Collaborative Learning through Flexible Web CVE - Teaching through Multi-User Virtual Environments - page 489

Table 1. Configuration time

Configuration Non structured

approach

Authoring process-based
approach

Geometries of Meeting Point About 50 min. About 20 min.

Geometries of Blue Dome About 60 min. About 25 min.

Behaviors of Blue Dome About 30 min. About 8 min.

Overall session About 335 min. About 90 min.

224 schools in seven different countries and more
than two thousands students during the years
2005/2006. The two projects had different set-
tings (world and objects) and similar (not equal)
activities to create experience instances. The
configuration phase represented a crucial aspect
for these projects for two reasons:

structured approach and by using the authoring
process. Table 1 describes the effort to load on
stage and place the interactive objects in correct
position for each part (i.e. an autonomous portion
of the 3D environment), for the configuration of
the behaviors of the interactive objects and finally
for the configuration of the overall session details.

• high number of users involved (both

end user and back end user like Session
Configurators, , 3D World Designers and so
on)

CONCLUSION

In this chapter we described the experiences we
gained during the years we spent developing a
lot of 3D collaborative applications for educa-
tion purposes. These experiences have shown the
need to take into account not only the pedagogical
and educational aspects related to the specific
experience, but also the conceptual, design and
implementative aspects of a generic experience.
Then we provided an answer to the specialists
needs for the fast prototyping of contents and
collaboration management with the WebTalk04
framework. The most challenging future work will
be to define a methodology of abstract representa-
tion (a modelling language) of a generic “learning
session”, intended as a set of “core components”.

• need to supply all experiences in a few

months

Our authoring process workflow has dramati-
cally reduced the time needed for “customizing
a session”. Meanwhile we have developed an
authoring tool (Barchetti et al., 2006) able to give
support to different expertises involved into the
authoring process. To give value to results we
tested our the configuration environment on real
Learning@Europe sessions according to specific
format defined from Experience Architects . De-
signed session is structured in two part (distinct
terrains, 3D objects and collaboration rules)
containing respectively 13 and 15 interactive
objects with their own behaviors and collabora-
tive metaphors. We used two different approaches
to perform the test. The first one is based on a
non-structured approach without following any
particular authoring process and second one made
use of our authoring process and tool. The table
below shows the estimated improvement, with
respect to reprogram the sessions, by using a non-

ReFeReNCeS

Barbieri, T. (2000). Networked virtual environ-
ments for the web: The WebTalk-I and WebTalk-II
architectures (pp.179-182) Paper presented at the
IEEE for Computer Multimedia & Expo 2000
(ICME), New York, USA.