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Second Life (SL) is a three-dimensional (3D) virtual world, and educational institutions are adopting SL to support their teaching and learning. Although the question of how 3D learning spaces should be designed to support student learning and engagement has been raised among SL educators and designers, there is hardly any guidance or research in this area. In this article, we report an empirical study in which we have elicited educators', designers' and students' perceptions of learning spaces within SL. Based on this empirical research, we have presented some design considerations for SL educators and designers who are involved in designing learning activities and spaces in SL. We hope that the design guidance and examples described in this article will support educators and designers to design learning spaces that foster students' socialisation, informal learning, collaboration and creativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term “social software” covers a range of tools which allow users to interact and share data with other users, primarily via the web. Blogs, wikis, podcasts and social networking websites are some of the tools that are being used in educational, social and business contexts. We have examined the use of social software in the UK further and higher education to collect evidence of the effective use of social software in student learning and engagement. We applied case study methodology involving educators and students from 26 initiatives. In this paper, we focus on the student experience: educational goals of using social software; benefits to the students; and the challenges they experience. Our investigations have shown that social software supports a variety of ways of learning: sharing of resources; collaborative learning; problem-based and inquiry-based learning; and reflective learning. Students gain transferable skills of team working, negotiation, communication and managing digital identities. Although these tools enhance a student's sense of community, the need to share and collaborate brings in additional responsibility and workload, which some students find inflexible and “forced”. Our findings show that students have concerns about usability, privacy and the public nature of social software tools for academic activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper reports the theoretical underpinnings for the pedagogical role and rationale for adopting 3D virtual worlds for socialisation and knowledge creation in distance education. Socialisation or 'knowing one another' in remote distributed environments can be achieved through synchronous technologies such as instant messaging, audio and video-conferencing. However, a 3D virtual world can provide an immersive experience where there is a visual presence and virtual proximity of the group members in terms of their 3D selves (avatars). We discuss the affordances of a 3D virtual world and its role in providing a platform for pedagogical design that engenders socialisation, synchronous communication and collaboration. We propose the use of a knowledge construction model as a framework for guiding the design of collaborative activities in a 3D virtual world for blended learning environments. We believe that this framework will also be useful for integrating 2D environments such as blogs, wikis and forums with a 3D learning environment. We consider the implications of this in the context of blended learning in distance education. This paper would be of interest to course designers, researchers, teachers, staff developers and policy-makers who are involved in integrating 3D virtual worlds within the curriculum of their programmes and institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the early years of the twenty-first century there has been an increasing interest in using Web 2.0 technologies to support learning in Higher Education. However, previous research suggests that the integration of blogging into courses can be difficult and cites problems with issues such as student compliance. We adopt a learner-centred perspective and explore students' (rather than their educators') understanding of how blogs and blogging can support distance learning in Higher Education. We report on a study of UK Open University (OU) students on an online distance learning Masters course, that has enabled us to determine the issues that are important to these bloggers, and we describe five ways in which they appropriated blogging to suit their individual needs. We discuss the importance of making blogging activities flexible so that students can blog to meet their own needs whilst still attending to the requirements of their course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The post-graduate course, Software Requirements for Business Systems, in the Department of Computing of the Open University involves teaching systematic elicitation and documentation of requirements for software systems. On a software development project, team members often work remotely from one another and increasingly use wikis to collaboratively develop the requirements specification. In order to emulate requirements engineering practice, the course has been enhanced to include group collaboration using a wiki. In this paper, we describe the wiki-based collaborative activities and the evaluation of the pedagogical effectiveness of a wiki for collaborative learning. Our evaluations have confirmed that the strength of a wiki, as a collaborative authoring tool, can facilitate the learning of course concepts and students' appreciation of the distributed nature of the RE process context. However, there is a need to support the discussion aspects of collaborative activities with more appropriate tools. We have also found that there are certain usability aspects of wikis that can mar a positive student experience. This paper will be of interest to academics aspiring to employ wikis on their courses and to practitioners who wish to realize the potential of wikis in facilitating information sharing, knowledge management, and in fostering collaboration within and between organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A customer's experience with an e-commerce environment extends beyond the interaction with the website, including delivery of products, post-sales support, consumption of products and services, and so on. It is the total customer experience that influences the customers' perceptions of value and service quality, and which consequently affects customer loyalty. In our cross-disciplinary research in human–computer interaction (HCI) and relationship marketing, we have been investigating how HCI and customer relationship management (CRM) strategies can be integrated in the design of e-commerce so as to engender customer retention, trust and loyalty. We have performed a series of empirical studies to understand customers' requirements and perceptions about service-quality from e-shopping and e-travel environments. From these studies, we have developed an empirically-grounded evaluation instrument, E-SEQUAL, which we discuss in this paper. The development team can apply it at different phases of an e-commerce development life-cycle to integrate customers' perceived dimensions of service quality into the design and evaluation of e-commerce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]