Punya Mishra is Professor of Educational Psychology and Educational Technology at Michigan State University, where he directs the Master of Arts in Educational Technology program. He currently chairs the Creativity Special Interest Group at the Society for Information Technology in Teacher Education. He is nationally and internationally recognized…

Teams of students in an upper-division undergraduate Usability Engineering course used a collaborative environment to carry out a series of three distributed collaborative homework assignments. Assignments were case-based analyses structured using a jigsaw design; students were provided a collaborative software environment and introduced to a…

Assessment feedback is an important part of students' learning experiences; however, text-based feedback has limitations. This article proposes an alternative in the form of individualised video recordings of the lecturer discussing each assignment. This research reports on 126 undergraduate and postgraduate students' reactions to 5-minute videos…

Game-centred approaches (GCAs) were designed for the effective integration of skills into contextualized situations. Despite a plethora of research, few studies explore the articulations between pre-service teachers' experiences, conceptual understanding, pedagogical practices, the wider cultural and political realities of teaching and their…

Online environments, particularly virtual worlds, can sometimes complicate issues of self expression. For example, the faculty member who loves punk rock has an opportunity, through hairstyle and attire choices in the virtual world, to share that part of herself with students. However, deciding to share that part of the self can depend on a number…

This article outlines a collaborative study between higher education institutions in Australia, which qualitatively explored the online learning experience for undergraduate and postgraduate students. The project adopted a narrative inquiry approach and encouraged students to "story" their experiences of this virtual environment,…

The changing online learning environment requires that instructors depend less on the standard tools built into most educational learning platforms and turn their focus to use of Open Educational Resources (OERs) and free or low-cost commercial applications. These applications permit new and more efficient ways to build online learning communities…

Assessing speaking is one of the most difficult tasks in computer based language testing. Many countries all over the world face the need to implement standardized language tests where speaking tasks are commonly included. However, a number of problems make them rather impractical such as the costs, the personnel involved, the length of time for…

Much research has been done on blended learning and the design of tasks most appropriate for online environments and computer-mediated communication. Increasingly, language teachers and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) practitioners recognise the different nature of communications in online settings and in face-to-face settings; teachers do not…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology has become a part of contemporary Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) systems. ASR systems however are being criticized for their erroneous performance especially when utilized as a mean to develop skills in a Second Language (L2) where errors are not tolerated. Nevertheless, these errors can…

This paper reports on an exploratory case study of learner participation within the context of online language learning in virtual world platforms. Data for this investigation was collected through a case study of a Business English course within a qualitative Case-Study Research framework. This study examines learner activity in virtual worlds in…

Students live and work in worlds where virtual communities, such as those created via social network sites (e.g. Facebook) may interplay with their formal learning, but scholars of design pedagogy know little about how these spaces can support design learning. In this study, we describe how a set of informal communications, encapsulated in five…

Social media is the new face of global communication, and, instead of blocking it, schools should be embracing it. Twitter presents opportunities for teachers to link students with real-time information and diverse ideological perspectives. The authors describes the use of Twitter in a high school civics class during the 2012 presidential election.

This comparative study investigates how two groups of design and technology students generated ideas in an asynchronous computer-mediated communication setting. The generated ideas were design ideas in the form of sketches. Each group comprised five students who were all 15 years of age. All the students were from the same secondary school but…

In seeking to prepare students to be "citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world," teachers engage students in live, online discussions about what justifies war, while at the same time grappling with the requirements to teach the memorization of people, places and isolated events. Teachers and a…