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LILT, Dept. of ICS • University of Hawai`i at Manoa • 1680 East-West Road, POST 309 • Honolulu, HI 96822 • 1-808-956-3890

What do fish have to do with a technology lab?

A lab in a computer science department has lava and then fish on its home page ...What do we think we are doing?

LILT is hosting www.hawaiianatolls.org, the web site for a multi-agency education project related to the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands (NWHI). Several scientific research vessels are in the NWHI with education and documentation teams on board along with the scientists. These teams are sending back daily videos, journal entries, and fantastic photographs such as those you see here to the web site that we are hosting and maintaining. The multi-agency project is offering these resources to anyone who can use them for educational purposes.

We are doing this not only as a public service and because of our great interest in the islands, but also because we want to explore better ways to support meaningful online interaction. When we learned of this project we thought it would be a great application area for our research.

If you browse the site you will see that most content-oriented pages have "Ask About It" links that enable one to ask a question about or comment on the topic of the page being viewed. Questions are sent up to the on-board staff, and they send us the answers. Questions and answers are then posted on the page on which they were asked, a procedure intended to encourage contextualized and content-focused discussions. (Feel free to ask questions yourself as you browse the site!)

This year's site represents just the beginning of a new line of work: the opportunity came up so fast that we did not have time to design and implement automated support. So we are presently enacting the functionality just described entirely by hand. This approach enables us to be flexible and change the design when the need to do so becomes apparent. Based on this year's experience we will be designing and implementing automated support for the expeditions planned for 2003.