Impact of a Learning Network for Collaborative Story Telling on

Elementary and middle-school teachers have begun using LAN and WAN networks to engage students in authentic learning tasks. The Neverending Tale, Classroom Edition is proposed as a combination learning network and computer tool for editing and publishing hypertext. It will be implemented via internet server and database, accessible with any networked World Wide Web browser. Within The Neverending Tale, the learner reads pages of a narrative story, each page containing a title, text, and further choices of action, along with the options: "Edit this page" and "Add a path". The learner can fix mistakes and add new choices as new pages. In this way, the tale is written collaboratively by its readers. The teacher has control over most aspects of the tale creation process. An exploratory prototype with limited functionality has been accessible to children over the World Wide Web since March 1996, with 6,000 pages created by its users. A number of elementary teachers have indicated they will use the public version in their classes. An alpha version of the Classroom Edition interface has been developed, and school teachers in New York and Virginia have agreed to participate in testing the project in their classrooms this spring.