Abstract

Abstract
The paper presents an proposal model for assessing the quality of educational collaborative virtual environments. This model is based on the Quantitative Evaluation framework developed by Escudeiro in 2008 and it consists in five phases. The purpose is to establish a theoretical model that highlights a number of relevant set of requirements in relation to the quality in educational collaborative virtual environments in order to facilitate the assessment of educational collaborative virtual environments. It is intended to apply the model during the lifecycle of product development and the selection of environment to support the learning/teaching process.

Abstract
With the goal of lessening barriers to the learning of advanced programming techniques, we put into place a trial which required students to get involved with online communities of programmers. Using a course assignment on software architecture styles, students had study a problem, find basis for a tentative approach, and discuss it online with programmers. The expectation was that students would find motivation for their studies from both the contact with communities of programmers, and from having to study and reflect upon their problem well enough to be able to draw the interest of members of those communities. We present the strategy we used, the developments and outcomes, and ideas for further application of this approach. © 2012 IEEE.

Abstract
This paper presents two contributions: (i) a system architecture capable of staging platform-independent choreographies within different virtual worlds, and (ii) an ontology-based solution for capturing and representing multi-user choreographies with reduced time/effort. We argue that choreographies for virtual worlds should be clearly separated from the technical characteristics of their execution in virtual world technological platforms. Due to the heterogeneity of the various virtual worlds and their domain requirements, we propose exploiting the modularity, generality, and granularity dimensions of ontologies to simplify and empower the choreography modeling capabilities. Instead of a unique ontology, several ontologies with different levels of generality and granularity can be progressively combined to support the modeling requirements of a given choreography. Because these ontologies are aligned with the ontology of each specific virtual world platform, the mapping and transformation between the core ontology is simplified and automated, thus reducing the development and time-to-market.

Abstract
Entrepreneurship is widely recognized as one of the basic skills to be acquired through a life-long learning. The European Union, under the guidance of the Oslo Agenda, promotes several initiatives to develop entrepreneurship culture in Europe. Education can make a significant contribution to entrepreneurship, encouraging the development of entrepreneurial attitudes and skills in young people. Serious Games are presently recognised as having an important role and potential in education and social networks emerged in the last years as the platform preferred by many, especially young people, to socialize, play games and even learn. This paper presents the PLAYER project, in which a game was developed and implemented as a Facebook application, to enable learning entrepreneurial skills progressively, by guiding users to develop a business idea in the form of a business plan.

Abstract
The need for computer supported collaboration has grown over the last years and made collaboration an important factor within organizations. This trend has resulted in the development of a variety of tools and technologies to support he various forms of collaboration. Many collaborative processes, e.g. strategy building, scenario analysis, root cause analysis and requirements engineering, requires various collaboration support tools. Within these synchronous collaborative applications to create, evaluate, elaborate, discuss, and revise graphical models, e.g. data flow, fishbone and brainstorming diagrams, play an important role. Currently, the necessary tools are not integrated and flexible enough to support such processes. In this paper, we present a case study done to a synchronous collaborative brainstorming diagram editor - CLSD that is integrated in a flexible group support system. Our approach goes beyond the current state of the art as we can be seamlessly integrated with other collaboration support tools such as text-based brainstorming or voting.