Online Behavior of the Social Media Student

A survey of 100 undergraduates and 30 post-secondary faculty members was conducted in order to examine the current attitudes and perceptions of both groups toward the integration of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter in education. Results indicate that both parties are willing to incorporate these social media sites into academics but caution that digital identities are not necessarily representative of face-to-face behavior, thus suggesting the need for an awareness of social presence for online interaction between students and faculty. Social cognitive theories are applied to the use of social media as an instructional tool and a set of best practices for implementing social media in academics is proposed.

More than just Logging In

This case study chronicles co-curricular activities held in the virtual world Second Life. The event activities included standard content delivery vehicles and those involving movement and presence. Several international content experts were featured and allowed students to meet and discuss ideas on a common ground with these experts. When developing these events, the researchers wondered, could an immersive learning environment be provide a deeper level of engagement? Was it possible to have students do more than just logging in? During the events, the students discovered a whole new way of learning. Chief among their discoveries was the realization that in these virtual world educational events, students, scholars, and faculty can all be mentors as well as learners. In virtual worlds, the expert-on-a-dais model of teaching is rapidly replaced by a matrix of discussion, collaboration, and movement that quickly generates a pool of ideas and knowledge.

Gaming as a Woman

This chapter reports the findings of two surveys taken by players of the video game Rock Band. The purpose of the surveys was to determine what differences, if any, exist between the ways that males and females learn to play the game, are motivated to improve, interact with other players both online and in real life, and interact with other players in online communities for the game. This study suggests that while females do not appear to learn to play this game much differently from males, they are motivated differently and interact with other players differently, and ultimately they have a harder time than males finding a place in the affinity groups that exist for the game, and these findings provide starting points for teachers who intend to use video games and virtual worlds for educational purposes in guarding against creating a “gender gap” between males and females.

Cross-Reality Math Visualization

Traditionally, the numeric symbols are introduced along with the alphabet. Dream Realizations believes that the introduction of numeric symbols is premature and prevents children from seeing the patterns that various numbers make. Research on subitizing substantiates the natural ability of the human eye to instantly “see” quantities. The early introduction of symbol and process prevents seeing the beautiful metapatterns of polynomials, which are easily recognized when mixed quantities are represented in different base systems: subQuanned. The authors have researched current math practices, math in virtual worlds, number sense, and subitizing to fortify the direction of their efforts. Their journey progresses from the physical (paper and cubes) to the virtual (online flash-based programming) to the immersive (3D in Second Life). This natural progression and ultimate visualization of quantity and metapattern lie in the immersive world. Individuals at all stages of learning can finally see and understand math from a very different vantage point.

Instructional Design Meets Politeness Issues in Virtual Worlds

Attempts at incorporating emerging and innovative instructional technology, like virtual worlds, into educational settings requires efforts to understand new discourse patterns that may develop and bring in a learner-centered instructional design that takes the affordances and constraints of the new technology into consideration. These efforts can contribute to an effective and positive learning experience for learners. Drawing upon observations of different types of learning activities held in Second Life, an increasingly popular virtual world, this chapter aims at initiating a discussion interweaving the concerns for politeness, reflecting learners’ psychological needs during their interactions with fellow learners and technology, with considerations of instructional design in a virtual world as a new learning context. Such a discussion has the potential of more effectively exploiting what new immersive environments can offer for learning.

Digital Structures and the Future of Online Leadership

This chapter discusses findings from a study that looked at organizational leadership in the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft® in an attempt to inform the future of leadership in schools and other online and blended learning organizations. After offering a general orientation to the game world and the original study, this chapter delineates the ways in which studying virtual worlds of this sort can and cannot inform theory and practice of instructional leadership. It then examines the organizational leadership and learning cycle that emerged in the original study. Finally, it considers implications from the research for instructional and organizational leadership in a data rich environment.

Conversational Metabots for Educational Applications in Virtual Worlds

Education is one of the most interesting applications of virtual worlds, as their flexibility can be exploited in order to create heterogeneous groups from all over the world who can collaborate synchronously in different virtual spaces. Additionally, they can create opportunities to offer educative contents with the advantages of online courses, but also the feel of “presence” that only virtual worlds can provide. However, the interaction in social virtual worlds usually takes place in text mode, given that usually only textual and chat facilities are provided to communicate with avatars and bots. This makes it difficult for people without enough technical knowledge, or with visual or motor disabilities, to interact with such systems. To solve this problem, the authors propose a methodology for building bots as intelligent embodied conversational agents that can communicate with the users through oral as well as visual modalities.

Visual Learning in the Virtual World

Humans rely heavily on their sense of vision and learn from didactic images within their environments. For this reason, in traditional educational environments, educators care about visual representation. However, as today’s technology brings images to wider audiences with diverse cultural backgrounds in the virtual world global community, the process of automatic cognition helps people build new knowledge based on prior regional experience. Therefore, when educators employ a technology like Second Life to deliver education, the whole virtual world can be seen as a school. Although most research participants agreed that the imagery in Second Life is fictional, the data shows that users do learn from imagery in the virtual world.

Learn in Your Avatar

A Malaysian Smart School document has vividly described components that will make up future classrooms in 2020. Nonetheless, such components can currently be implemented using Virtual Worlds (VW), specifically Multi-User Virtual Environment (MUVE). Integrating virtual worlds effectively in teaching and learning can be very daunting, especially when the tool requires a steep learning curve on the part of the teacher. This chapter aims to describe a teacher’s journey of integrating Virtual Worlds or MUVEs in her teaching and learning, both for adult learners and Malaysian secondary school. The technology integration is based on continuous self-reflection of TPACK (Technological, Pedagogical and Content Knowledge) framework. The description will include the strategies used in learning to learn; learning to teach in virtual worlds; and also lessons learned during the learning process of using the technology.

A MUVEing Success

The chapter will explain the role of scenario-based MUVES and educational games in science education and will present both the benefits for students and the challenges of using these forms of technology in a classroom setting. This chapter presents the findings of two case studies on the use of a scenario-based Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVE) in science education. The chapter will consider strategies for designing professional development programs for teachers and pre-service teachers to enhance both the teachers’ skills and their confidence in using and designing classroom activities suitable for MUVEs and educational games in science inquiry learning.