachers in online master's programs are mentored to use and model the technology themselves—developing facility with collaborative problem posing, exploration, and discourse analysis—before introducing these approaches to their own classrooms. The proposal draws on the group cognition theory developed in earlier VMT research, conversation analysis adapted to text-based chat, and the Math Forum's established expertise in online math mentoring. The intellectual aim is to advance theory, technology, and educational practice simultaneously within real-world settings; the broader aim is to provide a comprehensive package of tools, resources, and pedagogical methods scalable to national deployment through the Math Forum and partner schools of education.
ONR: Theories and Models of Group Cognition
This proposal to the Office of Naval Research (ONR) brings multiple theoretical frameworks, mixed analytic methods, and computational models to bear on a single rich dataset: a complete eight-hour record of synchronous problem solving by two virtual math teams, collected in 2006 under IRB-approved protocols. The proposal's central ambition is to compare and synthesize the many theoretical approaches to group cognition—or macrocognition—that have developed across distributed cognition, situated cognition, activity theory, actor network theory, dialogics, ethnomethodology, knowledge building, and small-group theory. Three analytic approaches are proposed: manual conversation analysis adapted to text chat; automated natural language processing using established coding schemes; and mixed methods combining cluster analysis, network analysis, statistical analysis, and data mining. Workshops will bring together ONR researchers from the Cognition and Knowledge Integration (CKI) program and CSCL researchers to apply their different methods to the shared dataset, compare findings, and work toward theoretical synthesis. Goals include identifying the specific nature of group cognition processes in ad hoc problem-solving teams, clarifying terminology, distinguishing related theories, validating or expanding existing theory, and contributing to computational models and coding schemes useful for future macrocognition research. The proposal positions itself as a bridge project—one that uses one carefully curated dataset to make progress across multiple theoretical disputes simultaneously.
ALT: Dynamic Support for Virtual Math Teams
This proposal to NSF's ALT (Advanced Learning Technologies) program seeks to extend VMT by adding computational tools for facilitation in a lightly-staffed online learning service. Its motivating vision is equity: to replicate the impact of intensive local programs that have improved college preparedness among minority and low-income students—such as the Treisman Berkeley Professional Development Program—through a freely available, scalable online environment. The core research goal is to develop and test adaptive feedback mechanisms that elicit productive collaborative behavior from learners, optimizing group interactions for learning without requiring constant human facilitator presence. Machine agents are envisioned as supplements to human facilitators, performing two key functions: matching students whose abilities and interests complement each other, and intervening with structured prompts to guide collaborative conversations toward greater pedagogical effectiveness. The proposal is grounded in previous VMT research on small-group online mathematical problem solving and in the literature on tutorial dialogue systems and CSCL. It argues that if the causal connections between specific interactive behaviors and learning outcomes can be understood, technology can be designed to elicit those behaviors reliably and at scale. The broader impact claim is that making free online courses more successful will disproportionately benefit low-income learners and students from developing countries, since they are least able to afford high-quality in-person instruction.
SLC: Engaged Learning in Online Communities
This Catalyst proposal to NSF for a Sciences of Learning Center (SLC) focused on "Engaged Learning in Online Communities" aims to build an interdisciplinary research network capable of defining and studying online engaged learning at individual, small-group, and community levels. The proposal argues that despite the proliferation of online learning environments—including those built on NSF's NSDL infrastructure—neither the cognitive and affective dimensions of engaged learning online nor the ways group structures and community configurations support or constrain it have been rigorously studied. Existing research has largely been descriptive and focused on individual learners. The Catalyst project proposes to review existing literature, develop a rigorous research agenda, and produce a journal special issue to motivate follow-on work. It brings together established US and international researchers working on mathematics and science learning online, organizing them into focused workgroups that will collaborate both online and at an in-person conference. Research targets: (a) the cognitive and affective relations between learners and the groups or communities in which they participate; and (b) the forms of joint activity that learners engage in online. The proposal connects to prior VMT and Math Forum work and situates it within a broader science of online learning that addresses barriers related to minority status, geography, disability, age, and skill level.
ITR: Catalyzing & Nurturing Online Workgroups to Power Virtual Learning Communities
Virtual Learning Communities
This NSF Information Technology Research (ITR) proposal uses the Math Forum—already a virtual community of approximately one million students, teachers, and mathematicians—as a test bed for studying the fundamental challenge of catalyzing and sustaining online workgroups. The Math Forum's existing activities are largely oriented toward individual learning; this project aims to shift toward small-group collaborative work. Three research questions organize the proposal: how to automatically match compatible participants and form groups; how to scaffold and nurture group interactions once formed; and how to sustain networks of different kinds of groups within a larger learning community. The project proposes three types of groups: student teams working on collaborative problems of the week; teacher and mentor teams developing new problems and curricular materials; and international researcher and developer teams designing and assessing collaboration technologies. Each type serves as both a subject of study and a contributor to the project. Group-formation and group-scaffolding software will be designed, implemented, and iteratively evaluated in collaboration with an international CSCL research community. The proposal argues that the core scientific challenge—how to use the Internet to bring together people who do not know each other but could benefit from interacting—remains unresolved, and that the Math Forum's established infrastructure provides an unusually well-positioned test environment.
NSDL: Collaboration Services for the Math Forum Digital Library
Library
This NSF National Science Digital Library (NSDL) proposal addresses a fundamental gap: existing digital library services support individual learners but provide little direct support for small groups collaborating within a shared digital environment. The Math Forum Digital Library (MFDL), with nearly one million distinct users, is proposed as a model and test case for designing, implementing, and evaluating collaborative services within a digital library. The project will create a Math Forum Collaborative Learning Environment (MFCLE) within the MFDL, extending the popular Problem of the Week (PoW) service to include asynchronous and synchronous small-group collaborative learning. Three team types are the focus: user teams (students working on collaborative PoWs), creator teams (teachers and student teachers who develop new problems and mine the library), and design teams (international CSCL researchers who design and assess the MFCLE). The project draws on CSCW and CSCL groupware research, arguing that adapting existing collaborative software components to a digital library context is now technically feasible and represents a significant opportunity to increase the impact, efficiency, and value of digital libraries. Goals include understanding the computer support needs of collaborating groups within library settings, designing and evaluating a collaborative learning environment within the library, and making that environment a sustainable MFDL service positioned as a reproducible model for other digital libraries.
Foundations: Educational Online Communities for At-Risk Youth
Youth
This short proposal, directed to Philadelphia-area and national foundations in 2011, outlines a partnership between Drexel University's College of Information Science and Technology, its College of Nursing and Health Professions, the Math Forum, and the Houston-based John C. Ford Program to create an educational online community for at-risk youth and their families in lower North Philadelphia. The target community—the 11th Street corridor—is described as a severely underserved area of concentrated public housing, high unemployment, low family income, and disproportionate health burdens including hypertension, diabetes, asthma, and risky behaviors. The proposal argues that educational community intervention can help break the self-perpetuating cycle of poverty, poor health, and low educational achievement. Drawing on the Ford Program's established model of tele-community after-school education, the proposal envisions expanding it to engage both students and parents in collaborative online learning— developing academic skills, health literacy, technical skills, and career pathways. Long-range goals include reducing dropout rates, increasing college attendance, and building upward mobility among families in the program. The proposal integrates health education from the nursing college with information science and math resources from IST and the Math Forum, presenting a comprehensive community-development vision through educational technology.
New Media to Support Collaborative Knowledge Building: Beyond Consumption and Chat
Beyond Consumption and Chat
This seed-grant proposal from the Center for LifeLong Learning and Design (L3D) at the University of Colorado describes WEBGUIDE, an early knowledge-building environment developed by the proposal's principal investigator. WEBGUIDE experiments with dynamically structuring hypertext communication according to group and personal perspectives, moving beyond both passive web consumption (model 1: read-only repositories) and simple communication (model 2: mediated submission or chat). The proposal positions itself within L3D's broader trajectory from design environments and human-computer interaction to CSCW and CSCL, driven by the advent of the Web as an infrastructure for shared knowledge building. The seed grant would allow development and evaluation of WEBGUIDE during an advanced interdisciplinary seminar at L3D, where WEBGUIDE would be both a topic of study and a tool used by seminar members. New functionality would be added iteratively based on actual use; adoption, usability, benefits, and limitations would be evaluated and reported. Industry collaboration is also noted: WEBGUIDE would be positioned for exploration in commercial settings. The proposal's key conceptual contribution is distinguishing among models of web use to show that genuinely interactive, perspective-structured knowledge building requires a new category of software beyond what either repositories or chat systems provide.
Interoperability among Knowledge-Building Environments
This multi-institutional proposal gathers researchers building related knowledge-building environments (KBEs) from Colorado (WebGuide), Georgia Tech (CoWeb), Stanford (Learning Lab), SRI (Knowledge Network and Tapped In), the University of Toronto (CSILE/Knowledge Forum), the Math Forum, UC Berkeley (KIE/Wise), McGill (LearningSpace), the University of Hawaii (Belvedere), and others. The proposal's single core objective is to define a common XML-based data markup language that would allow KBE systems to export, exchange, and archive their discussion data in shared formats. The proposal notes that despite striking similarities among these systems—all feature persistent discussion forums supporting collaborative knowledge construction—there has been almost no direct interchange of ideas, designs, experiences, or data among their developers. A common markup format would enable comparative research, software tool sharing, and archiving for analysis, analogous to the 1988 Dexter conference that defined a reference model for hypertext systems. Partners have already begun XML work within their own systems and would contribute over 400 hours to drafting standards documents, corresponding, and attending workshops. Modest in immediate scope but significant in ambition, the proposal aims to knit a scattered research community into a coherent field by giving its members a shared technical language for describing what their systems do and how they differ.
Conceptual Frameworks and Computational Support for Organizational Memories and Organizational Learning
Organizational Memories and Organizational Learning
This substantial early NSF proposal from the University of Colorado investigates computer support for knowledge-intensive communities of practice within and across organizations. The central concept is "organizational memory"—a structured, evolving repository of knowledge captured during work that can be accessed and delivered to inform future tasks. Organizational learning, the proposal argues, is a community-level process in which knowledge created during collaborative work must be captured, structured, maintained, and made accessible in ways that reduce burden on individual workers while empowering communities to grow their own information spaces. Three research foci are identified: capturing knowledge and integrating the contexts of work; sustaining the timeliness and utility of evolving information; and actively and adaptively delivering relevant information. The proposed computational approach builds on domain-oriented design environments developed in the L3D lab, extended with structured web interactivity, version control, software critiquing agents, and end-user programmability. Empirical work will involve specific communities of practice—LAN designers, research teams, student classes, neighborhood communities, and industrial workgroups—to ground theoretical frameworks in observed organizational needs. Expected outputs include a unifying conceptual framework for organizational memory and learning, a generic computational architecture, and a body of empirical results. This proposal represents a foundational early statement of concerns that would later evolve into the group cognition and CSCL research agenda.
Allowing Learners to be Articulate: Incorporating Automated Text Evaluation into Collaborative Software Environments
Text Evaluation into Collaborative Software Environments
This proposal to the McDonnell Foundation from the University of Colorado's Institute for Cognitive Science and L3D center addresses a persistent limitation in educational software: automated assessment has been restricted to factual questions with well-defined correct answers, leaving no computational support for the open-ended articulation and collaborative construction of deeper knowledge. The proposed solution is Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA)—a mathematical technique then newly developed as part of cognitive theories of text comprehension—which computes semantic relations within a corpus and uses them to judge the similarity between submitted written responses and expert materials. The proposal aims to incorporate LSA into three existing educational software environments: WebQuest (adventure games motivating Web-based subject matter exploration), Remote Explorium, and Teacher's Curriculum Assistant. Students would be empowered to design their own games with open-ended questions and essays that the software evaluates automatically. LSA would also enable matching of information sources to individual students based on their written products. The project explicitly addresses the need to foster articulate self-expression and collaborative knowledge construction without imposing unsustainable workloads on teachers. The proposal connects text comprehension theory from cognitive science with CSCL design practice, positioning LSA as a bridge between individual cognitive tasks and collaborative classroom activities.
Collaborative Research on KnowledgeBuilding Environments: Growing a National and International Research Community for Distance Learning Information Technology
Growing a National and International Research Community for Distance Learning Information Technology
This NSF proposal responds to the rapid growth of distance learning in the late 1990s—at the time of writing, 60% of US colleges offered internet courses—by arguing that neither the technology nor the pedagogy for effective online education is well understood. Most teachers simply digitize traditional course materials, ignoring the potential of computer-supported collaborative learning. The proposal aims to build a US network of KBE researchers to work within the international community already active in Canada, Europe, and elsewhere. Four programmatic areas structure the project: synthesizing learning theory around social knowledge building; defining technical standards for KBE interoperability; developing multidisciplinary curriculum and courses; and building a workforce of students and researchers capable of advancing the field. The project would grow over five years from one grantee (Colorado) and three subawards (Berkeley, Cornell, Southern Illinois) to a larger coalition directly supporting between 9 and 21 students per year. The proposal articulates a vision of collaborative, student-active, constructivist pedagogy enabled by computer support as the necessary alternative to lecture-based internet courses. Its explicit goal is to create an organized US research community that can turn the promise of distance learning into educational reality through theory, technology, and methodology developed in international collaboration.
Models for Organizing Collaboration: Ways of Supporting Distributed Learning
Distributed Learning
This compact proposal to Lotus Research partners the principal investigator with colleagues from the Monterrey Institute of Technology's Virtual University and Marist College, alongside Lotus engineers responsible for planning the next version of LearningSpace. The research objective is to identify a set of collaboration models that can serve both as a theoretical framework for Lotus software design and as practical guidelines for organizations deploying distributed learning systems. The proposal asks a sequence of questions: how do people learn through collaborative work? What phases does collaborative knowledge building proceed through? What instructional methods effectively promote distributed learning? What forms of computer support correspond to those phases and methods? And how can organizations be guided in configuring Lotus software to support collaboration? The work will draw on the existing expertise of the research partners in social knowledge construction, virtual university operations, educational technology leadership, and software engineering. Results will be compiled in a format demonstrated to be practically useful for distributed learning organizations. The proposal represents an unusual moment of direct industry-research collaboration, positioning CSCL theory as a design resource for commercial software development, and the largest Latin American deployment of LearningSpace (the Monterrey Tech Virtual University) as a practical testing ground.
POW! (Perspectives On the Web)
This proposal to the Colorado Advanced Software Institute (CASI) describes the POW! project as a technical evolution of the WEBGUIDE knowledge-building environment. The central problem addressed is asynchronous knowledge management and negotiation in shared online collaboration spaces—a challenge that simple email, chat, and conferencing tools cannot meet. WEBGUIDE had been built as a research prototype and classroom tool; the POW! project proposes to separate its architecture into a high-performance Java perspectives server and lightweight client applications communicating via XML, and to release the server as open-source software. This architectural separation would allow other researchers and corporations to develop proprietary clients for their own applications without rewriting the underlying perspectives computation. Target contexts include both educational settings and corporate decision-making and training—an explicitly dual-sector vision. The proposal sketches the corporate use case: a reengineering workshop in which geographically dispersed employees must synthesize diverse perspectives into a shared strategic direction. It also emphasizes Colorado's strategic opportunity to establish software leadership in educational and groupware computing alongside its existing strength in hardware and communications. POW! represents the pivot point in the author's early research trajectory, framing the core challenge of collaborative knowledge construction as fundamentally a problem of perspective management.
The Research CyberStudio: Supporting Researchers as LifeLong Learners
Learners
This proposal from the University of Colorado addresses the neglected problem of training graduate students to become interdisciplinary researchers. It argues that the transition from domain specialist to skilled researcher is lengthy and unsupported: students who have completed coursework are typically expected to pursue dissertation and post-doctoral work with minimal pedagogical guidance, despite continuing to need development in reading, writing, mathematics, and cross-disciplinary methodology. The Research CYBERSTUDIO (RCS) project draws on four theoretical pillars: knowledge is constructed within communities of learners; design studios provide effective learning settings; participation in communities of practice is the vehicle of learning; and individual understanding is fostered by appropriate computer support. Organizationally, the project structures research activity as a studio, in which individual and group projects are conducted and critiqued within a mentored community. Computationally, the CYBERSTUDIO provides adaptable support tailored to the information and methodological needs of interdisciplinary researchers, building on software prototypes developed at L3D and the Institute for Cognitive Science. The proposal positions research training as a legitimate extension of lifelong learning theory into the most advanced tier of the educational system—a domain that has received almost no systematic computational support—and anticipates that software designed for novice researchers will have value for interdisciplinary research communities generally.