A Collaboration Facilitator Model for Learning Virtual Environments

Adriana Peña Pérez Negrón

doi:10.13189/csit.2014.020207

Adriana Peña Pérez Negrón

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.13189/csit.2014.020207

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Abstract

In virtual environments most pedagogical virtual tutors or facilitators supervise or guide the learning activity; they are task-oriented. In contrast, the here proposed facilitator is strictly about monitoring some aspects of collaboration and offering advice in this regard. In a multiuser virtual environment, that is, a Collaborative Virtual Environment, oral communication is chosen over written communication in order to enhance the feelings of presence, co-presence, and immersion for the user; but oral communication analysis presents a high resource overhead. As an alternative, the monitoring activity of this facilitator is based on two nonverbal cues of interaction: talking-turn patterns and object manipulation. An empirical study to validate this approach was conducted based on the participants' perception regarding the suitability of the facilitator's messages; the results showed that the students' accepted a significant number of generated advice.

Highlights

As social creatures, humans are highly influenced by the interaction with their socio-cultural environment; this interaction contributes to the formation of the individual.In a collaborative scenario, people interchange ideas and coordinate efforts to achieve their shared goals; whenever conflicts appear, according to Vygotsky [1], activity and communication conduct to knowledge
Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) fit into the Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) paradigm, which central notion is that knowledge building is achieved through interaction with others
Where the Virtual Reality (VR) technology attempts to provide the users with the feeling of presence or “being there” in the computer’s generated display [2], in which the user can interact with the virtual world

Summary

Introduction

People interchange ideas and coordinate efforts to achieve their shared goals; whenever conflicts appear, according to Vygotsky [1], activity and communication conduct to knowledge. In this regard, Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) fit into the Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) paradigm, which central notion is that knowledge building is achieved through interaction with others. While the multiuser feature is expected to provide the users with the co-presence feeling, that is the feeling of “being there together” and interact with each other [3]

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