The Global Forest is a CD-ROM produced in the Multimedia Ethnographic Research Lab in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia. It is a multimedia learning environment designed to enable young people in dispersed locations to explore issues involving an endangered rain forest on the west coast of Vancouver Island called Clayoquot Sound (pronounced: Klak-wit Sound). It contains over 25 QuickTime movies, 200 articles from newspapers, text overviews, and maps dealing with this complex social, political, and ecological issue.

Users of The Global Forest are able to learn about Clayoquot Sound through the ideas and reflections of the Bayside young people. The CD-ROM resulted from a two year ethnographic study about gender and science education conducted by Ricki Goldman-Segall with the young people of the Bayside Middle School. As a community, we gathered text and video materials about this controversial socio-scientific issue from a variety of sources including field trips. We selected and analyzed the data constructing both text-based and electronic notebooks. The young people were also the "subjects" of intensive interviews while they researched rain forest issues.

The interface reflects an intense collaboration among researchers, teachers, and young people. It opens with a slide show; then, you are given the choice to listening to young people's thinking about five key issues in their investigation (see sidebar). Each of these five key issues contains a number of paths through the research data. Users navigate through these paths, initially following markers that were created by our design team. As the user begins to see their own connections between the different movies, articles, and pictures, they can create their own paths. Users can also extend the database of information and add new markers about their own local ecological issue.

While still in prototype form, The Global Forest contains a rich, comprehensive collection of information organized within an application which has been designed to facilitate dynamic data entry so that future development could enable the trading of information over the Internet. This open-ended approach to developing multimedia educational environments supports the understanding developed by the young people at Bayside in the course of their research, that learning is about "being there" and being involved with issues that are personally relevant.