2009 Publications | Publicações de 2009 (III)

Following the previous posts, here's the third part of 2009's papers.

My research team and students had four papers in the first two issues of the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research in 2009 - great!

Morgado, Leonel (2009). Interconnecting virtual worlds, Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, 3 (1), 4-7.

In the position paper above, I make a parallel between the emergence of virtual worlds technology and the emergence of the Web, which I witnessed, and present the argument for a Metaverse of interlinked virtual worlds of varying technologies.

Valério, S.; Pereira, J.; Morgado, L.; Mestre, P.; Serôdio, C.; Carvalho, F. (2009). Second Life Information Desk System using Instant Messaging and Short Messaging Service Technologies. In Rebolledo-Mendez, G.; Liarokapis, F.; Freitas, S. (Eds.) "IEEE First International Conference - Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications, Coventry, UK, 23-24 March 2009", pp. 125-132. Los Alamitos, CA, USA: IEEE Computer Society.

The paper above was the output the first research cooperation on virtual worlds between UTAD and PT Inovação in 2008, the research arm of Portugal Telecom - the PtInworld project. It details a system to use technology developed previously by this team, so that a small company or organization can provide continuous staffing of virtual-world spaces, without actually needing to have a staff member logged into Second Life all the time. This was the idea that led to the HELPMI project, which was developed in 2009, and will be presented this year (2010).

Pereira, A.; Martins, P.; Morgado, L.; Fonseca, B. (2009). A virtual environment study in entrepreneurship education of young children, Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, 1 (2).

Ângela is one of my doctoral students. She took up a huge risk, in deciding to identify the requirements of using a virtual world platform (Activeworlds) in primary schoold to teach entrepreneurship education, and providing & testing technical solutions for them. While doing this, she also had a baby, and still managed to be completing her thesis - no small endeavour! In this paper, she presents the results of field work in primary schools and the technical requirements that were identified.

Esteves, M.; Fonseca, B.; Morgado, L.; Martins, P. (2009). Using Second Life for Problem Based Learning in Computer Science Programming, Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, 1 (2).

This was another part of Micaela's field work, which I already mentioned in the previous post.

Lopes, A.; Pires, B.; Cardoso, M.; Santos, A.; Peixinho, F.; Sequeira, P.; Morgado, L.; Paredes, H.; Foguet, O. (2009). Use of a virtual world system in sports coach education for reproducing team handball movements,Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, 1 (2).

Lopes, António, Pires, Bruno, Cardoso, Márcio, Santos, Arnaldo, Peixinho, Filipe, Sequeira, Pedro & Morgado, Leonel (2009). System for Defining and Reproducing Handball Strategies in Second Life On-Demand for Handball Coaches' Education. In Proceedings of World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications - ED-MEDIA 2009, June 22-26, 2009, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, ISBN 1-880094-73-8, pp. 3954-3961. Chesapeake, VA: AACE.

These two papers are the first outputs of an idea which is now becoming more focused, involving one of my PhD students and two MSc students: the use of Second Life to support the training of handball coaches, presented in Portuguese in 2008, but now coming to fruition. It was first presented in the ED-MEDIA conference (the second paper above) and then detailed and refined in the JVWR. This is now evolving into the cornerstone of our effort to create a data representation for virtual world actions and events, with the cooperation of Nuno Silva from my research centre, GECAD, but that will be the theme for future papers...