Extended reality technologies -- mixed, augmented, and virtual reality, and future-related technologies -- are rapidly expanding in many fields, with underexplored potentials for multimodal composition in digital media environments. This research generates new knowledge about the novel wearable technology -- smart glasses -- to support elementary…

The rapid evolution of virtual reality (VR) technologies and their adoption for learning opens up new possibilities for shifting semiotic content across modes, with underexplored scope for transmediating content in visual, haptic, and auditory ways in immersive media literacy practices. This research investigated users' creative digital designing…

Although the population of science teachers in the US lacks diversity, the technology used to teach science should be diverse and culturally connected. Culturally relevant frameworks for science call for science teaching to be situated in meaningful contexts. This study calls for the integration of CRP and situated cognition perspectives as a…

This article aims to contribute new knowledge about the media literacies children assemble as they play the digital game "Minecraft" which it describes as a children's digital making platform. The article argues media literacy's tendency to use socio-cultural and humanist accounts of media participation limit its ability to fully explain…

Two cases of context-sensitive mobile computing curricula for children are shown to develop analytical understandings of how science-related sense-making talk can be supported through physical and digital environment interaction, which supports play and learning through movement. Our work investigates how proximity-based computing mediates…

This paper discusses gaming in a Western Australian school for boys. The overriding ethos of the school is supportive of the potential of ICT to better engage students and deliver enhanced educational outcomes. The school sees game-based design as at the vanguard of innovation, but also accepts its important duty of care responsibilities. Tensions…

Education in virtual worlds has the potential, it seems, for engaging students in innovative ways and for enabling new discourses on a host of issues. Virtual locations like "Second Life," "Kaneva," or "World of Warcraft," among other multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs), also come with unique challenges for educators as they consider the…

This article explores the potential benefits of creating "virtual ecosystems" from real-world data. These ecosystems are intended to be realistic virtual representations of environments that may be costly or difficult to access in person. They can be constructed as 3D worlds rendered from stereo video data, augmented with scientific data, and then…

The "Immersed in Learning" project began in 2007 to evaluate the use of 3D virtual worlds as a teaching and learning tool in undergraduate programmes in digital media at the University of Wolverhampton, UK. A question that the research set out to explore was what were the benefits of integrating 3D immersive learning with face-to-face…

This study interrogates the idea of using videogames and game-like virtual worlds as a means to advance studio education pedagogy. Looking at a series of case studies of urban planning courses taught using "Second Life," the results describe the potentials, and limits, of this emerging digital media. Key findings are that the virtual worlds…

For hundreds of years, the "remediation" of reality has been built into all technologies of representation. Although taken as a whole, the available information enables a qualitative assessment of the history of multimedia and their influences on different fields of knowledge, there are still some areas that require more focused research…

The theory and lessons of knowledge exchange, in both a physical and virtual environment, suggest a framework for understanding the specific requirements for a digital design class in "Second Life". Through teaching and observing students who were asked to complete a machinima project, our research provided examples of the strengths and…

"Second Life" (SL) is a three-dimensional (3D) virtual world, and educational institutions are adopting SL to support their teaching and learning. Although the question of how 3D learning spaces should be designed to support student learning and engagement has been raised among SL educators and designers, there is hardly any guidance or…

Virtual world platforms such as "Second Life" have been successfully used in educational contexts to motivate and engage learners. This article reports on an exploratory workshop involving a group of high school students using "Second Life" for an urban planning project. Young people are traditionally an under-represented demographic when it comes…

Nowhere in the current digital technology landscape is the process of "blurring the lines between media" more apparent than with the uses and applications of gaming practices and technologies. Here the overlaps between new media and media interfaces are becoming significant as games technologies and practices are becoming more pervasive as…