Existing literature regarding social communication outcomes of interventions in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) depends upon human raters, with limited generalizability to real world settings. Technological innovation, particularly virtual reality (VR) and collaborative virtual environments (CVE), could offer a replicable, low cost measurement…

In this paper I argue that the technologizing of most things in our daily lives, from work and education to finance and leisure, can be seen to promote a loss of the tangible and a rootlessness for human societies, causing a disorientation in the knowledge and beliefs acquired over millennia. Arendt's proposal that 'the earth is the very…

Virtual Reality (VR) is a valuable tool for learning, however, there is a lack of education-focused content for language learning needs. This article introduces the "VR Application Analysis Framework" (Lege, Bonner, Frazier, & Pascucci, 2020) to assist educators in scaffolding existing commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) applications for…

In the last 10 years, gaming has evolved to the point that it is now being used as a learning medium to educate students in many different disciplines. The educational community has begun to explore the effectiveness of gaming as a learning tool and as a result two different ways of utilizing games for education have been created: Gamification and…

Virtual worlds have become an invaluable space for online learning and the exploration of digital cultures. Communication departments can benefit from using these spaces to educate their students in the logistics of virtual worlds and as a way to better understand how the process of interpersonal and global communication functions in both online…

Over a 13-month period, the Schome Park Programme operated the first "closed" (i.e. protected) Teen Second Life project in Europe. The project organised diverse educational events that centred on use of a virtual world and an associated asynchronous forum and wiki. Students and staff together exploited the affordances of the environment…

This paper presents and tests a general model to predict emergent exchange patterns and power differences in reciprocal exchange networks when individual actors follow the norm of reciprocity. With an interesting qualification, the experimental results reported here support the power-dependence approach (Emerson 1972a, b): those who acquire the…

This article explores the relationship between users' interpretations of a new technology and failure of organizational change. I suggest that people form interpretations of a new technology not only based on their conversations with others, but also through their use of technology's material features directly. Through qualitative and quantitative…

This paper examines how pre-university students shared and constructed knowledge in the context of GP (general paper) by interacting through individual virtual characters across five cycles of enactive role play sessions. Contextualized scenarios on the topic of euthanasia were developed in "Second Life". Role-playing the virtual characters…

Evaluation of methods and techniques for conversational and multimodal spoken dialogue systems is complex, as is gathering data for the modeling and tuning of such techniques. This article describes MushyPeek, an experiment framework that allows us to manipulate the audiovisual behavior of interlocutors in a setting similar to face-to-face…

This paper examines the effective deployment of conversational agents in virtual worlds from the perspective of researchers/practitioners in cognitive psychology, computing science, learning technologies and engineering. From a cognitive perspective, the major challenge lies in the coordination and management of the various channels of information…

How do communities establish shared communication systems? The Common Knowledge view assumes that symbolic conventions develop through the accumulation of common knowledge regarding communication practices among the members of a community. In contrast with this view, it is proposed that coordinated communication emerges a by-product of local…

This article previews the emergence of "homo virtualis." Drawing on data from seven research studies, peer-reviewed published research articles, and selected excerpts of 30 months of field notes taken in Second Life [SL], the article examines virtual learning environments and embodiment through the lens of interactions of avatars with…