Technical Challenges and Solutions: Creating Virtual Environments for a Health Science Interprofessional Course

Virtual interactive environments such as Second Life are emerging as innovative tools that can support and enhance learning in various educational domains. However, for the educational practitioner new to these environments, developing educational settings and activities in a virtual environment can appear to be technically complex and beyond their area of expertise. This case study describes some of the technical challenges encountered and the solutions derived during the development of a virtual world for the delivery of a health science interprofessional communications course.

From Stages of Development to Inter-Modal Functioning

This paper is not intended to be a deeply meaningful philosophical analysis of theory development nor a detailed historical account of the period involved. It is a personal view as seen by a practitioner and researcher during a period of several decades (1950s-1990). From this perspective, the period divides itself nicely into three distinct stages. Firstly, between the mid 1950s and the early 1970% practitioners were trying to describe Piaget's insights in classroom terms (Collis, 1969,1971; Peel, 1960,1971). This period was followed by attempts to explain the Piagetian stage phenomena most often in terms associated with information processing concepts (Case, 1972; Pascual-Leone, 1970). This latter work continued through the 1970s and in to the 1980s and sparked off a period that saw the efforts of the critical reviewers of Piagetian concepts redoubled. These reviews led to more recent expositions which have Piagetian heritage but subscribe to only a few of the original constructs. As an educational practitioner during the whole of the time under consideration, the writer's observations are biased towards'that context.