Full Screen

	This paper presents WebQuest, a system combining the WWW with the notion of an interactive quest game. Instead of just creating their own homepages, that may be interesting to other students for only social reasons, students turn into authors of their own interactive quest games. They set up complex worlds containing interesting landscapes and tricky obstacles linked to real websites. Players of the game answer questions to acquire important objects needed to solve the quest.
	WebQuest is a system combining the WWW with the notion of an interactive quest game. Instead of just creating their own homepages, which may be of interest to other students for purely social reasons, students turn into authors of their own interactive quest games. They set up complex worlds containing interesting landscapes and tricky obstacles linked to real websites. Players of the game answer questions to acquire important objects needed to solve the quest.
	Social accounts of learning and human knowledge have led to attempts to reorganize schools as learning communities. This paper examines the utility of the World Wide Web for aiding in the construction of school-based and work-based learning communities. An ordered list of interactions is provided to characterize the depth of students' entry into new learning communities. Current offerings on the WWW are then surveyed in terms of these categories. Finally, proposals are advanced for enhancing the architecture of the WWW to facilitate its use for the creation and operation of learning communities.
	The need to model users' dynamic behaviour in CSCW systems arises in many contexts. This study developed a probabilistic model of the usage of an awareness-maintaining mechanism in a collaborative hypertext database system. Longitudinal time series data of user-database interaction were studied. The study found that the recurring patterns in the occurrences of the awareness-seeking event were related to several contextual aspects of the CSCW system studied. The context-behaviour relationship is captured by a Poisson regression model. The analytical method can be applied to the study of situated actions in other CSCW systems.
	The paper describes the implementation of a virtual environment to support the training of engineers in Panels of Experts (POE), a vehicle for gathering customer data. The environment, which is implemented using multi-user domain (MUD) technology, simulates a hotel conference facility, the context in which POEs generally take place. Within the environment, simulated customer data gathering activities support training through practice. The paper describes the environment, discusses some issues of communication and interaction raised by the technology, and relays the experiences of new users within this environment.

JCMC inquiries