Disputation Mikhail Fominykh - Department of Computer and ...

Collaborative Work on 3D Educational Content
The second goal of the described study and some of the collected data were
dedicated to exploring a possibility of integrating virtual campus and virtual city
environments. Later, this enquiry became an independent theoretical study. As a
result, a framework Virtual Campus in the Context of an Educational Virtual City
was developed. It comprises the results of the empirical study in VCYO and the
framework of virtual campus. The new framework was presented in Paper 2 of this
thesis.
Later, after conducting the first empirical study in the virtual campus of NTNU and
participating in TiE project, the idea of an educational virtual city evolved again.
We sought to develop a holistic approach to educational virtual cities, introducing
a concept of ‘Universcity’ as a framework for social, cultural, educational, and
entertaining activities, a city for students, researchers, and other learners to live
and work in. Although, the metaphor of a city was used in the design of virtual
worlds, a systematic approach to learning support in virtual cities was not
developed. A new study was dedicated to filling this gap. The results of this study
and the ‘Universcity’ framework are published in Paper 5 of this thesis.
Research on the design of tools for collaborative work on 3D content was
continued in the following three empirical studies. The framework Creative Virtual
Workshop had been evolving from one study to another, based on the user
feedback and data collected. Creative Virtual Workshop became a framework that
supports creating, demonstrating, storing, and retrieving of 3D constructions, by
providing an environment equipped with a set of tools. In such a way, the
framework became more specialized in supporting educational visualizations and
a learning community around this activity.
Based on this framework, a prototype was developed in the virtual campus of
NTNU after the first empirical study on educational visualizations. The prototype
was improved after the second empirical study on educational visualizations based
on the user feedback and data collected. Creative Virtual Workshop framework is
presented most thoroughly in Paper 3 of this thesis.
Creative Virtual Workshop was used in the third empirical study on educational
visualizations, but at the time of writing the thesis, the results of the study were
not fully analysed. However, the details of this study are presented in Paper 9 of
this thesis.
3.4.3 Studies on the support for learning communities in 3D CVEs
Topic 3 appeared during the first studies of the research work presented in this
thesis. The area of supporting learning communities in 3D CVEs was narrowed
down to learning communities in educational virtual cities and virtual campuses
(Figure 5).
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