A stroll across campus without leaving home

Margarita Ruiz is running late for her meeting with fellow graduate students at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C. Ruiz is enrolled in ASU's master's program in educational media.

She catches up with the students in the plaza and they head for a conference room where they continue a discussion on questions posed by a professor. Later, she stops one of her professors and quizzes him about the internship she's planning. She visits the library to check on recent periodicals. Finally, she chats with two students about their postgraduate plans.

Then she logs off her computer to make supper at her home in Puebla, Mexico.

Ruiz, a private-school teacher in Puebla, is attending ASU's Reich College of Education through a 3-D online world called Applied Education Technology Zone, or AET Zone. Through the Zone, hundreds of students in the college's instructional technology programs communicate, socialize and learn. Many of the students live miles from the actual campus, and there is a growing number from other countries, including Mexico and Finland.

The Zone is built on the Active Worlds 3-D server and tool kit from Activeworlds in Newburyport, Mass. The software, tracing its roots to 1995, uses various techniques to minimize bandwidth. Many students log on, work and interact in the Zone over dial-up connections. The 3-D software runs on a dual-CPU Dell PowerEdge 2850 server, which also hosts the college's main Web site and is part of a compute cluster for redundancy and storage.

A suite of communications tools, including text chat, VoIP, discussion threads and file sharing, and a custom course management system built specifically for the 3-D world round out the Zone's basic functions. The course management application lets students form teams to work collaboratively on research and assignments.

But it's what students and faculty do with these tools as they meet in the 3-D space that makes AET Zone so intriguing.

The need for presence

The Zone is the brainchild of the three faculty members in the College's Department of Leadership and Educational Studies: Stephen Bronack, Richard Riedl and John Tashner. The project launched in 2001 for grad students in the instructional technology program, which looks at how to use computers, software and networks for learning. AET Zone recently won an Innovators Award from Campus Technology, a monthly publication about technology for higher education.

The trio had been exploring distance learning and the Web. "A lot of these Web programs were starting, but they were missing something in our view," Tashner says. "There was no sense of presence. They just seemed to throw out a bunch of information [onto Web pages] and see what stuck. The real guts of interaction, which is the essence of course work, wasn't there."

Three-dimensional interfaces, as many computer gamers have discovered, create presence: a user logs on; adopts an identity and a distinctive icon called an avatar; and can then move around inside a custom-built 3-D world, encountering and interacting with other avatars.