2006 Campus Technology Innovators: Virtual and Immersive Learning

Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology

Home > 2006 Campus Technology Innovators: Virtual and Immersive Learning

Features

2006 Campus Technology Innovators: Virtual and Immersive Learning

7/23/2006

discussion boards, voice-over-IP and file sharing, and a group-oriented custom course management system built in-house each contributed to the communication and interaction between and among students, instructors, and visitors.

“We may have begun with the notion of creating an online space that was analogous to and ‘as good as’ the typical blended program,” says Tashner, “but we have come to realize that the kinds of interactions that occur through a combination of peer network facilitation, varied communication tools, and an immersive online social environment are richer and more satisfying than those supported by the traditional classroom or web-based models.”

Next Steps

Today, ASU has opened its world to the larger world. Educators, researchers, adult students, and young students from the US, Mexico, Australia, and Finland are using AET Zone as a place to meet, teach, and learn. They are planning activities and building spaces of their own within the Zone. As the population of these new “citizens” grows, ASU hopes that AET Zone will serve as a model for educational institutions looking to create effective, immersive social environments for learning.

Advice

ASU’s Instructional Technology faculty agree that scalability was a key factor in developing AET Zone: “Look for technologies that offer a small footprint at first, but that are scalable when you succeed. In our case, Activeworlds’ public education server provided a quick, cost-effective way to get started and eased our transition to our own, private virtual world server.”

Innovator: Purdue University

PURDUE UNIVERSITY’S ENVISION CENTER:
A NEW WAY TO INTERACT WITH DATA

Challenge Met

The Envision Center for Data Perceptualization at Purdue University (IN) was conceived by a group of faculty who saw a need for a central facility on campus that would support visualization and data perceptualization in research and teaching. Traditional text and 2D displays were falling short as a means to represent data and concepts, and technology offered new ways to involve a variety of senses—visual, auditory, touch, and more—to immerse users in environments for exploration, interaction, and discovery. The center gives its users a chance to work with the technologies that serve them best in interpreting data and concepts.