Archive for the ‘Interface Design’ Category

Student Perceptions of Self and Community within an Online Environment: The Use of VoiceThread to Foster Community

This paper investigates student responses to two tools used to create learning environments that encourage the sharing of ideas and discussion in online asynchronous university courses. Journal of Teaching and Learning with Technology

Design as Participation

This started with a drivetime conversation about contemporary design with Joi Ito. We were stuck in traffic, and in our conversation, a question emerged about designers: This new generation of designers that work with complex adaptive systems. Why are they so much more humble than their predecessors who designed, you know, stuff? Journal of Design and Science

Determinants of presence in 3D virtual worlds: A structural equation modelling analysis

There is a growing body of evidence that feeling present in virtual environments contributes to effective learning. Presence is a psychological state of the user; hence, it is generally agreed that individual differences in user characteristics can lead to different experiences of presence. Despite the fact that user characteristics can play a significant role in […]

Preservice Teachers’ Perception and Use of Personal Learning Environments (PLEs)

Personal learning environments (PLEs) are Web 2.0 tools and services by which users’ access, construct, manage, and share educational contents in order to meet their learning needs. These environments enable users to manage their learning according to their own personal preferences. They further promote socialization and collaboration with their broad user networks and interaction facilities. […]

A Cognitive Style Perspective to Handheld Devices: Customization vs. Personalization

Handheld devices are widely applied to support open and distributed learning, where students are diverse. On the other hand, customization and personalization can be applied to accommodate students’ diversities. However, paucity of research compares the effects of customization and personalization in the context of handheld devices. To this end, we developed a customized digital learning […]

Professors and Virtual World Professionalism: A Qualitative Study

Just as there are now questions about professionalism and professional boundaries in social networking environments such as Facebook or LinkedIn, there are also questions about what it means to be professional in virtual worlds like Second Life (SL). In an effort to understand professors’ lived experiences with professionalism in virtual worlds, specifically in SL, I […]

Bridging the Communication Divide: CMC and Deaf Individuals’ Literacy Skills

Deaf individuals frequently capitalize upon communication technologies that increase equitable access to communication in an ongoing, effortless manner. Those communication technologies create conditions that increase direct access to language and literacy. It is the lack of direct access to language that has been historically problematic for deaf individuals, contributing to English literacy achievement gaps that […]

Alexandria – A Virtual Repository of Knowledge

Virtual worlds are development platforms, similar to sandbox games where users are able to interact with each other with no predefined goal. Due to immersive visual feedback, these platforms have been successfully used in the past to create lesson plans and materials used for undergraduate and, graduate education as well as for  and recreation. To […]

What Does the Eye See? Reading Online Primary Source Photographs in History

This exploratory study looks at how a sample of preservice teachers and historians read visuals in the context of school history. The participants used eye tracking technology and think-aloud protocol, as they examined a series of online primary source photographs from a virtual exhibit. Voluntary participants (6 students and 2 professional historians) were recruited at […]

Linguistic competence and mathematics learning: the tools of e-learning

This paper addresses the issue of mathematics education in e-learning platforms. In the frame of discursive approach to mathematics learning, the discussion is focused on multisemioticity and multivariety, as they characterize mathematical practice and students’ linguistic competence seems to be strictly linked to their success in mathematics learning. E-learning platforms offer plenty of opportunities to […]