Rob Wright

Who benefits from virtuality

Abstract For educational software to take advantage of contemporary views of learning, instructional designers need to employ design models that incorporate the variety of ideas that are based on constructivist frameworks for developing learning environments. These environments, if well designed, can support learner construction of knowledge, however, such frameworks are based upon arguments that learners should be placed in authentic environments that incorporate sophisticated representations of context through such constructs as “virtual worlds”. Within these environments the learner is supported by visual metaphors constructed to represent the information structure and how the “world” operates. This paper will discuss the framework employed in the development of several virtual solutions and the process by which they were constructed.

Visual Support for Authoring

Development of educational software has had a long history of use of authoring environments that have enabled instructional technologists rather than programmers to design and develop applications. The advantage of these tools has been that the designer did not need to be highly skilled in high-level languages, but could use a simpler construction set of pre-programmed modules, often supported by a simple scripting language. The disadvantage was that the developer was limited to the pre-programmed modules available and to the underlying assumptions of the structured instructional design models adopted by the tool. The designer also had to work within the visual and procedural structures employed by the tool designers to represent the design process within which learning activities could be constructed.