The diverse participants in this project appeared to embrace a common goal: the design of a prototype for the Plimoth Plantation's proposed Online Learning Center. This apparent consensus masked a multiplicity of evolving agendas and expectations, however. As they worked together in the online course Teaching to Standards with New Technologies, the participants became gradually aware of this multiplicity as they began to recognize that their individual perceptions of the goal and their priorities for achieving it differed.

Museum Educators-Plimoth Plantation

The four members of the Plimoth education team were looking to create a multi-faceted educational website as outlined in their proposal to the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations (AVD). They hoped to create an online resource center that would address the scarcity of educational resources available on early colonial American history and generate an online learning community for teachers.

The curricular units in the Online Learning Center would be structured around the Teaching for Understanding (TfU) framework and include grade-appropriate online resources designed to meet state-mandated curriculum requirements in social studies. Plimoth also hoped the Online Learning Center could serve as a model for a consortium of history museums interested in online collaboration, and other cultural institutions seeking to support curriculum-based museum resource development. The museum educators were interested in the online course as a means of learning about TfU and developing a network with a diverse group of educators toward their ultimate goal of developing a website prototype for the Online Learning Center.

Classroom Educators - Natick and Plymouth Public Schools

With the help of the WIDE World coach for the Teaching to Standards with New Technologies course, Plimoth Plantation recruited schoolteachers from local districts and offered them a stipend to participate in the online course and help design the prototype. One teacher who had previously enrolled in Teaching to Standards with New Technologies looked forward to extending her work. The others had not taken an online course and at least one of them was openly skeptical about the potential benefits of new technologies in the classroom. All of the teachers shared an interest in Plimoth Plantation, having taught about Plimoth and taken their students on fieldtrips to the Plantation in the past. The teachers' goal was to design a curriculum unit that would further their students' understanding of 17th Century history.

University Educators - Harvard Graduate School of Education

The university-based educators viewed this project as an opportunity to further develop and test online technologies as a means of connecting educational research with practice. They hoped to use TfU, the Education with New Technologies website, and the online course to develop a synergistic partnership of museum educators and schoolteachers. They expected that museum educators with deep knowledge of history content and experienced teachers with a thorough understanding of curriculum, students, and classroom realities could benefit from using a common research-based educational framework to co-develop curriculum. The researchers were hoping to support and guide the group of Plimoth and classroom educators to collaboratively develop a sample learning activity that would serve as a component of Plimoth's Online Learning Center prototype. They also intended to use their work as an opportunity to investigate the theoretical and logistical implications of creating an online community of practice among a diverse group of educators.

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• Connecting a Museum, Schools and a University: Process