Chapter Introduction | Web Resources | Assignment Comments | Teaching Materials

What this assignment is asking you to do is fairly straightforward: an evaluation of a collaborative virtual environment, from your perspective as a participant. As with the assignment in Chapter 1, the aim is for you to develop and use a wider set of concepts to discuss your experience, that go beyond saying, 'it was fun' or 'it was terrible because no-one talked to me'. It also enables you to structure your evaluation in terms of social aspects, specific interaction design issues relating to those aspects and design implications based on them. It is important to see the connections between these three aspects, and not to answer them as separate sections. The evaluation should also enable you to focus more deeply on some of the pertinent 'social' issues, that might be overlooked, if you were doing a straightforward usability evaluation.

You should also spend some time thinking about how the mode of interaction has been designed to support new forms of communication. And you should discuss the kind of conceptual model that underlies the CVE. The questions asked in the assignment should help you come up with an extensive account. You may also think of other issues we have not mentioned, which you can include in your answer.