This paper presents Learning@Europe, an educational service, supported by VR, that has involved in year 2004-2005 more than 1,000 students from 6 different European countries. L@E has fostered the creation/reinforcement of three different kinds of communities: (1) the classroom community (reinforcing the bonds among students, and between students and their teachers), (2) communities among different schools competing together through 3D environments, (3) a global community (roughly involving 20% of the total) of all the teachers and students. A similar situation was created, at regional level, in the Italian Region of Lombardy, involving nearly 800 individuals. Given that the behaviours of the different communities in the two projects were very similar, it seems to be arguable that a pattern of community building through virtual environments has been detected. The important facts (detected by surveys of teachers and students, inspection, direct observation, qualitative data analysis) about these communities are: (1) the depth of the pedagogical impact, in terms of increased knowledge (about history and related subjects), skills (use of functional English, use of ICT in learning/teaching processes, group work) and attitudes (more curiosity towards history, increased motivation in school activities, improved respect and interest for other cultures).(2) The engagement of all the participants, with very high level of customer satisfaction. (3) The depth of the social impact, reinforcing existing relationships (within the same class) and creating new ones. The key feature of this success apparently lies in the sense of ''social virtual presence'', that is, a feeling of being engaged in a virtual situation, so strong that the technological means become ''transparent'' and the social situation (meant at different levels and for different time frames) becomes ''the king''. The paper will present the project, its main features and its outcomes, eventually discussing the role of social virtual presence into building effective and lively communities.

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How can we include entertainment into an ITC-based educational experience? Edutainment is the blending of education and entertainment; it is about engaging, enjoyable experiences providing a learning value. Understanding better how to make a pedagogical intervention engaging, to stimulate significant effort and reasoning from all kinds of students, could generate a positive impact on education. We analyze the entertaining features in the design of Learning@Europe (www.learningateurope.net), an edutainment experience on European history for high-school students, based on a shared 3D virtual world. L@E has involved since 2004 over 6,130 students (aged 14 to 19) from 18 European countries plus USA, with highly rewarding results in terms of engagement and learning.

SEE, Shrine Educational Experience, represents an example of how Internet and multimedia technologies can effectively be exploited to deliver complex scientific and cultural concepts to middle and high school students. SEE (a project by Politecnico di Milano and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem) is based on a shared online 3-D environment, where students from four possibly different countries meet together to learn, discuss and play, visiting the virtual Israel Museum with a guide. The educational experience combines online engagement and cooperation to “traditional” off-line learning activities, spread across six weeks. Data from an extensive two-year-long evaluation of the project, involving over 1,400 participants from Europe and Israel, prove the educational effectiveness of this innovative edutainment format.

Online 3D Shared Spaces (3DSSs) can be regarded as a frontier of the Web 2.0, where users as participants contribute to create a meaningful, engaging experience. Like other complex web applications, the development and evolution of high-quality 3DSS applications requires methodological support-through models, methods, and principles. Yet, the application of structured, engineered approaches to this domain is largely unexplored. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to bridging Web Engineering to the 3DSS world by means of design patterns. We present five patterns that focus on two factors deemed necessary for effective experiences in a 3DSS: Presence (i.e. the feeling of "being there", typical of "virtual worlds") and Long-Term Engagement (typical of successful Web 2.0 communities). The patterns presented in the paper distil our largescale experiences with 3DSSs (that have involved so far over 9,000 youngsters from 3 continents) and are discussed in the light of existing literature.

This chapter is about how to make an effective use of MUVEs (Multi-Users Virtual Environments) in\ud formal education. It draws on the authors’ experience with four different programs deployed since 2002\ud involving, so far, more than 9,000 students from 18 European countries including Israel and the USA. The\ud chapter is intended as a set of “lessons learned” on all of the relevant aspects of this kind of enterprise,\ud from design to implementation and actual deployment. It is therefore meant as a short “users” guide\ud for building effective and engaging edutainment experiences in virtual worlds

How does visual communication in multi-user educational 3D environments support interaction and collaboration?To what extent does it affect learning? How can it be improved? We investigate the role of visual communication in 3D virtual reality basing on our 8-years experience of VR-based educational projects, tested with good results by thousands of users from 17 countries. We identify 3 key aspects strongly related to the visual nature of VR, contributing to the success of collaborative experiences: virtual presence, proxemic semiotics, and peripheral awareness.

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