Data In Depth: Web 3 D Technologies Provide New Approaches To The Presentation Of Course Content

For nearly two decades, the Web has provided the classroom with vast, ever-expanding volumes of browser-accessible information. As the web has evolved so too has our desire to become more involved with the process of content-creation and content-sharing. Now new web-based technologies look to provide smarter, more meaningful content and present that content with a new level of depth and interactivity. No longer are faculty and students browsing for information that is largely static; instead, these users are interacting through their threedimensional (3-D) proxies (their avatars) and are querying applications (semantic web agents) soliciting them to collect, filter, verify, correlate, and present answers to their queries. Yet, all of this capability is not without potential challenges.