Collaborative Virtual Environments for Supporting Learning Communities: an Experience of Use

Ekaterina Prasolova-Førland Norwegian University of Science and Technology

IDI, NTNU, Sem Salands vei 7-9 NO-7491 Trondheim

+4773593437

ekaterip@idi.ntnu.no

Monica Divitini Norwegian University of Science and Technology

IDI, NTNU, Sem Salands vei 7-9 NO-7491 Trondheim

+4773594462

divitini@idi.ntnu.no

ABSTRACT In this paper we present the experiences of usage of Viras, a collaborative virtual environment for social awareness support in educational settings. Collaborative Virtual environments (CVE) have lately been used for learning in different contexts, and offer promising possibilities for supporting social awareness. In our study, we look at how students evaluate CVE in educational settings and investigate the importance of different factors on social awareness.

Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.3 [Group and Organization Interfaces] - Computer-supported cooperative work, evaluation/methodology.

General Terms Design, Experimentation, Human Factors

Keywords Collaborative virtual environments, learning, communities, social awareness.

1. INTRODUCTION Lack of social awareness, i.e. awareness of the surrounding social environment, can negatively impact on learning. Social awareness creates continuous occasions for knowledge sharing. On the contrary, lack of this awareness creates continuous breakdowns in the flow of knowledge. For example, let’s assume a student group is assigned to work on a project. Knowing that another group in their school is working on a similar project can be very beneficial since they can share knowledge, avoid making the same mistakes, make their activities more effective through joint efforts. However, students have often little awareness of activities done by others and most of the knowledge sharing outside the established social structures, either classes or groups, relies on personal acquaintance, such as a member of a group playing basketball with a person in another group. This has two problems.

First, the social network on which to rely is limited and it is often impossible to find someone that can help. Second, as also discusses in the context of knowledge management [3], the closest persons are not always the most competent. An increased awareness of knowledge distribution in the social environment would increase the chances to get a better help. Social awareness is defined in different ways by different people [9, 10, 19]. Here we define social awareness as the awareness of the social situation in a group or community in a shared environment, which can be physical, virtual or both: people’s roles, activities, positions, status, responsibilities, social connections and group processes, with a time-span from a short-term overview of the social situation in a community, to a long-term memory of a community’s social life. It appears that too often systems supporting education neglect the importance of social awareness. The focus is on supporting the teacher, individual learning or group activities. Little or no attention is put in fostering encounters among students that do not necessarily belong to the same established social structure. Internet-based Collaborative Virtual Environments have been lately proposed as a tool for supporting learning in different contexts, e.g. [2]. In particular, in relation to supporting social awareness, they are interesting for their capability to provide a social arena where students and teachers can meet overcoming the barriers of the physical world [15]. The virtual space provides occasions for chance encounters and informal communication. On the longer term, the space also becomes a container of artifacts that represent the shared repertoire of the community. Starting from an understanding of learning as a social activity [20], we have designed a CVE system, called Viras, which aims at promoting social awareness in educational settings. A prototype of the system has been realized by using Active Worlds, a platform for delivering real-time interactive 3D content over the web [1]. Many educational virtual words (Euroland, Vetumini [1, 18]) have been successfully employed for the purpose of providing a real-time common meeting and working place. Though we acknowledge the role of such deployment for supporting “short-term” social awareness, we believe that CVEs have greater potential in supporting long-term awareness, as there are a number of tools supporting short-term awareness more effectively, such as ICQ and IRC [16]. Therefore, in our system we focus on flexibility as a main means for supporting creation and evolution of a learning community. CVEs not only provide an additional place for the community using the system, but they also provide a space and artifacts with a higher degree of flexibility than the physical ones. For example, existing class or

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group rooms in the university can be too few, too small, have wrong design and tools or in other ways unsuitable for a specific learning situation and the current social structure of the community. It is usually not possible to create new rooms or restructure the existing ones. Appearance as an expression of personality is only to a limited degree modifiable in real life. Also, there are limited possibilities for community members to create lasting manifestations of personal expression due to the limited availability of space and therefore the necessity to reuse, as well as the limited flexibility of the physical space and artifacts. This is, on the other hand, to a great degree possible in collaborative virtual environments, such as Virtual Campus [14] and Active Worlds Universe [1]. This flexibility is very important because it allows a community to progressively build, structure, and restructure its environment according to its evolution. In this paper, we focus on the results from the first experimental usage of the system and on the lessons that we have learned from this experience. This experiment was not aiming at studying the final impact of CVEs on learning, but rather their potentiality of providing an infrastructure for improving social awareness. Our goals are (1) to understand how students actually evaluate CVEs in educational settings, in particular with respect to their ability to improve social connections with other people involved in their community, and (2) to analyze how different factors, e.g. the representation of the space and of the users, impact on social awareness. As shown by an extensive number of cases related to the evaluation of cooperation technology, this type of reflection is necessary since the interaction of the system and the community using it cannot be completely foreseen a priori. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 briefly describes Viras, both its design and its prototypical implementation. Section 3 outlines the experiment that we have performed in Autumn 2002. Section 4 presents the results of this experiment, while Section 5 discusses these results, both in terms of the two goals outlined above and the more general lessons learned on the design, development, and deployment of educational CVEs. Section 6 concludes the paper by discussing the limitations of our work and future direction of research.

2. VIRAS A full description of Viras is beyond the scope of this paper. In this paper we simply want to illustrate the rationale behind its design and some of its functionality. The design of the system is rooted in the socio-cultural theories that have lately been proposed as a theoretical framework for the design of CSCL systems because of their emphasis on the social nature of work and learning, see e.g. [7, 8]. Among these theories we refer to the activity theory [5, 6, 13] and to the work on communities of practice by Wenger [21]. An analysis of the needs of learning communities and groups compared with the awareness support currently provided in the university environment [16], led us to define a set of requirements for a CVE supporting social awareness in learning communities:

• The representation and embodiment of the user should reflect his/her place on and movement along the learning and participation trajectory, facilitate communication, navigation and artifact manipulation (and thus identity construction), and make the others aware of the user’s presence.

• The place should provide framework for activities and have a dynamic structure reflecting the structure of the community and support a flexible usage of different parts for playing different roles. The outlook (possibly static) should reflect the spirit of the community and groups.

• Artifacts should comprise a shared repertoire of the community, with different types available to allow accomplishing of various tasks. It should be possible to associate artifacts to people and leave traces of user’s actions on them.

Based on these requirements, we have developed a prototype of a collaborative virtual environment for social awareness support. The prototype is developed using the Active Worlds technology [1], which provides a number of basic features for virtual world creation and running, such as:

• A library of pre-built avatars, objects (such as panels, signs, desks etc) and textures.

• The possibilities for object manipulations, such as copying and moving, and programming object characteristics and behavior (such as teleporting, showing text or pictures) by writing scripts. Each object carries the timestamp of creation and the name of the owner.

• Features like chat, contact lists showing online status, messaging, joining (instantaneous teleportation to selected users), making gestures and moving.

By using this functionality, we have created a virtual world called Viras. Viras is based on the metaphor of “Archipelago”: a virtual world consisting of sea and islands and groups of islands. We have arrived at this metaphor after analyzing various spatial metaphors used in educational CVEs [17], trying to combine different features in one system in order to achieve sufficient flexibility. One of the goals behind this metaphor was to re-create the way in which communities and groups naturally are created and developed. Islands represent groups and individuals, their constellations into archipelagos are communities, and the links, bridges and roads serve as connections between them. Also, we wanted to create a landscape with a high degree of overview, especially from the “bird’s-eye view”, of the existing structures by clear distinction of borders and units of community building against the “sea” background, thus promoting awareness of the community development. We also sought to create an informal atmosphere for socializing and to ensure a higher degree of flexibility for community development by providing enough open space (sea) for building and building blocks. The world is created with a number of constructions and artifacts to be used as building blocks for community development:

• Houses of different sizes and designs, islands with houses, roads and bridges. The intention was to allow the students to either “inhabit” or copy these construction, for further tailoring and customizing.

• Pre-made artifacts with attached scripts for various purposes. There are artifacts for facilitating communication and transportation, such as templates for message boards, document links, teleportation links and portals. There are also templates for artifacts facilitating personal expression, containing pictures and text. The users can just put in their individual parameters such as a web-link to a picture of a

girlfriend. We have also artifacts representing useful resources such as links to student information.

Users are represented by avatars and the objects they create, as well as the history of communications. Users can communicate by text chat, sending messages to each other, leaving messages in the environment, changing artifacts, changing position of the avatar and making gestures. Users may leave their traces everywhere by creating artifacts with their personal stamp on, not only in the building they live in, but also in places belonging to groups or communities where they participate or just visit for a short time. At the moment users may choose from a list of about 20 predefined avatars with a certain number of possible gestures and thus send some signals about their situation Users can navigate through the environment by walking, flying, and by following teleportation links to the houses and islands belonging to other users, groups and communities. By observing the in-built list of users online, as well as avatars present, their mutual orientation and the conversation pattern, users can acquire awareness of other users and of relations between them. If we consider the implementation against the requirements, we can see that the transportation and communication possibilities are provided, while a user’s movement along the learning and participation trajectory is mostly reflected through the created artifacts and history of communication, due to the limited choice of avatars provided by Active Worlds. The outlook of the place is chosen to be an Archipelago in order to support an informal atmosphere (as suggested in the requirements). The environment can be used both for socializing (party on the beach) and for work. Each person lives in a building or a part of it. Each group owns an island or a group of islands. A community is represented by an archipelago. Each island contains a building or more, plus roads between buildings and various artifacts (see Figure 1). All islands and buildings are hierarchically connected by virtual bridges, or teleportation links, some near islands are connected by “real” bridges visible on the surface and houses are connected by roads. Each major island contains a house for group meetings, which can also be transformed to be used for other purposes (see Figure 2). The main island in the center of the world provide users with a common meeting place and a major transportation node, as well with a collection of artifacts necessary for working and socializing. The landscape is dynamic, allowing users to change and add houses, land and connections and thus provide an indication of the community structures as stated in then requirement of dynamicity of space. Users may migrate between different islands, settle together with friends or working partners, or can own several rooms or buildings distributed on the islands. As mentioned earlier in this section, there are provided artifacts as signs, boards, teleportation and Internet links, pictures, furniture, parts of houses and so on, which can be further customized by the user. Tools are provided for various tasks, such as communication, navigation, personal expression as well as for educational activities (links to educational resources), as suggested in the requirements for artifacts. There are a number of basic “public” objects, which can be modified by everybody, and personal objects that bear the name of the user who owns it. The created and modified artifacts comprise the shared repertoire of the community, to the extent it is feasible concerning degree of participation and time-span of usage. The users can leave their traces by creating and changing their own artifacts with a name

stamp on it, copying other artifacts and destroying public property in their area. The users may also leave their notes about the ownership and activities in the description fields of the artifacts or put explanatory signs on larger artifacts such as houses (thus satisfying the requirement of traceability).

Figure 1. An archipelago.

Figure 2. A group house “underwater”.

3. EXPERIMENT Viras has been used for an experimental period in a fourth year course at our department in Autumn 2002. The aim was to evaluate the usability of the system, but also to understand the acceptance of the system from the students, their willingness to use this type of system in their learning environment, and its impact on their social awareness. There are described some similar experiments in the literature, such as “30 days in Active Worlds” [11]. The difference from our experiment is that we have created a framework (archipelago) and building units (islands, houses, other artifacts) not only for a spontaneous and unrestricted development of a community, but to provide an increased flexibility of space and artifact manipulation and a greater degree of overview, to ensure an increased awareness of the structure and the evolution of the community.

Since due to technical reasons the regular adoption of the system was not possible, we have decided to design an exercise of the course involving the usage of Viras. In this exercise the students were asked to perform some mandatory building tasks plus they

had to answer to some theoretical questions on CVEs in general, topic that was lectured in the classroom, and Viras in particular. The exercise has been satisfactory completed by all 15 groups, for a total of 51 students. All groups of the course completed the exercise, though not every single student logged in personally. In some cases, the whole group was logged in as one user or only some of the group members were logged in and worked on the exercise. The world was open for a period of 41 days. During this period, the designer was available online for 3 meetings for helping with the system, though she was connected most of the working hours for further clarification. After the delivery of the exercise students have been asked to participate to a collective interview with the system designer. During this meeting students have been asked to fill in a questionnaire. The total interview lasted for about 1 hour and saw the participation of 10 students. The questionnaire was distributed later also to the course mailing list and was filled in by 14 more students (2 of them answering only 2 additional questions since they have already filled the questionnaire during the interview), taking the total up to 22 completed questionnaires. Also, the interactions have been logged, using Active Worlds logging facilities. The results presented in the next section are coming from all these sources: logging, interviews, questionnaires, observations of the participants online, active participation in the world, and answers to the exercise. This approach has a number of limitations. First of all, the degree of participation of the respondents varied to a certain extent, from logging in and building regularly during the whole period to creating the required minimum during the last days before the exercise deadline. Therefore, some of the students did not have much time left to engage in conversation and community building. The variety on responses can be partly contributed to this. Also, there have been variations in the amount of knowledge students had of each other before they started to use Viras, which could have influenced the degree of awareness increase they could achieve.

4. SUPPORTING SOCIAL AWARENESS WITH CVES: RESULTS FROM THE USAGE OF VIRAS The perceived increase in social awareness at the end of the exercise, measured via the questionnaire, is not high. Social awareness increase was measured along the dimensions of personal interests, knowledge and resources, activities, and place in the social network. On all the dimensions on the average the increase was medium-low. Incidentally, it is relevant to point out that the highest increase was related to awareness on knowledge distribution and resources, which looking at the answer to another question can be singled out as the most important factor of social awareness in the context of learning. The overall result, though not satisfactory, is not surprising since the system was used for a short time and making an impact on social awareness would require a longer period of usage. It is therefore more interesting to look at how the different functionalities of Viras were used and how they contribute to social awareness.

4.1 Communication Many studies of awareness in the real world point out the importance of the informal communication that is promoted by

sharing the same space, e.g. [12]. Not surprisingly, we observed the same phenomenon in our virtual world and students claimed that awareness was promoted by chats and telegrams. Verbal communication in Viras was characterized by joking and informality. Communication was uninhibited and the threshold for what was acceptable to say was lower than in real life, though often influenced by real life norms such as offering a cup of virtual coffee to a visitor. We often observed patterns of communication similar to the ones that are triggered by chance encounters in real world, with people starting helping each other (Table 1 and 2). There have been different opinions about the effectiveness of communication. While somebody claimed that “communication is as lively as possible over the net without using web-camera”, the majority found it rather unnatural compared to the one in real life, with people talking with their back to each other or while being far from each other in the virtual world. It is also worth to mention that the 3D nature of the world led to some peculiar communicational phenomena, such as hanging in the air over the conversation partners or to avatars being “private” by hanging together high in the sky. During the interview the students mentioned that indeed the extra dimension in positioning gave greater possibility for privacy, as well as it could provide the opportunity to express themselves more strongly by rising above the opponent.

Table 1. Two examples of chat

Fantomet: Can you fly,

Barbie?

Barbie: i’m probably too

heavy

Fantomet: Then you can sink

down through the ground

Barbie: how do can you do it?

Fantomet: press+/- and shift

Barbie: is there an easy way of

finding others, want to date

Viras36…thought we could

build a house together…jippi,

we found each other!

Glenn: copy from the others,

it is easiest

Christina: Come here,

Synnove! We are out and

stealing…Just run after Glenn

Glenn: hmm… a lot of ladies

running after me…hmmm:-)

Christina: YESSS! Glenn

and I are reunited!….Erlend,

follow us!”

Glenn: come with me so I

will show you…I copied from

the island nearby”

4.2 Identity and Avatars There have been somehow divided opinions on the importance of avatars for promoting social awareness. On the average, avatars were considered less important to awareness than space and artifacts. Part of the students claimed that avatars are difficult to associate to a concrete person and therefore not very important. In addition, the avatars look rather artificial, so users felt a “distance”. Other students claimed that avatars are important for evocation of the users and the indication of who is present, what they are doing, the emotional status etc, and are essential for awareness since they make the system more alive and natural.

Some students changed avatars often, mostly randomly, only sticking to a certain sex, sometimes preferring “funny ones”. Others used only one avatar to provide at least some degree of recognition. Some students claimed that the degree of recognition could vary whether the situation was formal or not, so in certain situations a nametag could be enough. Summarizing, we can say that avatars were generally considered problematic in relation to awareness support because of the limited selection and the constant rotation of avatars among users. These results are supported by the research performed by Dickey [4], who pointed out that the limited selection of avatars in Active Worlds represents a narrow specter of values that may not correspond with those of the user.

Nametags are, together with avatars, a way to convey identity. At the beginning all the students have been assigned a univocal identifiers nametag: Viras followed by a univocal number (see e.g. the chat in Table 2). While using the system most of the students have changed their nametag, generally to reflect their real name (e.g., chat on the right in Table 1). Some students, however, have chosen fictional names (e.g., chat on the left in Table 1). In general, changes of nametags were less frequent than the ones of the associated avatar. It is also interesting to witness the need for some students to identify the real person behind the virtual representation, as illustrated in chat presented in Table 2.

4.3 Artifacts Many students consider artifacts as the major source of information about activities, resources, and social structure, compared to the spatial factors and the avatars. As one student puts it “the use of houses, signs, other objects is a funny and efficient way to share information” and another: “you can easily leave traces after yourself that the others will see”. Artifacts were perceived as an indirect form of communication: “You can communicate by manipulating objects such as signs and links… In this way you can exchange ideas and give comments…reach a bigger audience with your ideas”. However, this kind of communication is considered by the students mostly less efficient than chat and telegrams.

“Useless” objects not related to any task but creating and communicating the mood were common: coffee cups on the table, beds and night tables. Houses themselves were used for express the personality of the owners: castles, underwater houses, abstract futuristic constructions etc (Figures 2, 3 and 4). Artifacts were also designed to carry detailed information about the owner: a picture of herself and of a “special one”, signs with explicit facts such as “I like to play guitar”, links to favorite web pages. The design of the group island/house and corresponding individual houses often followed the same style, and sometimes the style within same group differed according to subgroups, as described in more detail later in the paper. There has been a rather significant amount of house and island reuse, as neighboring houses often looked similar, with some personal adjustments. The majority of the houses were traditional ones with walls and roofs, while some of them were just symbolic markers for a personal/group place, such as abstract glass constructions. In this context, it was uttered an opinion that, in terms of socializing, houses are only obstacles, it should be an open place so you could see other people.

Artifacts were mostly spread in the area where the owner “lives”, but sometimes also scattered around in common areas and on property belonging to other users, which usually led to complains. Some objects were deliberately placed in the common areas to lead attention on their owner, for example signs in the main building saying “Eivind was here”, “Olav is cool”, “Group 10 is the best!”. We have also observed some users spreading around small “traps”, almost invisible, which would teleport those bumping into them to the creator’s house.

Figure 3. A student house.

Figure 4. Another student house.

4.4 Space The results from the questionnaire show that the functionality associated to the virtual space is considered important by students. In particular, on the average, they associated the highest score to the possibility for “momentous teleportation”, followed by the possibility to have group and private areas with distinctive borders, and by the possibilities for flexible space structure. Moreover, the spatial factor, e.g. where people build, connections between houses and islands, where people “hang around”, appear to be important for awareness support. Many students attempted to draw the attention of others to their constructions, by putting traps as mentioned earlier, making huge and high constructions

visible from long distances, and explicitly in chat, for example: “StrikingViking: I recommend to have a look at the group 9B’s lovely summer cottage over there”.

The results from the questionnaire shows that, on the average, casualty was the most important factor for the choice of the building place, followed in the order by proximity to friends and working partners, to other houses/islands for easier copying, and to the central island. While in the world, students tended to spend most time (score 3 out of 5) in the group areas, tightly followed by equal amounts of time in the individual and common areas and less in other people’s areas. In a number of occasions, students strolling around met other users working in their own areas (see Table 2), and this initiated conversations about the constructions like “What a nice swing door you have” and requests for help and permission to copy.

The building appeared to be rather compact, often in several levels. In most cases, the real world norms were followed, for example signs were grouped along the walls, but some builders took advantage of the “virtual physical laws” and made constructions not possible in reality, such as objects hanging in the air. The group and private areas were often interleaved. The islands contained both links and bridges to the friends and acquaintances. In majority of cases the group island/house and individual constructions were geographically close, though not in “satellite” fashion, with roads/bridges to group members. Some group islands also had bridges to the main island and other groups. In one case, the group house was connected to other houses only by virtual links. For the purposes of socializing and working, students considered it positive to have their own places in the world. As one group put it, “To divide the area into islands is an effective way to define working areas“.

Spatial movement as well as teleportation and joining were considered by many students as a part of communication. Information has also been coupled to the space. For example, students placed numerous web and BSCW links in the world. It was also mentioned that “information has geographic placement” and that “advantages of space structure is that you remember where you keep a particular document”.

4.5 Patterns of Usage The usage of Viras was directly dependent on the mass of users online at the moment. The most common situation was as following: a user logged in and looked around, often checking if there were any more active users there: “Hello”, “Is anybody here” etc. If the user got a response (either from the administrator, another citizen, or from a casual tourist), or met an avatar, they usually started to talk, ask for help or possibly build, as illustrated in the chat session reported in Table 2.

Table 2. A chance encounter at a building place .

Viras9: and you are?

Viras14: glenn

Viras9: ok, jon ole here

Viras14: I started (to build) half an hour ago…the island is right

behind you!

Viras9: it looks nice

Viras14: I think I steal a little bit from you

Viras9: Ok…eivind has made a little island to, have you seen it?

Viras14: yes I have looked at it…have to copy from there too, I

suppose

Viras9: Would you please remove that sign you have put on my

property!!!!

Viras14: No

If the user did not have anybody to talk with, he either left the world immediately or stayed for some time running around and experimenting or accomplishing a task, like building a house, usually in his own area.

Sometimes a whole group logged in at the same time, presumably after having planned a virtual meeting (Table 3).

Table 3. A group meeting online

Tora: Hi Annette!

Anette: Hi Tora!

Tora: What shall we do now? Choose a house?

Anette: How do we do that?… Ok let’s go and find a house

Tora: But where are Stein and Ingeborg now? Tell what you are

doing, don’t just run away from me…communication!

Stein: I am here

Annete: Now I think I have entered house nr 1… Are you

coming too?

During the announced common meetings, the number of participants was rising dramatically, up to about 10-15 at a time. The majority arrived at the meeting’s start, and then the amount of visitors gradually decreased during the next 3-8 hours. Three patterns of interaction can be identified:

1) Students - administrator, mostly asking for help, discussing technical problems and inviting to look at the constructions.

2) Among group members, both work-related and informal, sometimes through whispering so others could not hear it.

3) Students – students, asking for help: “How can I do this and this” and responding to help requests, commenting on avatars and each other’s constructions.

4.6 General Attitude Towards the System Students were asked to comment on potentialities and further use of the system. The responses could be classified in three groups: “I don’t like the system, I will not use it for socializing”, “The system has a number of drawbacks as it is, but the idea and potential are good” and “I like the system, and I will use it (or something similar) in the future”. Some students claimed that the system looks more like a game and could not be used in “serious” context. Others, on the other hand, see potentialities for group work and socializing. For example, when nobody in a group knows each other, it would be a good place to socialize since you get a different impression of a person in a virtual world. It was easier to ask “stupid questions“ in Viras than in real life. Such a system could be also useful for those with social fears and first year students to “demystify” computer. As to the working, there have been drawn parallels to the use of BSCW: “Appears like BSCW as you save links and documents. We think it is an effective way to support asynchronous communication. Every group member knows where to find relevant information. The shared working area is represented with islands and/or houses”. The potentialities for supporting group work are in line with the results in the questionnaire were students were asked about the usefulness of Viras in different learning situations. The students on the average gave highest scores to “presenting projects” and “group work”, slightly less to “meeting the teacher” and lowest to “presentation/demonstration”. The students noted that they could have got much more out of the system if they spent more time on building and forming the world. There have also been opinions that communication and cooperation in Viras and CVE in general have good potentials, but the technology and interface is still not good enough.

4.7 A Group Island: a Case In order to illustrate how social factors (in this case gender relations in a group) can be reflected through construction of a virtual place, we provide a description of a specific building project by one of the student groups. The whole island is built rather uniformly, during one day (before the deadline). First, the island itself was build, then the group “tower”, later the “boys’” houses, then the “girls’” houses (the exterior). It is situated rather isolated, not far from a pre-built island inhabited by a group, but without any evident connections to it. The only external link points to a group residing rather distantly away. The design and structure appears standardized and consequent, indicating a significant degree of copying. The whole island is built as a public property. The island consists of a group tower, 4 individual houses, some “vegetation” and a little additional island belonging to the group, connected by a bridge to the main group island. The individual houses have all the same structure, but different design (colors, textures, interior) and are divided into two very distinct groups, “boy” and “girl” houses. The exterior of the houses is exactly the same within the same group. The two groups are placed on the opposite sides of the island. The interior and design of the houses depicts the gender differences in the group. The “girl” houses are in soft beige-golden colors. The furniture includes beds in both houses, and in addition sofas, table and flowers in one of the houses. The signs and pictures in both houses mirror one each other, with similar pictures (both girls are depicted with a rubber nipple), texts like “I go to SIT (local gym)”

- “I also go to SIT”, “I love candies” - “I love horses”. It is obvious that the girls have a close social relation in real life as well. The “boy” houses are designed in more “strong” colors, gray and terracotta. The interior is very minimalistic, with a computer and simple sofas. The atmosphere is more “serious”, there are no pictures, only links to a firm one of them works at, cars portal and a portal for computer science students.

Figure 5. A group island

5. DISCUSSION As our results show, the increase in the awareness was moderate. There are a number of reasons for that. First, the world has been used for a relatively short period of time, from a month to a few days for some students. Second, many of the students knew each other from before the experiment, which could lead to the lacking awareness increase even if the circumstances were right for that. Third, there have been a number of problems with the usability, such as difficult building and problems with overview and structuring of the information and space, which sometimes made it difficult for students to put out and find relevant information. Fourth, the pattern of usage was not exactly the one intended since the amount of students online was usually quite small, except when they were invited to common meetings and prior the deadline.

5.1 Increasing Awareness There has been much variance in the students’ attitude towards Viras in particular and CVEs in general in an educational context. Many students have pointed out the current technological limitations, but also the potentials of the Viras and CVEs in different learning situations, such as presentation of projects, group work and meeting with supervisor/teacher. Considering improving the social connections, most students found the face-to-face communication more natural and convenient, but recognized the usefulness of virtual communication for shy persons and for the situations where the users do not know each other from the real life. Also, the communication through the artifacts and spatial formations was considered important and effective. We have looked at how different elements in the world affected social awareness. The following factors, according to students, contributed to the various dimensions of social awareness:

Who is available at the moment and who is doing what: amount of users in Viras on the in-built Worlds-list, chat, telegrams and whispering, the avatars with the names over their heads, their position, movement, gestures and environment manipulation, the user status on the contact list (online/offline). The resources people possess (knowledge, skill etc): the artifacts in people’s houses (text, links, pictures, for example a job-related link in our group case), chat and telegrams, the design of the house (also as a measure of Active Worlds building skills), homepages (available from avatar pop-up menu or from links in the houses), avatars people choose. Activities: artifacts in the houses (for example party pictures in girl’s houses in the case description) telegram, homepages, house design, the behavior, position and movement of the avatars. Place in the social network: artifacts with explicit information, chat and telegrams, links to other people in the houses, positioning of objects and buildings (for example, the gender-related grouping in the case description), avatars as indicators of belonging and roles, position and behavior of avatars as indicators of whom people talk to and whom they work with. It is relevant to point out that awareness on the social network was the dimension with the highest variance. This can be attributed to the fact that there has been variance in the students’ awareness of the social network prior to the usage of Viras, as mentioned earlier. In addition, the contributing factors such as the positioning of constructions in the world, links to friends, bridges (not mentioned explicitly, but in practice used to mark connections between group members or between groups) require a higher degree of reasoning and observation than just perceiving explicit information about a person’s interests. As this type of awareness demands from users to walk around to get an overview of the geographical structure of the world, the users who have spent less time with the system mostly in their own areas could have missed this information. The existing (though limited) flexibility of building has been important for the creation of objects and constructions used for awareness acquisition (artifacts, houses, islands etc) as described above as students often combined parts of existing constructions to relatively fast create new ones, as shown in a group island example. The resulting moderate increase in social awareness, we believe, can be explained in two ways:

• The flexibility is still limited so technical factors such as possibilities for easy copying have in some cases more influence on the building pattern than those concerning social awareness (proximity to friends)

• The mapping between the constructions bearing awareness information and a user’s mental “awareness map” can be complicated due to such factors as too large area of settlement and unstructured or lacking mapping of the settlement pattern to the information available in the central island.

In order to improve the social and learning potentials of Viras, we will in the following consider the consequences for the design and deployment of the system, based on the results of the usage in general and above discussion in particular.

5.2 Design ActiveWorlds resulted to be a useful platform for the quick development of a collaborative virtual environment. It was easy to tailor for providing the wanted scenario, an archipelago, and it offered a number of useful functionality. However, there are some problems that we have detected. Many of our students complained about system crushes, slow response time, difficulties with resizing windows. Many students experienced problems with the access rights for working with public objects. They sometime experienced interaction and communication as unnatural. They also felt that body language was not sufficiently supported and communication inhibited. More important with respect to our goals, the platform does not seem to support in an appropriate way the flexible extension of the world since building was often experienced as too cumbersome and unintuitive. Copying and moving of artifacts is difficult, especially over distances. Moreover, especially in a dynamic world like Viras, it gets difficult to gain an overview of the world, people and activities there, and students felt they can easily get “lost”. Summarizing, Active Worlds has proved to be very useful for obtaining a working system, but it is difficult to extend. More flexibility is required by a system for supporting social awareness and, at the current state of the platform, this awareness can be achieved only by adding new functionality to the platform. On the basis of our results we can formulate the following lessons learned with respect to the design of CVEs for promoting awareness in learning communities:

(1) Awareness mapping. There is a need for better structuring and overview of the world, including maps (possibly some kind of “radar-view”), overview of the users online, their status and positions and a more “compact” world. In general, we need an overview/visualization of a student’s movement along the participation/learning trajectory, probably as a central indexing structure reflecting settlement patterns and traces left.

(2) Integration with existing tools. There is a need for more integration with support tools already used by the students. According to the students, BSCW-like functions like version control of documents, common file area, synchronous work with documents will be desirable. Some students recommended also integration of other tools such as e-mail, videoconferencing, and access via mobile.

(3) Avatars. The persons are static, but this may be improved by better customization of the avatars/environments. A personified recognizable avatar will according to the students contribute to increased awareness.

(4) Artifacts. There is a need for easier and more intuitive building, to allow easier communication and community development. This includes better overviews and easier copying and moving of building objects; more explanations of how to build; pre-built houses, islands and other constructions that are easy to put in place and customize; better possibilities for associating people to artifacts and to understand the rationale behind the different constructions and the evolution of the world.

(5) Space. The 3D space proved to be important. Students seem to confirm the hypothesis on space usage underlying the design of Viras. However, even if the need for distinct

working/”leisure” areas was recognized, not all the students thought that the chosen metaphor is the right one. We believe that to a certain extent this is a matter of personal taste, and of the intended use of the world (working/leisure). To comply with the personal and situational needs, there is a need to provide more spatial flexibility, including easier manipulation of spatial constructions as mentioned in the former paragraph, and a variety of spatial formations for various purposes available for the users. There should also be provided some kind of indexing and mapping of the spatial structures to a format more easily graspable by user.

In general, the design should provide a greater degree of flexibility on all levels, to adjust to the different characteristics of the user mass and evolving needs of the learning communities and groups.

5.3 Deployment Four aspects need to be underlined with respect to the pattern of usage and feedback on Viras. First, as mentioned in Section 4, a recurrent pattern of usage of Viras is the one encountered also in other CVE systems: users enter the system, stay for a short time and, if there are little or no other people there (critical mass), they leave. Casual encounters did occur, with the intended results such as helping each other and communicating, but the size of the user mass and thus the probability of such encounters made their appearance less frequent. Second, when several persons were online, the cooperation was often chaotic, without any specific plan, everybody built as he/she wanted. Third, not everybody in a group logged in, sometimes a student or two did it on the behalf of the group, with the rest of the group either absent or gathered together in front of the screen. Forth, the acceptance of the system greatly varies from user to user. None of these is unexpected. However, it is natural to assume that usage will vary depending on learning situations (for example, traditional course vs. project-based course), the background of the users, the purposes of usage etc. Based on our results, we introduce some general modifications to the deployment of the world, which will need to be adjusted to concrete usage scenarios:

(1) There is a need for strict and consequent rules for information, space and artifact structuring and indexing, to ensure a predictable and organized development of the world, easier information retrieval and better overview, which in turn will contribute to awareness increase.

(2) Common norms of behavior and a moderator are needed to ensure effective and polite communication and building and to prevent “unsocial behavior” such as swearing and leaving objects on other people’s property.

(3) As a way of knowing each other better (and thus improving awareness) students should have a common task. Also, arranging common meetings and thus creating the “critical mass” and stimulating communication was considered desirable by many students, even if it implied to “force” students to meet. It should be easier to locate other students. This can be achieved by for example establishing conventions for using special places for meeting other people and leaving questions and help requests.

(4) A number of students reported that they spent too much time on building to engage in socializing (especially with

the persons in other groups), and implied that they could have increased their awareness to a greater degree if they had spent less time and effort building. This feedback is problematic since, as discussed above, the process of building has promoted communication and cooperation among students, such as helping each other to build, copying, creating joint construction. Also, building was considered as a way of expressing one’s personality. Therefore we believe that the concern raised by these students must not be addressed by reducing the amount of building, but rather its complexity. This reinforces the requirement for an infrastructure supporting easier and more flexible building, as discussed in Section 5.1. In addition, at the deployment level, it demands short online introduction/tutorials when users adopt the system. Moreover, to prevent the students from “sticking” to their areas and thus missing important awareness information, arranged common meetings and activities in public places could in some cases be beneficial.

6. CONCLUSIONS AND FURTHER WORK In this paper we presented an experience of usage with a collaborative virtual environment designed to promote social awareness in learning communities. After a brief description of the design of the system and its main functionality we have described how the system has been used in a period of 41 days in a university course. With this experiment we have not focused on the way collaborative environment can be used to build a community from the scratch, as in e.g. [11]. Rather, we have focused on how a system like this can help to foster community relations among students taking a common subject, creating more awareness on the existing relationships and knowledge distribution. We believe that this is important to support knowledge sharing among students and promote a better experience.

The results from our experience are pointing in different, sometimes opposite, directions. This is not surprisingly since the patterns of usage of the system and its acceptance are deeply depending on personal preferences. However, this experiment has also reinforced our impression that CVEs can be a powerful tool for promoting long-term social awareness. With this study we have pointed out directions for improving the design of CVE, but we also indicated some issues to take into considerations when deploying this type of systems.

Based on the results we have got, we have identified a number of directions for further research. First, concerning social awareness in virtual worlds, we have identified two main issues: flexibility of building and effectiveness of the mapping between the awareness-bearing structures and the mental “awareness map” of the user. Therefore, we need to work for improving usability of the world, to allow easier and more flexible building and providing a better structuring and overview of the contents. Second, we need to elaborate a more flexible framework for situating the usage of the system, taking into account the size of the user mass (and thus the probability to meet other users online), previous users’ knowledge of each others, and the changing needs of the learning communities and groups, so that the world can serve both as a meeting place and as a repository of

community resources, depending on what is most adequate in the current learning situation.

7. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The research reported here is financed by the Norwegian Research Council in the context of the project CAGIS II.

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