Affiliation:
1. University of Texas at Austin, USA
Abstract
Attempts at incorporating emerging and innovative instructional technology, like virtual worlds, into educational settings requires efforts to understand new discourse patterns that may develop and bring in a learner-centered instructional design that takes the affordances and constraints of the new technology into consideration. These efforts can contribute to an effective and positive learning experience for learners. Drawing upon observations of different types of learning activities held in Second Life, an increasingly popular virtual world, this chapter aims at initiating a discussion interweaving the concerns for politeness, reflecting learners’ psychological needs during their interactions with fellow learners and technology, with considerations of instructional design in a virtual world as a new learning context. Such a discussion has the potential of more effectively exploiting what new immersive environments can offer for learning.
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