Social Awareness Mechanisms in Educational CVEs: Towards a New Characterization Framework

3D Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) have promising potential for supporting socializing and learning in a university context because of their capability to provide a social arena where students and teachers can meet overcoming the barriers of the physical world [10]. In addition, the virtual space provides a dynamic and flexible environment where learners, especially distributed ones, can have and share experiences, forming the environment according to their needs. Therefore, we suggest using 3D CVEs for supporting (SA), which, we believe, can be beneficial for learning and socializing among university students (as learning is essentially a social activity). We define SA as awareness of the social situation in a group or community in a shared environment, including knowledge on learners’ resources, activities and social network. Short-term SA is awareness of a social situation at a certain moment. Long-term SA is awareness of the social situation in general.