IVR (Immersive Virtual Reality) environments naturally suggest hands-on approaches to learning, but the success of such virtual “direct experience” depends heavily on the design of interface and interaction techniques. Although IVR may suggest ease of use and obvious, transparent interface designs, the opposite is, unfortunately, true: IVR presents surprisingly difficult interface challenges an...

It is presumed that recent technological innovations, combined with three more established (educational) technologies, could cause a drastic change in university education, if adequate organizational conditions could be created. Such conditions are needed to structure, channel and manage an as yet undreamed of flow of information. Closely related to the metaphor of the 'Info Highway', an educat...

Designer’s toolkit is rapidly changing and design practices need a shared vision of what the short, medium and long term might be. With this in mind we interviewed twenty-four thought leaders in the design community worldwide. Four big ideas emerged from the interviews: transferring technologies from other industries has provided great benefits, but it has also generated the need to transfer pr...

As a result of a general dissatisfaction with transmission models of learning and theories of cognition that preclude context, "constructivism," or perhaps more accurately, a constructivist metatheory drawn from many sources, has come to dominate contemporary educational psychology. One of constructivism's principal implications, according to Sack, Soloway and Weingrad [9], is that "...activiti...

In the literature on complexity theory it has been noted that the increasing interdependence, non-linearity, and adaptiveness of social and other systems require forms of representation that can accommodate such complexity. In this essay I argue for examining the possibilities of cartography (mapmaking) in and of educational theory and research. Cartography offers alternative forms of represent...

This paper calls for a change in our theoretical perspectives on the nature of understanding as ideas embedded in the mind-as-container metaphor. In particular, it is suggested that we should adopt Bereiter’s [1] postulation that understanding is best understood as resulting from the ways an individual may be positioned relative to the knowledge object. As such, it is proposed that understandin...

This article provides an overview of objective and subjective class differences in experiences of postsecondary education. Using the metaphor of a funnel, it argues that cumulative disadvantage results when first-generation and low-income college students are disproportionately filtered out at each stage of the postsecondary education process. Subjective class differences largely serve to repro...

This paper presents the guidelines emerging from the EBONI (Electronic Books ON-screen Interface) Project’s evaluations of electronic textbooks [1], which describe how e-learning content can be made usable for the UK Higher Education community. The project’s on-screen design guidelines are described, including recommendations as to which features of the paper book metaphor should be retained, a...