Virtual Knowledge Spaces Research Articles

Digital and Spatial Education Intertwining in The Evolution of Technology Resources for Educational Curriculum Reshaping and Skills Enhancement

The aim of this research is to deepen how digital education has been intertwined with spatial education throughout the evolution of technology resources. In the last years, the user experience has been improved by open-source, collaborative user-generated, and immersive content – starting from multimedia/hypermedia architectures to synthetic learning environments. This research analyses which spatial design principles have influenced multimedia/hypermedia, collaborative web 2.0 interfaces, and more recently the synthetic environments of virtual worlds. The evolution of technology resources supports the hypothesis of a continuous intertwining between digital and spatial education since multimedia/hypermedia architectures, in which spatial knowledge may play a significant role in web-based design according to individual differences in hypermedia fruition, prior knowledge in the field, and personal experience in web-based instruction. In collaborative user-generated content technology, visual presentation facilitates learning co-construction and spaces are intended as synchronous and asynchronous virtual knowledge spaces of communication. In 3D virtual learning environments, spatial interaction is really developed and may open full accessibility to further studies on digital and spatial education. In the joined field of learning and ICT, the main scope of digital technology knowledge sharing, and re-shaping, is the enhancement of digital skills based on experiences in educational activities and the re-thinking of the nature and the format of educational curriculum to implement more experiences in the digital – and, possibly, spatial – fields.

Models for Understanding Collective Intelligence on Wikipedia

Through examining established and evolving conceptions of intelligence across natural and social science and applying them to Wikipedia, this article argues that the world’s largest encyclopedia and broadest implementation of the wiki is an online instance of collective intelligence (CI), as it fits key models for this concept. Further, by relying on sociotechnical ensembles of human intelligence, programmed bots, social bureaucracy, and software protocols, a more humanistic CI, as proposed by Lévy, is realized in a virtual knowledge space that embodies information as both product and process while empowering its community to explore the cultural possibilities of its collectivism.

3D Virtual Knowledge Space for Collaboration in New Product Development Processes

The purpose of this article is to create a virtual knowledge space, K-SPACE (Knowledge Space), that enables communication and knowledge sharing between a business level and a plant level for mutual decision-making. Another purpose of a virtual knowledge space is to enable successful collaboration that ensures better quality while reducing costs and time by checking the task progress of departments participating in new product development (NPD) under the concurrent engineering (CE) paradigm. The Croquet software development kit is utilized to develop the knowledge space, which is a small-talk based, object-oriented language. The use of K-SPACE at enterprises that adapt the CE philosophy for NPD processes is expected to reduce both time and cost through fast, accurate, efficient, and collaborative decision making for various conflicting issues.

Networked experiments and scientific resource sharing in cooperative knowledge spaces

Cooperative knowledge spaces create new potentials for the experimental fields in natural sciences and engineering because they enhance the accessibility of experimental setups through virtual laboratories and remote technology, opening them for collaborative and distributed usage. A concept for extending existing virtual knowledge spaces for the means of the technological disciplines (“ViCToR‐Spaces” ‐ Virtual Cooperation in Teaching and Research for Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Engineering) is presented. The integration of networked virtual laboratories and remote experiments (“NanoLab Approach”), as well as an approach to community‐driven content sharing and content development within virtual knowledge spaces (NanoWiki) are described.