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ENT Gallery: Developing a Community of Practice
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 In October, 2000, one month after Plimoth Plantation's proposal to build an Online Learning Center was submitted to Arthur Vining Davis Foundations (AVD), Stone Wiske and two other university-based educators met with members of the education staff at the Plantation and a pair of website designers. At this meeting, the group discussed a range of ideas about how Plimoth might take advantage of online resources to develop, enrich, and extend its educational activities. Plimoth educators expressed their central goal as: helping visitors to their "living museum," particularly young people, understand how people who lived in the past were both similar to and different from people living today.
The Plimoth staff felt that this goal would be served nicely by the proposed Online Learning Center. They described the planned Center, including an interactive website that would serve the needs of both teachers and students. One component of the site would be a series of lessons or "learning modules" that could be experienced by students alone or with teacher assistance.
 From several proposed learning modules detailed in the AVD proposal, those present at the October meeting opted to focus on "Packing for America". The Packing for America module would allow learners to pack a virtual trunk for a pilgrim who was departing from England for the Plimoth colony. In considering what the pilgrim might need, learners would become familiar with virtual artifacts from the 17th century. By negotiating to fit their possessions into a limited space, learners would experience some of the dynamics that shaped family life for pilgrims to the New World.
At this meeting, the Plimoth and Harvard educators also concluded that an online course, Teaching to Standards with New Technologies, taught by Wiske, might be a good means of involving Plimoth staff and schoolteachers in collaboratively planning the Packing for America module. With this general idea in mind, Plimoth staff began to look for "technologically proficient Massachusetts history educators who teach the colonial period." Plimoth recruited teachers from the local Plymouth, Massachusetts school district (which has the modern spelling of Plymouth). Wiske asked MaryBeth Kinkead to serve as the WIDE World coach; Kinkead agreed, and recruited two additional teachers from her former school district in Natick, Massachusetts. In recruiting teachers, Plimoth felt that expertise in teaching the colonial period was most important, and consequently, the teachers selected were not as technologically proficient as Plimoth had originally hoped.
The group of four Plimoth Plantation museum educators and five schoolteachers enrolled in the online course in February, 2001. The course consisted of eight sessions that took place over a 14-week period, ending in May 2001.
During the course, the team outlined the Packing for America curriculum design using the online Collaborative Curriculum Design Tool (CCDT). Based on what they posted to the design, their understanding goals seemed to fall into two major areas: (1) what were the different factors that affected a 17th century colonist's decisions about what to bring when packing for America and (2) how can a historian uncover and interpret such stories using primary source documents and material culture? Draft performances designed to address these questions included opportunities for students to reflect on their own and the colonists' packing experiences by comparing one 17th century family with another and comparing the families' with the students' own experiences. All performances were designed to take place online and would be supported by an online database of artifacts and a visual representation of a furnished 17th century house with a "drag and drop" packing feature. Concrete ideas for ongoing assessment of Packing for America were not posted in the team's design before the course ended.
Over the summer of 2001, while juggling many other responsibilities, educators at Plimoth used the Packing for America design to develop plans for a prototype of the Online Learning Center website. When the World Trade Center was attacked on September 11, 2001, many of Plimoth's development plans changed abruptly, including those for the Online Learning Center. Financial forecasts about the viability of the website became less optimistic. The Plantation suffered from a sharp drop in tourism in the aftermath of September 11th, and it eliminated several staff positions including the Education Director. Plans for the Online Learning Center were curtailed.
In December of 2001, representatives from Plimoth met with Wiske and her colleagues at Harvard to consider ways of harvesting the benefits of the collaboration, despite the derailed plans. They decided to develop a version of the Packing for America unit that did not require an online component. Kinkead and a member of the Plimoth Education staff, Kim VanWormer, agreed to revise the unit and pilot test it in a school classroom in February of 2002. At Harvard, Wiske, along with Leah Gotcsik and Shannon Martin Croft, continued to document Kinkead and VanWormer's experience through the time of this pilot test.
Through in-person meetings, weekly phone calls and e-mails, and curriculum design within the online CCDT, VanWormer and Kinkead refined the Packing for America unit into a classroom-based design that would take teachers and students four class periods to complete. The classroom unit included many of the components of the online unit and was supported with folders full of historical information, transparencies of primary source documents to be used with an overhead projector, and a brochure activity to be completed by the students in sections as the unit progressed. This classroom unit was pilot-tested in a self-contained 4th through 6th grade classroom in the Boston area in February 2002.
 The two-hour classroom experience included an introductory presentation by VanWormer in character as a Plimoth settler, group activities that helped further students' understanding of choices the colonists had to make as they left for the New World, and a full-class discussion of the role of primary source documents in interpreting history.
Kinkead and VanWormer collected written and oral feedback from students and teachers and conducted their own assessment of the program in order to further refine the Packing for America classroom unit.
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