The objective of this presentation is to define and demonstrate a "learning application" and then illustrate through stories how social change needs to become part of our definition of a network application. In this paper, I will tell the story of my experience in developing PARnet, and how my vision for it changed from a shared information "collection" --> documentation of the current status of social thought --> need to capture history and allow for complexity of interpretation --> a tool for generating social knowledge. Show how the site's failures have been both technical and social. I will point out how the same failure is common to many network applications that aim to elicit a high level of participation. ...and this genre is huge, ranging from commercial Web sites, to Intranets, to educational applications. I will suggest that the failure is not necessarily the result of not including users in the design process, but may be because we mistakenly fix the design process itself in time and space -- a thing we do at the beginning of a contract with participants that exist at that moment of time.

"The Participatory Glossaurus Process"

The "Participatory Glossaurus Process" defines a method of structuring and representing knowledge claims in electronic environments. The project focuses on the task of defining terms of discourse and marking a range of agreements and disagreements about terminology, conceptualization and theory building. The internet provides both syncronous and asyncronous modes of communication, but we don’t yet know what impact computer mediated representations of knowledge may have on the quality and viability of these modes of communication for knowledge aggregation. Computer mediated communication environments may promote consensus through communication, but may also promote exploration of differences, and may precipitate conflict and controversy. Methods of knowledge representation suitable to a knowledge building community must preserve and respect differences while identifying and facilitating agreements. Both visual and textual methods of knowledge representation are explored. In the initial phases of the project, participants will use and critique the available software environments, in a participatory design process. The results, we hope, will be a new form of interactive knowledge development and publication.

The LangNet project is a program of the National Foreign Language Center in Washington and has received substantial funding from the federal government to link editorial boards of language teaching experts with each other on teams and to collectively create a site with a searchable database providing access to fully evaluated learning and teaching resources for all people anywhere who can link to the internet. The development of both the editorial board structures through alliances with language teaching professional groups and of the structure and software strategy for the project have required unprecedented innovations from all participants. We want to present a "state of the project" report and enlist the PDC members in conversations about ways to improve it and deepen our thinking about it.