Controlling and Assisting Activities in Social Virtual Worlds

Since its beginning, web technology has advanced from a text-based to a visual-based interaction. This evolution has been facilitated by both high speed internet connections and PC's graphical power. Virtual world (VW) technology began as standalone applications (e.g.. virtual simulations) but soon evolved into web-based applications. Nowadays, home users for entertainment and wide-spread enterprises or institutions for business can exploit virtual worlds to develop remote activities between friends, employees, clients, teachers or students (Sherman, 2002). Then, virtual worlds have clear applications in e-governance, elearning and e-commerce, and therefore it is mandatory to study mechanisms ensuring the assistance and the control of activities taking place in these applications..

The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change

This report aims to identify, understand and visualise major changes to learning in the future. It developed a descriptive vision of the future, based on existing trends and drivers, and a normative vision outlining how future learning opportunities should be developed to contribute to social cohesion, socio-economic inclusion and economic growth. The overall vision is that personalisation, collaboration and informalisation (informal learning) are at the core of learning in the future. These terms are not new in education and training but will have to become the central guiding principle for organising learning and teaching in the future. The central learning paradigm is thereby characterised by lifelong and life-wide learning, shaped by the ubiquity of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). To reach the goals of personalised, collaborative and informalised learning, holistic changes need to be made (curricula, pedagogies, assessment, leadership, teacher training, etc.) and mechanisms need to be put in place which make flexible and targeted lifelong learning a reality and support the recognition of informally acquired skills.JRC.J.4-Information Societ

Microworld Writing: Making Spaces for Collaboration, Construction, Creativity, and Community in the Composition Classroom

In order to create a 21st century pedagogy of learning experiences that inspire the engaged, constructive, dynamic, and empowering modes of work we see in online creative communities, we need to focus on the platforms, the environments, the microworlds that host, hold, and constitute the work. A good platform can build connections between users, allowing for the creation of a community, giving creative work an engaged and active audience. These platforms will work together to build networks of rhetorical/creative possibilities, wherein students can learn to cultivate their voices, skills, and knowledge bases as they engage across platforms and genres. I call on others to make, mod, or hack other new platforms. In applying this argument to my subject, teaching writing in a college composition class, I describe Microworld Writing as a genre that combines literary language practice with creativity, performativity, play, game mechanics, and coding. The MOO can be an example of one of these platforms and of microworld writing, in that it allows for creativity, user agency, and programmability, if it can be updated to have the needed features (virtual world, community, accessibility, narrativity, compatibility and exportability). I offer the concept of this MOO-IF as inspiration for a collaborative, community-oriented Interactive Fiction platform, and encourage people to extend, find, and build their own platforms. Until then and in addition, students can be brought into Microworld Writing in the composition classroom through interactive-fiction platforms, as part of an ecology of genre experimentation and platform exercise

Museums as disseminators of niche knowledge: Universality in accessibility for all

Accessibility has faced several challenges within audiovisual translation Studies and gained great opportunities for its establishment as a methodologically and theoretically well-founded discipline. Initially conceived as a set of services and practices that provides access to audiovisual media content for persons with sensory impairment, today accessibility can be viewed as a concept involving more and more universality thanks to its contribution to the dissemination of audiovisual products on the topic of marginalisation. Against this theoretical backdrop, accessibility is scrutinised from the perspective of aesthetics of migration and minorities within the field of the visual arts in museum settings. These aesthetic narrative forms act as modalities that encourage the diffusion of ‘niche’ knowledge, where processes of translation and interpretation provide access to all knowledge as counter discourse. Within this framework, the ways in which language is used can be considered the beginning of a type of local grammar in English as lingua franca for interlingual translation and subtitling, both of which ensure access to knowledge for all citizens as a human rights principle and regardless of cultural and social differences. Accessibility is thus gaining momentum as an agent for the democratisation and transparency of information against media discourse distortions and oversimplifications

What is the Avatar? Fiction and Embodiment in Avatar-Based Singleplayer Computer Games: Revised and Commented Edition

What are the characteristic features of avatar-based singleplayer videogames, from Super Mario Bros. to Grand Theft Auto? The author examines this question with a particular focus on issues of fictionality and realism, and their relation to cinema and Virtual Reality. Through close-up analysis and philosophical discussion, the author argues that avatar-based gaming is a distinctive and dominant form of virtual self-embodiment in digital culture. This book is a revised edition of Rune Klevjer's pioneering work from 2007, featuring a new introduction by the author and afterword by Stephan Günzel, Jörg Sternagel, and Dieter Mersch