Data in Depth: Web 3-D Technologies Provide New Approaches to the Presentation of Course Content

Abstract

For nearly two decades, the Web has provided the

classroom with vast, ever-expanding volumes of browseraccessible

information. As the web has evolved so too has

our desire to become more involved with the process of

content-creation and content-sharing. Now new web-based

technologies look to provide smarter, more meaningful

content and present that content with a new level of depth

and interactivity. No longer are faculty and students

browsing for information that is largely static; instead, these

users are interacting through their three-dimensional (3-D)

proxies (their avatars) and are querying applications

(semantic web agents) soliciting them to collect, filter, verify,

correlate, and present answers to their queries. Yet, all of

this capability is not without potential challenges.

There is an evolving need for faculty and students to find

and build out new structure in their 3-D virtual

surroundings that visually enables their content, making it

more palatable to the user while presenting it in a 3-D

format verses the typical 2-D format that has been the

mainstay for the past two decades. With the maturation of

virtual world (3-D Web) and semantic web technologies, the

web-based content available in the classroom increases

exponentially and takes on a new look. Following a brief

overview of these two technologies and their overall impact

in the classroom, this article presents several practical

approaches for presenting course content in 3-D Web

environments based on recent implementation efforts. In-

World lectures and lab assignments, project team briefing

sessions, student mentoring activities, and open conference

forums are just a few of the areas discussed. Further

discussions also focus on setup and future evaluation studies

planned in the near-term to further evaluate course content

presentation techniques.