Designing a Multipurpose Virtual Laboratory to Support Communities of Practice in Physics

This paper reports our recent work within the EuroTeV project, aimed at designing a Multipurpose Virtual Laboratory (MVL) to support collaboration among several European institutes, working in the area of physics research. Specifically, we discuss the type of support MVL can provrde to knowledge creation and sharing within its community of users. We also highlight how the digital resources available in this environment might be reused by virtual communities of learners, thus helping to bridge the gap between the worlds of eScience work and education.