Bryan Carter

Distance learning classroom using Virtual Harlem

Virtual Harlem is a virtual reality reconstruction of Harlem, New York, during the 1920s. It was designed to immerse students of the Harlem Renaissance directly in the historical context of the literature of that period. The goal of this prototype is to develop rich, interactive, and narrative learning experiences to augment classroom activities for students in the humanities. This paper describes a semester-long user study using Virtual Harlem in an English literature course and discusses our experiences of integrating virtual reality technology in the classroom.

Virtual Harlem [learning environment]

The paper discusses Virtual Harlem, a learning environment that lets students experience the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s as a cultural field trip. Virtual Harlem is a collaborative virtual reality (VR) tour of Harlem in which participants can travel back 80 years to see and hear historical figures, speeches, and music from that period.

Virtual Harlem as a Collaborative Learning Environment: A Project of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Electronic Visualization Lab

purposes have been developed at University of Illinois at Chicago’s (UICs) Electronic Visualization Laboratory, we focus on the Virtual Harlem project because it is designed as a collaborative learning environment (CLN)—a VR application that structured as a networked collaboration with the goal of building a model of the subject being studied (see “the Virtual Harlem Project” below for a more detailed description). Virtual Harlem is a learning environment (Sosnoski & Carter, 2001). Visitors can enter Virtual Harlem and navigate through it as a way of learning about the historical context, the events, the everyday life of persons who were living in Harlem at the time.

Collaborative Learning Environments: Developing SMART Classrooms in Theory and in Practice

This chapter will outline the theory behind collaborative learning environments and describe several projects that best exemplify these theories and how best to incorporate them into the learning styles of the Net Generations way of learning. Through partnerships with the St. Louis science center and the Childrens Museum of Manhattan, visuality and interactivity have been incorporated into displays that demonstrate how these sorts of projects encourage students to collaborate in different ways as well as how teachers can introduce material in a variety of multidisciplinary formats.