Umeå Universitat |
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Project Coordinator
Mikael Jakobsson
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Project Description The final goal of this project is to create a working environment for academic meetings in a virtual world. Hence the name Confuse which implies Conference use. Since our university is located pretty much on the edge of the physical world (northern Sweden) we have a special need for virtual arenas where people can meet without having to physically be at the same place. We plan to invite speakers for virtual seminars and meetings and also to hold research study courses in the Confuse world. Along the way we want to explore issues like difference between virtual world (VW) design and traditional IT design, collaborative design and learning in VWs, and VW design issues in general. We have also found that our work on creating this environment has helped shed some light on different ways of being with technology, touching on aspects beyond the traditional concepts of use and design. The project has led to two spin-off worlds in the Active Worlds main universe. One called Ogel, which is a free building Lego world. In Ogel we have arranged courses in virtual world design for students and staff at our university. The other world is called Socole, which is short for "the Social Context of Learning". Socole is used as a shared social space to support social interactions in a distributed learning setting. | ||
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