Gerald P. Ardito
Editor, ITLT

When I was still a middle school biology teacher, I was deeply immersed in the ways that various web-based technologies could enhance my teaching and the learning of my students. This was 2005, and Web 2.0 was all the rage. Thanks to Will Richardson (2010), I engaged my students in writing blog posts, contributing to wikis, and producing podcasts. I regularly attended local and national conferences of like-minded educators. At these conferences, there was often presentations by teacher using Second Life, a virtual reality platform. Its developer, Linden Research, had invested heavily in making Second Life available to schools and teachers, and many teachers did amazing work building worlds with Second Life for their students, and having their students build amazing worlds as part of their learning. We can see the echoes of Second Life in other platforms such as Minecraft/Minecraft EDU and Roblox. And the work continues.

In this issue, we have collected two articles that focus on VR in educational settings. Maggie Mosher and her colleagues have investigated the ways that VR can improve the communication skills of middle school students. Nana Osei Bonsu has written a systematic literature review of the topic. We hope that this small connection will start a collection about VR and other immersive technologies and how they can (and cannot) impact learning.

And, on a personal note, it’s honestly very nice to write about something other than AI.

Excelsior!

References

Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms. Corwin Press.