The Kaleidoscope Project is a multidisciplinary teaching, learning and research center dedicated to child study. This network-based center will use advanced communication technologies (i.e., NSF vBNS and Internet2 high-speed network) to create a collaborative workspace for both the research and teaching of child growth and development, care and education.

Advanced digital video technologies will be used to capture, store, catalog, and then display video observations of child and teacher behaviors in naturalistic classroom settings. Expert researchers and practitioners will be invited to analyze each video observation and their commentary will be optionally displayed along side each displayed video segment. This commentary will include objective descriptions of the captured event, annotations by the experts, concordances of these annotations, and special indices of the content organized by key words and phrases, content, and/or developmental level. The digital video collection will then be provided to geographically disbursed communities of interest as research data and pedagogical content over the high-speed networks.

A conferencing workspace will allow researchers from a variety of related disciplines to come together to observe these captured observations and to discuss them from their own unique perspectives. Multidisciplinary collaborations will be facilitated among the researchers who can use this powerful tool to aid in the integration of material, findings, and ideas that cut across content areas and philosophical viewpoints.

The centerpieces of this project, then, are: (1) The Digital Video Library with its collection of fully annotated and cross-referenced video vignettes, (2) the remotely operated Classroom Observation Toolkit and associated software for access, editing, abstraction, and annotation of digital media, and (3) the Shared Workspace in which researchers can collaborate on projects related to the video collection. This facility represents a novel and significant application of shared workspaces for analysis and cataloging of digital media.

Kaleidoscope's unique infrastructure that allows for the facilitation of the observation and discussion of real-world practice is a model that can readily be adapted for the professional preparation and development of education practitioners who will work with learners of various ages (birth through adulthood) and across multiple disciplines. But beyond this, the Kaleidoscope Project will serve as a testing ground for the research and development of methods that can be generalized to the study, preservice preparation, and professional development of practitioners in educational and non-educational fields alike.