Presenter: Philippe Bonfils, Université du Sud Toulon, Var, France

E-learning is now common in graduate education. Despite the fact new technologies are more and more sophisticated, one of the major problem related to those pedagogical approaches is still the distance between actors. This paper concerns the prevalence of virtual environments, suchs as online digital worlds in the daily life of the new generation. We guess that the number of powerful creative computer mediated communication systems like “3D persistents worlds” offer new perspectives regarding social interactions. We propose to look at the impact of those worlds in an e-learning context, and particularly regarding the specificities of a new way of “being together distant”. In the current study, we illustrate this by an analysis of students groups using “Second Life” world in a collaborative approach. We examine primary what we call the insourcing process of the artefact. We consider this process as crucial for every user to be able to interact with the others. We focus then on the avatar creation and his plasticity process. We finally analyse some variables of the activity of the groups during distant meeting. In our specific context we show relations between the insourcing process, self-representations and behavior in the groups during meetings.

Keywords :
E-learning, Online digital world, persitents worlds, avatars, social interactions.