Supporting Social Awareness with 3D Collaborative Virtual Environments and Mobile Devices: VirasMobile Ekaterina Prasolova-Førland, Monica Divitini, Anders Einar Lindås Norwegian University of Science and Technology NO-7491 Trondheim {ekaterip,divitini}@idi.ntnu.no, lindas@stud.ntnu.no Abstract - Social awareness is essential for effective learning. 3D Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) have been proposed as a tool for social awareness support in an educational context as the natural environments are often not sufficient for this purpose. User evaluations of the prototype that was developed to test the suitability of 3D CVEs in this context identified a number of problems in terms of supporting short-term social awareness. To overcome these shortages, we propose to supplement 3D CVEs with mobile devices. The paper presents a revised set of requirements for the augmented system, describes the corresponding design and outlines the technical implementation of a prototype. Keywords - Collaborative virtual environments, mobility, learning, communities, social awareness. I. INTRODUCTION Many existing applications to support education tend to focus on small groups of students performing specific tasks. However, we also know that collaboration takes place within collaboration structures characterized by a looser coupling. A full support to learning requires taking into account the notion of communities. As pointed out by Wenger [1], learning is situated and relies on participation in communities of practice, i.e. “groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis.” [1, p. 4]. Communities are social aggregates that are fluid and emergent [2]. It is therefore difficult for community members to get an overview of the existing social structures. This is a problem because awareness of e.g. experience distribution and community membership creates occasions for knowledge sharing. Lack of this awareness creates continuous breakdowns in the flow of knowledge and it impacts negatively on learning. Hereafter we use the term social awareness (SA) to indicate awareness of the social situation in a group or community in a shared environment, which can be physical, virtual or both. This awareness includes knowledge on learners’ roles, activities, positions, status, responsibilities, social connections and group processes. We distinguish between short-term SA, which is the awareness of the social situation at a certain moment, and long-term SA is the awareness of the social situation in general. There are various mechanisms for promoting social awareness in everyday life, like chance encounters, message boards, verbal and non-verbal cues [3]. These techniques are not always sufficient due to, e.g., physical distances between the students; different schedules for the group members; social fears and inhibitions; available spaces that are not optimal for meeting, working and information sharing. Various groupware tools have been used to promote awareness, overcoming the limitations of everyday modalities of interactions [4]. However, they mainly focus on supporting already established groups rather than fluid communities [5]. It is also important to point out that many learning settings are characterized by a high degree of distribution and mobility of students. In these situations, students need supporting technologies because they cannot rely on everyday modalities of interactions to get social awareness. Mobility might impact significantly on social structures involved in the learning process and pattern of interactions among learners [6]. However, most applications are traditional desktop applications whose access is problematic for students that are often on the move or occupied in multiple tasks. Therefore, students cannot take full advantage of existing applications for promoting social awareness when they need them most. Internet-based Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) have been lately proposed as a tool for supporting learning in different contexts, e.g. [7, 8]. 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 [8]. 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. CVEs also provide a space and artifacts with a higher degree of flexibility than the physical ones. Second International Conference on Systems (ICONS'07) 0-7695-2807-4/07 $20.00 © 2007