In the Post RN BScN curriculum, one of the courses "Professional Development and Leadership (PDLM)" was offered as blended mode for the first time. In order to explore the students' interactions and Cognitive Engagement (CE) in Online Discussion Forums (ODFs), the research team conducted a retrospective study for the first time at a…

For the first time in the history of collective action, the offline world has experienced a virtually organized and enacted union strike. While this was the first publicly noticed political action in a virtual world, others have been going on for several years now. As virtual worlds continue to grow in popularity, this type of protest of action…

Several scholars contend that learning with computer games and simulations results in students thinking more like professionals. Bearing this goal in mind, we investigated how a group of pharmacy students learnt with an in-house developed computer simulation, SimPharm. Adopting situated cognition as our theoretical lens, we conducted a case study…

As increasing numbers of educators explore the use of virtual worlds for education, there is a need to consider which pedagogical approaches can provide an opportunity to do more than recreate the traditional classroom by leveraging the unique characteristics and potential that the technology can offer. This study identifies Communal…

Background: In the 1990s, Salmon developed a five-stage model for enabling and scaffolding remote groups to work and learn together using asynchronous bulletin boards. The model has informed online learning and development practice across different levels and education for online and blended learning. Purpose: This paper reports our testing of the…

In this paper the online construction of disability is investigated and the implications for educators working in virtual worlds are considered. Based on the analysis of data collected through interviews with deaf residents of "Second Life", it is argued that research into online identity, disability and education needs to allow room for…

Background: Many of the potential benefits of using virtual worlds for teaching and learning are difficult to define and often become overly focused on the functionality of the technology or on its ability to support informal or "social" forms of learning. Purpose: The aim of the paper is to highlight the experiential nature of virtual…

Background: Although much has been written about the ways in which new technology might transform educational practice, particularly in the area of literacy learning, there is relatively little empirical work that explores the possibilities and problems--or even what such a transformation might look like in the classroom. 3D virtual worlds offer a…

In this article the author explores the seamlessness between children's online and offline worlds. For children, there is no dichotomy of online and offline, or virtual and real; the digital is so much intertwined into their lives and psyche that the one is entirely enmeshed with the other. Despite early research pointing to the differences that…