1 Three Uses of the Expression ‘Virtual’ In the two expressions “virtual reality” and “virtual community”, the term “virtual” has different meanings. A virtual reality is a depiction or, more generally speaking, a sensuous representation of reality that allows – mainly by means of interactivity – to experience various features of reality without actually being in contact with the reality depict...

This paper is the first in a series presenting findings from a yearlong mixed-methods study of the University of There (UOT), a player-run distributed learning community within the online graphical 3D world There.com. UOT is both a large-scale collaborative project and a learning environment within a virtual world originally designed as a social play space. The study employed in-world participa...

PURPOSE To determine whether critical thinking in problem-based learning (PBL) group discourse differed according to case modality. METHOD The study was conducted in 2000 in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver. Third-year medical students on their pediatrics clerkship were divided into three groups: face-to-face with a text case, face-to-fac...

This National Science Foundation funded project utilizes graphical multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) as a vehicle to study (1) classroombased situated learning and (2) the ways in which virtual environments may aid the transfer of learning from classroom contexts into real world settings. In the project’s River City curriculum, teams of middle school students are asked to collaboratively ...

This paper looks at the implementation of a new customer value alliance model in e-government. Firstly we review the issues of e-government and the drive towards customer centric organisations in the context of multiple government agencies. A model of e-Government is introduced and examined within the context of a virtual organisation model which can be applied along the customer value chain ac...

Virtual Communities have been studied from a variety of perspectives. Examples range from communities of interest to communities of practice, from gaming to transaction communities. More specifically, community building and community management may be factors of key success in the digital economy and may represent new business models in the digital economy, as well as being new venues of social...

ICT policies instituted over a number of years by the South African government have failed manifestly in establishing cyber communities amongst rural people in South Africa. The authors of this paper argue that for rural South African communities to reap the benefits of ‘cyber citizenship’ and Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) initiatives, it will be necessary f...

Known in the early 1990s by a few specialists in environmental law, the precautionary principle has within a decade established itself as a new general principle of Community law. In particular, Community case law has not only managed to extend the scope of application of the precautionary principle to all policies involving scientific uncertainty, but has also introduced extremely useful clari...

One of the challenges for ubiquitous computing is to design systems that can be both understood by their users and at the same time understand the users themselves. As information and its meaning becomes more associated with the communities that provide and use it, how will it be possible to build effective systems for these users? We have been examining these issues via ethnographic analysis o...