This chapter presents and discusses different cognitive and socio-cognitive mechanisms that appear in the interaction between subject-avatars, and between subject-avatars and the 3D Digital Virtual World, constructed in the Metaverses, based on the results from the Digital Education Research Group GPe-dU UNISINOS/CNPq. In these contexts, the authors analyze how perception and representation occurs, the acts of doing, understanding, and raising awareness, and finally, enabling collaboration and cooperation in individual and social interaction with Metaverses. As the main conclusion, the experience built in the subjects' living and collaborating, represented by their avatars, and with MDV3D, favors learning processes, regarding the technical and didactic-pedagogic ownership of metaverse technology, as well as the execution of awareness processes about how learning occurs in these contexts.
TopHuman Congnition
“Mom, I beat the book!”this is the way Emanuele, five years old, expressed her joy in having finished reading her first book in its physical form (paper).This child, long before learning to read and write, used digital games, both on consoles and computers (laptops).In digital games, when players finish all levels of a game, doing all the steps and challenges, they use the expression “beat” in the gamers language. To Emanuele the fact she had finished reading all the pages of the book, completing all the steps, meant to “beat” the book. Thus, it is possible to understand a language that comes from an experience in digital media used to mean another experiment in an analog medium. Thus, a child who interacts from a very early age (about one or two years old) with different digital technologies does not realize the world without these technologies, and therefore sees no need to establish a separation between what is analog and what is digital as they are intertwined.
Schlemmer and Lopes (2012), emphasize that digital technologies, for this generation, represent a place where you can go, be, enter. “Can I go on the computer?”, “Mom, I'm on the Internet, I'm on Minecraft1”, “Mom, can you come into my house? I’ll have a party and all my friends will be here.” Thinking about these events it is possible to understand that digital technologies represent a place (where you go or where you are) sometimes territories of virtual digital nature where you can immerse, act, interact, build, communicate and socialize. In these digital territories, the notion of belonging has changed, since it is no longer about continuous and contiguous spaces or geographic territories, but of nomadism and transnationalities. Thus, there is deletion of borders, whose “e-living” relations are constituted from a hybridity of thoughts, ideas, languages, knowledge and practices.