This article reports an exploratory study carried out at a public university in Bogotá, Colombia, with two indigenous students who took a level I virtual English-course during the second term of 2008 and the first term of 2009. The aim was to analyse their attitudes towards the learning of English through the virtual modality. Interviews,…

This paper presents further innovative use of virtual worlds under the pilot stages of ASSIS (A Second Step in Second Life), a project funded by Umea University. One of the aims of the project is to make use of the affordances offered by Second Life in order to raise sociolinguistic language awareness among teacher trainees and other students…

This paper reports on an investigation of student engagement with e-learning, using practitioner reflection as a lens. Five e-learning practitioners each provided a case study from their teaching, which was the focus of practitioners' reflective accounts. Each of the practitioners had used e-learning as a way of promoting both learning and…

Organizing and implementing telecollaboration projects in foreign language curricula is not an easy endeavour (Belz & Thorne, 2006; Guth & Helm, 2010), as pedagogical, organizational and technical issues have to be addressed before cross-cultural interaction sessions can be carried out (O'Dowd & Ritter, 2006). These issues make many teaching…

Background: In recent years, due to deliberate educational policy in various places around the world, children with dyslexia study in regular classes with non-dyslexic classmates. They do not appear handicapped, because their disabilities do not stem from physical deformities, and therefore, it is not easy to identify them in a group where the…

In this paper we present Geodromo, a prototype of an educational multimedia system, part of the Portuguese "Ciencia Viva" (Live Science) educational program, which is aimed at young people and designed with innovative characteristics. The project is based on a robotic multimedia simulator and an online puzzle game aimed at the…

This study examined the literacy practices of children ages 5-11 as they engaged in out-of-school use of virtual worlds. The purpose of the study was to explore the nature, purpose, and role of literacy in children's use of a virtual world. In this article, I reflect on how children's use of literacy practices in the virtual world constructed and…

This article describes the research design of, and reports selected findings from, a scoping study aimed at examining current and planned applications of 3D immersive virtual worlds at higher education institutions across Australia and New Zealand. The scoping study is the first of its kind in the region, intended to parallel and complement a…

Over the years deaf and hard-of-hearing children have been reported as having difficulty with time conception and, in particular, the proper arrangement of events in a logical, temporal order. The research examined whether deaf and hard-of-hearing children perceive a temporal sequence differently under different representational modes. We compared…

Science education is concerned with the meaningful pursuit of comprehension, knowledge and understanding of scientific concepts and processes. In Vygotskian social constructivist learning, personal interpretation, decision-making and community cooperation fosters long-term understanding and transference of learned concepts. The construction of…

This article discusses activities carried out in the virtual world of Second Life (SL) as part of a compulsory class in the first year of an undergraduate programme. The paper identifies the contribution of SL to the students' learning environment and an Inquiry Based Learning (IBL) approach to programme design. The reasons for taking an IBL…

Teachers' continuing professional development, that is an essential part of their professional career, is the subject of constant demand of them and of each educational reform interest. The rapid growth of technology and the choices of teaching and learning that it provides give possibilities for synchronous and asynchronous methods of distance…

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to give a critical assessment of a study designed to investigate the potential of a new method for teaching HRD students about performance appraisal. It is argued that this approach is in the vanguard of developments in IT and learning. Design/methodology/approach: The paper takes the form of an explorative study…

Background: Twenty-first-century undergraduates often find eighteenth-century culture difficult to access and, influenced by popular assumptions about the period in current media theory, characterise the century as individualist, underestimating the cultural significance of social networking in literary and political history. Purpose: This study…

Stereotype threat research has demonstrated how presenting situational cues in a testing environment, such as raising the salience of negative stereotypes, can adversely affect test performance (Perry, Steele, & Hilliard, 2003; Steele & Aronson, 1995) and expectancy (Cadinu, Maass, Frigerio, Impagliazzo, & Latinotti, 2003; Stangor,…