Led by a research team from the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University, CoVis is an example of large web-based research and development initiative with substantial funding and a developed network of institutional partners. CoVis brings together “thousands of students, hundreds of teachers, and dozens of researchers and scientists” in its efforts to develop inquiry -based learning in the geosciences at the middle and high school levels. There is a great deal that could be said about CoVis, and the site gives a rich background of its goals, philosophies, and tools (although currently lacking much representation of student work). The key goal behind CoVis is to create “communities of practice” in which students and teachers can participate with scientists in project-based inquiry learning: “Hopefully, by supplying students with some of the tools and data used by scientists in the field, engaging them in the practice of scientific inquiry, and facilitating interactions between them and members of the scientific community, they can become 'legitimate peripheral participants’ of that community.”
CoVis is working to develop student-scientist “telementoring” relationships, using a range of communication technologies to develop ongoing dialogues that otherwise would be impractical. There are a number of web-based student-to-expert communication projects that are built around the format of “Ask Dr. X,” which have value in their own right. CoVis, however, is designed to reach beyond such one-shot encounters by developing project-length mentoring relationships, where scientists can play a number of roles, such as helping students develop research questions, locate web-based resources, and analyze data. The mentoring and student research is facilitated by technological tools created by CoVis, such as the Weather Visualizer, which is a graphical interface that represents real-time weather data, and allows students to create weather maps customized around their inquiries. Image and print data from such tools, student discussions of them, and dialogues with scientific mentors, can then be recorded within the online Collaboratory Notebook, a multi-media and multi-user tool that has been developed to scaffold the inquiry process. Even a quick comparison between the traditional school laboratory notebook and the Collaboratory Notebook suggests the potential richness of this project and its creation of tools for new visions of participatory learning.