Me, us and IT
Insiders views of the complex technical, organisational and personal elements in using virtual worlds in education
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14742/apubs.2017.788Keywords:
Virtual Worlds Working Group, community of practice, TOP frameworkAbstract
The adoption and pedagogical use of technologies such as virtual worlds to support teaching and learning, and research in higher education involves a complex interplay of technical, organisational and personal factors. In this paper, eighteen educators and researchers provide an overview of how they perceive a virtual world can be used in education from the perspective of themselves as individuals ‘me’, their educational organisations and as members of the Australian and New Zealand Virtual Worlds Working Group (VWWG) community of practice ‘us’, as well as the complex technology that underpins this learning environment ‘IT’. Drawing on Linstone’s (1981, 1984) Technical, Organisational and Personal (TOP) multiple perspective concept as the framework for analysis, the authors discuss their perspectives of how the personal, organisational and technical aspects of teaching through the use of virtual worlds have impacted on their teaching and research in higher education. The potential of employing the TOP framework to inform future research into the use of technologies such as virtual worlds in teaching and learning is explored.
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Copyright (c) 2024 Sue Gregory, Brent Gregory, Denise Wood, Scott Grant, Sasha Nikolic, Mathew Hillier, Merle Hearns, Lisa Jacka, Marcus McDonald, Torsten Reiners, Sharon Lierse, Blooma John, Suku Sukunesan, Emily Rutherford, Jay Jay Jegathesan, Des Butler, Helen Farley, Pauletta Irwin
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.