D 1 . 1 . 5 . 3 : Approaches to Educational

This report describes research activities in respect to a specific form of educational cooperative computing: the collaboratory. Since this term was minted by William Wulf, to serve as an indication for virtual co-operative research groups and educational workgroups, it has drawn considerable attention. Especially in the framework of higher education and national scale research programs, developments in respect to Internet 2 in the U. S. stress this concept. Within the setting of the MESH project and hosted within the MESH SURFnet education and co-operation pilots, research, design, and development work has been carried out in order to be able to clarify the options and possibilities for an educational collaboratory involving initially the University of Twente and the Technical University Delft. Collaboratories are domain dependent. The collaboratory activities reported upon are situated in the field of educational software design and development. Within the pilots, researchers, teachers, and students from both universities were involved in co-operative study and system design. Work and study involved several (partially interlinked) software environments, such as the MESH platform, CLS (Collaborative Learning System), VRML (Virtual Reality software), and the SERVE environment (a Virtual Reality-based study environment). The report describes issues that have been studied, prototypes that have been developed, and some of the results that have been obtained. How to interface collaborative study groups in virtual reality environments is in this the focus of our attention.