Project Name
GRAIL
Description
The overall goal of The GRAIL Project (Graduate Researcher's Academic Identity online) is to develop a set of social and technical tools that support the formation of an online community to engage graduate students in activities related to educational research across course boundaries and through their degree program.
The journey of graduate students is a complex one that interweaves particular instantiations of community involvement with an ever-developing ability to find and articulate an independent and personal voice. As such, an effective online environment needs to support both these kinds of processes, possibly in multiple ways.
As the demands of globalization on education become more extensive, the need for geographically distributed communities of skilled researchers increases and the impact of learning on line to change at the rate of new advances to technologies. Various technologies for online course delivery all seek to facilitate academic learning communities, but graduate students working at a distance from their educational institution have only limited opportunities to engage in various research practices compared to their on-campus peers. In order to advance intersections of research into academia and technology, the challenges of developing and sustaining communities on-line and identifying the needs of graduate students must be more broadly understood.
The technical elements in the environment currently include; Knowledge Forum as a public discussion environment; social networking and bookmarking tools including weblogs as individual locations for academic journaling, shared RSS feeds to support connections to a more distributed research community; collaborative writing spaces such as Wikis, and a phased approach to developing a coordinating Portal users can modify to suit their own learning needs. Additionally, synchronous tools available in Macromedia's Breeze Live are being used for large and small group meetings.