THE STATE CHART METAPHOR FOR THE DESIGN OF COLLABORATIVE VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS

Nowadays there are an increasing evolution of technological solutions providing the virtual collaboration among people geographically distributed to obtain some common goals. At the same time virtual collaborative environments are often used for learning purposes because increase the interaction among users. These systems are usually developed in a custom way according to the specific requirements without any kind of standardization in terms of definition of collaboration among involved users. Although the literature shows attempts to formally express learning processes through a standard language, there are not proposals that combine e-learning languages with typical concepts of 3D collaborative experiences. This paper propose a notation model able to design collaboration for e-learning virtual environments. In this paper we present also the architecture of a tool that helps the designer in the use of the notation model here proposed.