Fourth year students in psychology and social work from two South African universities worked together across boundaries of race and class in a course which required them to engage in a personal reflexive way with issues of community and identity. A combination of face-to-face workshops and online tutorial groups was used. The course was demanding…

As certain areas of practice in higher education shift online, the work of learners and teachers increasingly takes place within the domain of the image. The "digital turn" we are experiencing, both in higher education and in the wider culture, accompanies an "iconic turn" in which the logic of the image as it emerges on our screens has a growing…

The paper deals with the use of visual stereotypes in virtual pedagogical agents and its potential impact in digital learning environments. An analysis of the concept of visual stereotypes is followed by a discussion of affordances and drawbacks as to their use in the context of traditional media. Next, the paper explores whether virtual…

This study examines teachers' experiences with and opinions on a web-based, cross-cultural project. Students from the Czech Republic, Denmark, Macedonia, and Sweden used information and communication technology and international collaboration to explore the links among youth, culture, and the use of alcohol. The data was generated through…

Multiuser virtual environments (MUVEs) are quickly gaining importance as tools for foreign language instruction by promoting collaboration and social presence in a lifelike 3-D environment. One of the largest and fastest growing of these MUVEs is Linden Lab's "Second Life" (SL). With an international membership of over 9,000,000 residents, SL is…

Online learning is expanding rapidly today in many Canadian universities. Fuelled by Canada's unprecedented broadband access, online teaching is creating new challenges for faculty and new responsibilities for educational developers. Although there is adequate literature with regard to faculty thinking about course planning in general, there are…

Web 2.0 tools are changing the way we work online. As lecturers, we need to understand how these emerging technologies impact both on our students' learning and on our own teaching practice. This means we must ourselves become more confident in our use of Web 2.0, to be able to cope with the rapidly changing nature of these technologies. In most…

The purpose of this study was to consider the efficacy and popularity of "Virtual Lectures" (text-based, structured electronic courseware with information presented in manageable "chunks", interaction and multimedia) and "e-Lectures" (on-screen synchrony of PowerPoint slides and recorded voice) as alternatives to traditional lectures. We…

With their realistic animation, complex scenarios and impressive interactivity, computer simulation games might be able to provide context-rich, cognitively engaging virtual environments for language learning. However, simulation games designed for L2 learners are in short supply. As an alternative, could games designed for the mass-market be…

Computing devices and applications are now used beyond the desktop, in diverse environments, and this trend toward ubiquitous computing is evolving. In this study, we re-visit the interactivity concept and its applications for interactive function design in a ubiquitous-learning system (ULS). Further, we compare interactivity dimensions and…

This paper reports the findings from an experimental study involving thirty three secondary school students (mean age = 15.5 years) in spatial visualization (SV) training through an interactive desktop virtual environment spatial trainer (iDVEST). Stratified random sampling was used to assign students into two experimental groups and one control…

Charter schools offer choice to parents who would otherwise be constrained to having their children attend a residentially assigned traditional public school. The number of charter schools has increased steadily in the last decade, reflecting their popularity with parents and the general public. They vary substantially in their missions, the…

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…

Student retention rates are a constant concern in higher education, but this concern has become especially challenging as online courses become more common and there are widespread reports of low completion rates for online, self-study courses. We evaluated four self-study online pharmacy courses with a history of very high completion rates for…

Humans draw on their stereotypic beliefs to make assumptions about others. Even though prior research has shown that individuals respond socially to media, there is little evidence with regards to learners stereotyping and categorizing pedagogical agents. This study investigated whether learners stereotype a pedagogical agent as being…