BULLETIN OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY / June 1999 Fialho, Catapan / VIRTUAL REALITY ENVIRON- MENTS Knowledge Building by Full Integration With Virtual Reality Environments and Its Effects on Personal and Social Life Francisco Antonio Pereira Fialho Araci Hack Catapan Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil It is primordial to insist on a continuous education that is open, flexible, and personalized, allowing the individual to update and make his or her knowledge adequate throughout life. The creation of distributed environments for constructivist learning is a chal- lenge. Research in this field is needed for the develop- ment of cooperative learning tools able to facilitate and motivate learning. The development of intelligent didactic systems is complex, demanding the support of knowledge coming from different fields. That is why to develop this class of systems a multidisciplinary team is needed, including pedagogues; educational psy- chologists; specialists in the knowledge domain; and technicians in computer graphics, programming, multi- media, virtual reality, project management, and so forth. Virtual immersion introduces new resources for interindividual communications that deal with reality interpretation. The authors outline the beginning of a long journey on how imagination power can be used for the collective creation of worlds able to improve learning. The development of high performance computing and communication systems is creating new world- wide media, such as the Web and virtual realties. In turn, these new media enable new types of messages and experience. Innovation on pedagogy, empowered by these emerging media, messages, and experiences, make possible the emergence of new ideas on how to reenchant education. In particular, advances in computer-supported collaborative learning, multime- dia/hypermedia, and experiential simulation offer the potential to create shared learning-through-doing environments, available anyplace and anytime on demand. Complex systems theory teaches us that new quali- ties arise from complexity itself. Hydrogen has the property of being inflammable. Breathing is the qual- ity associated with oxygen. Nevertheless, when one mixes hydrogen with oxygen, a new quality arises, “drinkability.” Virtual integration, with avatars and agents sharing some educational virtual (or real) envi- ronments, promises to offer such new qualities. This article speculates about how emerging tech- nologies may reshape both face-to-face and distance education. Although it will cite leading edge scholar- ship to reinforce its claims, it is a position/discussion piece rather than a simple review of all-relevant dis- tance education or educational technology research. As such, the emphasis is on expanding the reader’s conceptualization of distance education rather than on proving the validity of specific pedagogical practices. Archetypes In this article, we outline the beginning of a long journey on how imagination power can be used for the collective creation of worlds able to improve learning. Jung worked on the concept of archetypes that comes from the Greek “arqueu,” angels that helped in the creation of the universe. Our education is marked by the presence of concepts like gravity and guilt. If Newton, instead of asking why an apple falls from a tree, had investigated how it arrived at the tree branch, we would have had a levitation theory rather than a gravity one. We first commit a sin, and then we must feel the guilt for doing it. After a hard journey of repentance, God’s anger is abated. Only then we reach grace. Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, Vol. 19, No. 3, June 1999, 237-243 Copyright  1999 Sage Publications, Inc.