For more that a decade, I have worked with colleagues and graduate students to create both tools and techniques for collaborative theory building. Using a video ethnographic approach to studying the thinking of young people engaged in computer-rich learning environments, I have grappled with how to make sense of the video data piled high on my shelves safely in their cases. Indeed, previous tools I developed at the MIT Media Lab and in MERLin, the Multimedia Ethnographic Research Lab at UBC attempted to solve the problem of how to work with media-rich data so that my conclusions were based on the interpretations of other viewers and members of the community I was studying. My aim has been to build research tools which become learning environments—virtual places where theories can be negotiated and shared as users view data from diverse perspectives. Places where users learn from each other and validate their theories as they explore context rich datasets. But, the ability to just plug my video camera into my computer, download some video, text, or sound, and make it available for others to add their views was still an enigma until recently. The latest development of WebConstellations™, co-designed with Bitmovers Communications, an emerging high-tech company, along with recent developments in both hardware and software, solves the puzzle.

WebConstellations™ http://www.webconstellations.com enables participants to work with any form of digital media stored on a hard drive. Any of these media objects can be "dropped into" a star template. Thus, star chunks can be built from any piece of information which can be described by a URL and keywords can be added as markers or tags. Transcripts, descriptions, and annotations can be easily added to their stars and other users’ stars in any given galaxy—a designated database. This coded database of material becomes an expanding body of material for collaboration as participants create, cluster, and annotate stars. WebConstellations™ has been designed to break down the traditional barriers that often demarcate power and authority: Teachers, students, and researchers can now work as design teams sharing their views and building deeper understandings of the subject they are studying.

In this presentation, I will walk the audience through my first on-line distributed community building on the web using a version of WebConstellations that was designed for viewing the video portraits of young people described in my current book, Points of Viewing Children’s Thinking: A Digital Ethnographer’s Journey http://www.pointsofviewing.com. Throughout the book, readers encounter pages with video strips on them, showing frames captured from the source video discussed on that page or in that section. They can then enter the address of the website followed by a slash and the page number as a URL in their browser, and they are shown the video clip within a specifically customized WebConstellations environment. From within this environment, they can read other peoples annotations of that video clip and then add their own. For example, a teacher in Dallas, Texas, who recently read my book, asked her students to read portions, view the video at the website, and add their comments. See: http://www.pointsofviewing.com/225. The Dallas students have now entered into a community and are currently working on their own video study. I will report on the progress of this new learning constellation and invite the audience to partake in the journey with them.