Welcome to GRAIL

The overall goal of this project 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 throughout your degree program.

There are three "layers" of the environment from private to public--easily moved among. The first is My GRAIL-where contents are private unless by publishing, you designate them otherwise. The second view is the GRAIL community-here the tags, resources, discussions are public to the members of the community. The third view is that of groups that you can form and belong to in GRAIL. You can create or select customizable tags to name, define, and describe the relationships formed between ideas and resources introduced into the system, as well as to links outside the system. The system will show you tags to choose from, gathered primarily from the set of tags you have previously used, tags used by users in their communities, and tags generated by the system analyzing various content. The tags and their representations (Tag Clouds and others) provide ways to effectively categorize, manage, and empower everyone in their quest to find contextual resources as well as and other like-minded researchers both within and beyond the GRAIL environment.

Here are the things you can do in these views: Add/Delete Resources (currently any weblink), create Tags (like keywords-a way to indicate features of the resource that are important to you), sort tags into Categories (provides a way to group tags as you develop areas of interest that have interconnections, Stats (??) , Blogs (this area takes you to an aggregator of all the weblogs of GRAIL members, RSS (ways to set up notifications of new entries in websites you visit a lot), Discuss (links to the various conferences and discussions GRAIL members are participating in), Collaborate (Here there are links to collaborative writing activities of GRAIL members, Chat (selecting this option brings up a separate window that allows you to see who is online at that time so you can initiate a chat with them.

Project

Project description and researchers:

People in the project: Names and blurb

Funded By

All the stuff and logos the orig page.

Contact

Dr. Clare Brett
Assistant Professor, Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning

11-272, OISE/UT
252 Bloor St. W.
Toronto, Ontario M5S 1V6

phone: (416) 923-6641, x2596
fax: (416) 926 4725

email: cbrett@oise.utoronto.ca

For related papers and to learn more about Dr. Clare Brett, the principal investigator of the GRAIL project visit her website at http://grail.oise.utoronto.ca/cbrett/