Some educational networking enthusiasts think of the Internet primarily as a delivery vehicle for learning resources. Others see its value as a bridge between people, institutions and work routines: a way to bridge communities of discourse/practice which have traditionally been separated, so that students may have more authentic educational experiences. This dissertation reports on a set of design experiments conducted in collaboration with a high school and a middle school teacher around "telementoring": the use of telecommunications to support the development of mentoring relationships between students in school and adults in workplaces.

Over the 1995/96 school year, the participants in this research orchestrated curriculum-based mentoring relationships between 90 students in project-based science classes and more than a hundred volunteer scientists from government, academia and industry. The design and evaluation carried out in these experiments had three major foci: activity structures to support productive, ongoing discourse between students and telementors, network services to reduce the administrative workload that telementoring requires of teachers, and strategies to determine how students' written arguments about their research were influenced by telementoring.

Individual chapters consider how telementoring could help improve science education on a large scale; describe the activity structures implemented in each classroom and the rationale behind them; present in-depth case studies of successful and unsuccessful telementoring relationships; and discuss the implications of the research for the design of telementoring programs. The methods employed include surveys of students, interviews with students, teachers and volunteers, a broad-based topical coding of telementoring dialogues, and a unique form of genre analysis applied to students' final written reports of their research.

One important finding from the research is that teams of students who invested greater effort in sustaining their telementoring relationships were significantly more likely to produce sophisticated arguments about their research in their final reports. Statistically significant outcomes were attained on scales which measured a) the extent to which students' written reports fulfilled the customary functions of scientific research reports, and b) the frequency with which students' reports attempted to take account of alternate perspectives and objections to their work.