| Abstract
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Between April, 2007 and March, 2008 two teachers, one in northeastern Ohio, the other in Israel, began an uncertain collaboration in the construction of a virtual, technically-mediated interactional space for the conduct of a social studies curriculum for each of their two sixth grade classes. I was centrally involved in establishing the possibility for their collaboration, and then in documenting and analyzing an emergent path, whereby they came to 'tame' the technology, discover its possibilities and limits, trim their curriculum to those realities, and discover still others they had not anticipated. This research project was initially conceptualized to establish a technically-mediated, visual platform where the teachers could routinely interact to develop teaching and learning strategies for use with their students. Instead of its original focus on curriculum, the inquiry became a descriptive case study of the work of these two teachers. A majority of the studies described in the educational technology literature report occasions that focus on the potential use of the tools as an extension of the classroom, rather than an exploration of how these connective, multimedia technologies encounter actual classrooms and curricula, in the hands of teachers. Therefore, this project aims to study the practical worlds of two teachers who would be given sustained access to the technically-mediated tools, reliable technical support throughout the study, and the freedom to control their decisions about the pedagogies they were constructing. The findings suggest that teachers, given the opportunity to learn these tools, are receptive to the technologies and innovative in developing learning opportunities for their students within the virtual space, as they negotiate the technically-mediated environments within the practical exigencies of their local classrooms.
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