Moreover, collaboration is hard to teach, but easier to learn in practice. Collaboration in schools also suffers from lack of pervasive shared space for students and an appropriate set of tools for working on shared projects, both synchronously and asynchronously. The Collaboratory is a digitally-created project room which a student teams owns and uses to work on a project, much like the way many creative teams in business use a shared project space. It helps students learn to collaborate by embedding tools to facilitate collaboration within the environment itself. It embeds that collaboration within project-based learning so that students learn by doing.
Students own the project and their space, and are thus more motivated to learn.
Teachers have a palette of tools which provide quantitative and qualitative information for evaluation. The interface is a three-dimensional environment that organizes information and tools in the same intuitive way that people do in physical environments, but one that still provides access to common GUI computer applications such as word processors for doing project work. It is virtual, but non-immersive. The blend of 3D and 2D interfaces provide a highly functional, shared interaction environment. Communications Wall left.