Construction Of Virtual Learning Community Platform Based On Web3D

With the rapid development of network technology and the popularity of Internet, virtual learning communities emerged as the times require. As one important way of informal learning, they offer new ways for people to communicate, work, learn something and live, thus meeting people's demands of learning on Internet in information era.Currently, Virtual Learning Community has two types:one is traditional platform, where users employ graphs and texts to communicate and share with each other. The other is scene support platform, which usually provides users with community roaming. However, the traditional platform lacks lifelike situation experience and its information presentation is boring, which may leads to athymia and that students tend to feel tired. Besides, the scene support platform is not able to be accessed fluently because of large scene rendering. Thus we combine web3D technologies and popular elements (Blog, Tag, Photo, Personal Space, etc.) in the era of web2.0 to construct a Web3d-based Virtual Community Platform (Web3D-VCP) for informal learning, where Learners with common interests can join to communicate, collaborate, share, and discuss their experience and knowledge with each other anytime and anywhere. It's beneficial to improve learners' insights in knowledge and spirit and enhance their efficiency of informal learning. Moreover, it conforms to the life-long learning idea in knowledge age.Some methods like literature research, software engineering, survey research, and so on, are applied to complete the following job.First of all, through literature analysis, relevant background, its significance and research status are described, and the concepts of Web3D, Web2.0, informal learning, virtual learning communities and theoretical basis such as constructivism, situated learning, distributed cognition theory, are elaborated.Secondly, in light of the theory base, the functional requirements, roles requirements, and system architecture of Web3D-VCP are analyzed, and its functional modules and database are designed. According to the development process of software engineering, the functional modules are realized basing on the design, with Web3D technologies and the popular elements in the era of Web2.0 combined and development tools including VS2005, SQL2005, and 3dsMax applied. The functional modules include Friends Dynamic, Circles, Tag and Interactive Zones, all of which reflect the "user participation" theme of Web2.0. Besides, Web3D function modules, such as three-dimensional exhibition, hall auditorium and personal exhibition full of immersion and situational traits, are included, too.Again, as a common virtual learning platform, Web3D-VCP is suitable for wide area use including school education and social education. On the Background of "the Research on Web-based Teacher Training and Resource Construction in Zhejiang" project, the training of educational technology ability is selected as a community subject and a trial case called " Community of Educational Technology Ability Training" is constructed. Finally a questionnaire is designed to investigate the use effect.Finally, some innovations and problems in this study are summarized, and the follow-up work emphasis and direction are stated.