Qualities of Online Environments

Sarah Robbins is a rhetoric and composition PhD candidate at Ball State University. Her interests and research are on using online tools for teaching. Her blog Second Life Education Research, where she is known as Intellagirl is both thoughtful and based on real experience and research. In this posting she shares ideas from a book chapter she is writing, "CVE, MUVE, MMOE, MMORPG…What’s the difference?’: Virtual Environments as Compositional Models".

"In the chapter I attempt to delineate between different types of digital environments in which communication/composition can happen. In effect, what I’m doing is laying out the qualities that an instructor may be looking for in an online environment for a specific educational goal. Because the audience is largely readers who have never explored such environments, I’m hoping to lay out the most important differences to help light the way to informed pedagogical decisions."

It does a very good job of doing this, and includes a table that makes it even clearer. The post is here.