Pedagogical principles for the design of virtual learning spaces in higher education

This paper focuses on effective learning spaces in contemporary higher education. Drawing on empirical data from a qualitative study of international students’ experience of blended learning programs conducted in three computing courses in two Australian universities, a range of issues and challenges are reported. Three pedagogical principles are then presented that respond to these challenges: 1. Enabling learners – learning how to learn in virtual learning spaces; 2. Programming for flexible learning – learning how to manage virtual learning environments; and, 3. Transforming learning – learning how to capitalise on the affordances of new technologies. The pedagogical principles are presented together with examples of types of practices that they support.

Virtual worlds in Australian and New Zealand higher education: Remembering the past, understanding the present and imagining the future

3D virtual reality, including the current generation of multi-user virtual worlds, has had a long history of use in education and training, and it experienced a surge of renewed interest with the advent of Second Life in 2003. What followed shortly after were several years marked by considerable hype around the use of virtual worlds for teaching, learning and research in higher education. For the moment, uptake of the technology seems to have plateaued, with academics either maintaining the status quo and continuing to use virtual worlds as they have previously done or choosing to opt out altogether. This paper presents a brief review of the use of virtual worlds in the Australian and New Zealand higher education sector in the past and reports on its use in the sector at the present time, based on input from members of the Australian and New Zealand Virtual Worlds Working Group. It then adopts a forward-looking perspective amid the current climate of uncertainty, musing on future directions and offering suggestions for potential new applications in light of recent technological developments and innovations in the area.

Virtual villages: networking the global archipelago

In today’s changing economy, moving rapidly beyond industrial and information priorities, the creative arts, industries and enterprises have a powerful capacity for transforming a society’s cultural and economic capabilities and growth. One of the greatest challenges for present and future workplace participants in the context of this rapid change is the need to adapt to changing roles within a capitalism which has moved beyond a focus on the production of commodities to a greater social and economic flexibility. Gee talks of the ‘new capitalism’ requiring ‘shape-shifting portfolio people’ , creative and entrepreneurial individuals who can take on multiple identities. The key to managing this change is to focus on building a capacity to design new identities, affinity groups and networks. The virtual villages project described in this paper is a creative response to building ‘shape-shifting’ skills, focusing on the power of narrative immersion through virtual world environments to explore issues for rural and regional communities. The project aims to assist local communities in geographically diverse regions to develop their capacities for designing new identities through participating in the creation of digital storylines and characters for problem-solving. This will also have the outcome of an expanded affinity group (the project participants and their digital audiences) and potentially global networks (the archipelago). The concept of virtual villages utilizes associational narrative techniques, exploring portals of virtual worlds, thresholds of community discovery and fragments of narrative as the framework. Developing associational narratives which explore and share creative problem solving across diverse virtual villages will provide both individuals and the community with the ‘shape-shifting’ capacity to situate themselves beyond current community networks and identities.

Innovation in language education: enriching Arabic language learner experiences and proficiency in 2D and 3D environments.

Abstract:-Global language and cultural communicative competency is an ever increasing requirement in our connected world. Learners of Arabic at the only five Australian universities where Arabic is taught have access to predominantly on-campus delivery modes. One of the main challenges learners face when learning another language (L2) in an academic setting in countries where that language is not actively used – so little L2 exposure – is that it is harder to provide meaningful contexts for learning. This restriction in L2 exposure in the formal academic framework is due to the limited face-to-face learning time and, more significantly, is compounded by lack of exposure to the language‟s authentic use settings. Students are often isolated from the target language‟s authentic discourse communities and native speakers. This situation is exacerbated for Cloud (online) students, studying in relative isolation. All of these factors make developing communicative oral fluency in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) moredifficult and challenging for many learners. This paper will discuss two innovative approaches used at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia to enable learners of Arabic at Deakin University to practice their developing skills by listening, practising, and experiencing directly how the language is used outside the classroom boundaries as well as allow learners to develop their oral and cultural communicative competency by engaging them in simulating and evolving authentic language scenarios with native Arabic speakers through the Virtual World (VW).