Supporting Social Awareness in Education in Collaborative Virtual Environments

The goal of this PhD research is to explore how Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) should be designed in order to support social awareness in educational context. The social nature of learning is widely recognized in social science, therefore, learners need to be aware of the social situation in the learning group or community. Empirical evidence shows that the physical organization of the universities and traditional tools such as ICQ do not provide enough support for social awareness. We argue that CVEs offer much potential for social awareness support. We have arrived at a characterization framework of CVEs and analyzed various spatial metaphors used in existing systems. We have also arrived at a set of requirements for educational CVEs for social awareness support and developed a spatial metaphor, “Archipelago” that satisfies these requirements. The prototype based on the metaphor is now under development using the Active Worlds technology.