With the goal of lessening barriers to the learning of advanced programming techniques, we put into place a trial which required students to get involved with online communities of programmers. Using a course assignment on software architecture styles, students had study a problem, find basis for a tentative approach, and discuss it online with programmers. The expectation was that students would find motivation for their studies from both the contact with communities of programmers, and from having to study and reflect upon their problem well enough to be able to draw the interest of members of those communities. We present the strategy we used, the developments and outcomes, and ideas for further application of this approach.

Abstract-Mass adoption of virtual world platforms for education and training implies efficient management of computational resources. In Second Life Grid and OpenSimulator, commonly used for this purpose, a key resource is the number of servers required to support educational spaces. Educational activities can take place at different altitudes over the same virtual land, for different classes. This way a single virtual world server can sustain several different educational spaces/classes, reducing the number of servers needed to make available different classrooms or other educational spaces. One issue whose importance is emphasized in such conditions is that of class privacy, bearing in mind that most privacy-management features of these platforms are land-based, not space-based. In this paper, we provide an overview of the issues to consider when planning privacy in these platforms and the methodologies that can be developed and implemented to ensure it at an adequate level, including the extra privacy possible in OpenSimulator regarding Second Life Grid.

The continuous need for education and the significant changes in European policies and regulations overseeing sports coaching and training require the adjustment of teaching models and methods to the needs and potential of teachers, students, and technology. In educational and training programmes for team sports coaching, it is common to use a group of athletes or video to demonstrate physical, technical, and tactical procedures. This requires significant human resources, both while developing the procedures and to reproduce them. Furthermore, both cases (live execution by athletes or video recording) are limited in visual perspective and detail. For this reason, specific software for demonstrating tactical procedures is sometimes used. But existing software presents significant limitations, for instance, when one cannot change procedures in real time nor can one interact with the audience. This article focus on the development of a new resource: a software system combining tri-dimensional automated avatars in the Second Life world, an external control server, and an helper desktop application. Using this system, coaches enrolled in education/training programs can more easily be involved, even taking a player’s role, and analyze movements from various points of view. This system aims to contribute to the improvement of the team handball coach education programs by supporting the understanding of the dynamics between defensive and offensive players in the organized phase of a handball game, using shared 3-D simulations with avatars.

In this paper we discuss collaborative learning strategies based on the use of digital stories in corporate training and lifelong learning. The text starts with a concise review on theoretical and technical foundations about the use of digital technologies in collaborative strategies in lifelong learning. We will also discuss if the corporate training may be improved by the use of individual audio-visual experience in learning process. Careful planning, scripting and production of audio-visual digital stories can help in the construction of collaborative learning spaces in which adults are in the context of vocational training throughout life. Our analysis concludes emphasizing on the need to experience the routing performance of digital stories in the context of corporate training, following the reference levels mentioned here, so we can have in a future more theoretical and empirical elements for the validation and conceptualization in the use of digital stories in the context of corporate training. Ultimately we believe that lifelong learning can be improved with the use of strategies that promote the production of personal audio-visual for those involved in teaching and learning process in organizational context. Keywords: story telling, corporate education, cooperative learning, lifelong learning, teaching methods, audio visual aids. ResumenEn este trabajo se discuten las estrategias de aprendizaje colaborativo basado en el uso de las historias digitales en la formación empresarial y el aprendizaje permanente. El texto comienza con una breve revisión de los fundamentos teóricos y técnicos sobre el uso de las tecnologías digitales en las estrategias de colaboración en el aprendizaje permanente. También vamos a discutir si la formación corporativa se puede mejorar mediante el uso de la experiencia audiovisual individual en el proceso de aprendizaje. También se argumenta que la cuidadosa planificación, programación y producción de historias digitales audiovisuales puede ayudar en la construcción de espacios de aprendizaje colaborativo en el que los adultos se encuentran en el marco de la formación profesional permanente. El análisis concluye con el énfasis en la necesidad de experimentar el rendimiento de enrutamiento de las historias digitales en el contexto de la formación corporativa, siguiendo los niveles de referencia mencionados aquí, así

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This work is based on a Brazilian project that aims to promote the use of a semi‐quantitative tool with students (11 ‐ 18 years old) in topics about local environmental problems. The paper presents the VISQ program, a network to analyse models, a set of tasks and three examples of models made by students. Results suggest that the VISQ program is suitable for use in Environmental Education as while working with the proposed tasks students thought at a system level becoming aware of some local environmental issues.

Abstract-Learning Management Systems (LMS) provide minimal support for educational use of virtual worlds.Integration efforts assume the educators are inside the virtual world, providing hooks to services in the external LMS, to setup and manage virtual world activities. We present the inverse approach, enabling educators to setup and manage virtual world activities using the traditional LMS Web interface as an integral part of the overall educational activities of a course. In our approach, the LMS enables the teacher/trainer to setup, control, track, and store virtual world activities and its elements. It is the result of a joint effort by academic and corporate teams, implemented in the Formare LMS for OpenSimulator and Second Life Grid virtual world platforms. We explain how the Multis architecture can be used for integration, with concrete cases, an approach that can be implemented in other LMS and virtual world platforms, to overcome the limitations of existing systems for organizational management of e-learning activities.

Abstract-This work further clarifies how the MULTIS architecture can be used for integration of virtual worlds in Learning Management Systems (LMS) for organizational management of e-learning activities, as an extension to a previous work published in the proceedings of VEAI 2016. Current LMS provide minimal support for educational use in an organizational context, and other integration efforts assume educators are inside the virtual world, accessing the LMS as an external service. Our approach enables educators to setup and manage virtual world activities from within the traditional LMS Web interface as an integral part of the overall educational activities of a course. The MULTIS architecture foresees several alternative communication channels between LMS and virtual worlds, including the spooling of automated clients or "bots", and the flexibility to inject code if necessary and possible. In this work, we detail the application of this architecture and its approach in several sample scenarios, based on previous analysis of integration requirements. It is the result of a joint effort by academic and corporate teams, implemented and tested in the Formare LMS for OpenSimulator and Second Life Grid virtual world platforms.