Building distributed virtual environments to support collaborative work
VRST '98 Proceedings of the ACM symposium on Virtual reality software and technology
Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Networked virtual environments: design and implementation
Networked virtual environments: design and implementation
Modeling collaboration using shared objects
GROUP '99 Proceedings of the international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work
A Descriptive Framework of Workspace Awareness for Real-Time Groupware
Computer Supported Cooperative Work
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e-Learning is gaining increasing momentum as a teaching approach, both within universities and in general within funded courses, in Italy and abroad. Enterprise-wide e-Learning, used in companies and associations, is also perceived as a key instrument to train human resources reducing costs. However, especially in the range of funded courses directed to a lesser educated audience in respect to undergraduates, post-docs, or highly-motivated employees within an enterprise, sustaining the trainee's attention for e-Learning courses of long duration may be a problem, reducing the effectiveness and the benefits of the e-Learning approach. In this paper, we advocate the necessity to intermingle the present e-Learning approach, mainly based on bi-dimensional multimedia presentation of the contents with new types of e-Learning, based on the exploitation of 3D representation, thus adding one dimension to the current way of thinking e-Learning. The paper will show our early experiments on the subject, and how we used 3D and networking technologies to leverage collaboration between students that are working on the same e-Learning modules in different places, thus creating blended, distributed e-Learning activities, and extending the current concept of e-Learning. After having commented the results we obtained within two of our main experiments, we elaborate on a new framework which would support better this new e-Learning paradigm, we describe its architectural structure, and the directions of our future work.