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Project Briefing: Spring 2007 Task Force Meeting
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Building an Online, Cross-Disciplinary Community-based
Research (CBR) Learning Community:
Initial Observations

Deanna Cooke
Director of Research, Center for Social Justice Research, Teaching and Service
Georgetown University

Joan Cheverie
Head, Digital Library Services
Georgetown University

At Georgetown University many students are engaged in collaborative research with community organizations that support social change. However, there is little interaction between students and faculty from different disciplines, and these researchers rarely have opportunities to document and share their work. Through support from the Provost's Undergraduate Learning Initiative grant that supports teaching and learning, the Center for Social Justice and the University Library are collaborating to develop an online CBR community.
  • The online CBR learning community seeks to augment the community-based research being conducted by allowing students to do the following:
    Share research strategies and support each other's projects. For example, psychology students can provide interviewing skills to chemists who want to assess residents' attitudes about their research project on the polluted Anacostia River in Washington, DC.
  • Share resources across disciplines. For example, students who work with high school biology classes can learn about the housing community in which their students live from a sociology student working on affordable housing research.
  • Publicize their work through online research posters that give details about both the challenges and successes they face in their work.
  • Publish findings through the development of an online, peer reviewed CBR journal.

In this session, the principal investigators will describe the components of the online CBR learning community, the model they have developed that illustrates their vision for integrating scholarship, collaborative learning, and publication into the undergraduate research experience, and they will share their observations gained from the initial cohort.

Handout (MS Word)


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