Supporting situated learning for virtual communities of practice: representation and management of situated knowledge

This paper presents an approach to develop a Web-based, multiuser, 3D simulation learning environment supporting virtual communities of practice. This approach emphasizes helping geographically distributed learners to acquire and construct knowledge by doing shared \´\´authentic" activities, to interact with each other as community members, and to perform informal, unstructured, spontaneous, and situation-oriented learning. This paper focuses on description of representation and management of situated knowledge and of support for situated instruction.