A Virtual Environment to Share Knowledge: a Visualisation Design to Support Collaborative Learning

Many developments were introduced for presenting information using digital visualisation techniques, including 3D interactive visualisations and virtual environments. Additionally, the way a group of people shares information about the meanings of concepts can be considered as an important issue for knowledge sharing. However, visualisation potential for representing and exploring knowledge has not yet been totally explored. This work proposes a general structure for knowledge sharing to represent knowledge that allows a group of users to share concept meanings and their relations, and to organise information about a specific knowledge context. The development and evaluation of a prototype is presented. An empirical study conducted suggests that users were able to specify structures for knowledge sharing, using the prototype to explore and enhance the structure. The prototype can also be used as tool for collaborative learning. The work offers a structured approach to how 3D visual representations, as virtual environment setting, can be used to support collaboration. It also present how to evaluate them and reports the algorithms used to the prototype visual rendering process.