Abstract 
                           for the 
                 Evaluation of the Production EVE  
                           and the
                  Evaluation of Aspects of EVE


In the Fall term of 1993, Ben Shneiderman of the University of Maryland 
presented a course titled "Virtual Reality, Telepresence, and Beyond."  
The course was offered to students at the University of Maryland and to 
remote students in 12 states across the United States.  The remote 
students viewed the class through live video feeds and via satellite 
with a 2-5 day tape delay through National Technological University.  
The first project for the course was called EVE which stands for 
Encyclopedia of Virtual Environments.                    

EVE is a series of short articles authored by members of the class.  
Originally, EVE articles were envisioned to be written by pairs of
students taking the class from different locations.  Real world 
difficulties such as students dropping the course and getting pairs of 
authors at different locations to sign up for each EVE topic forced the
articles to be written by both single authors and by co-located pairs of
authors as well as pairs of authors at diffenent locations.

The topic of this paper is to evaluate the EVE class project from two 
perspectives.  The first is in the evaluation of the production of EVE 
articles.  This will be examined as a case study in Computer Supported 
Collaborative Work (CSCW).  (This term also appears as Computer 
Supported Cooperative Work.) 

The second is the evaluation of EVE itself as an encyclopedia for 
users to extract information in a quick and usable way.  A variety of
users completed a survey to evaluate the aspects of EVE as a tool.
Recommendations for improvements to the EVE class project are then 
given based on the findings.

Both members of this project are remote students living in Seattle, 
Washington and Colorado Springs, Colorado.