The Pavia University History Museum, which houses historic items mainly connected to the physics and medicine fields, has focused in the past years on new ways to involve its public and to attract new audiences. Among different approaches, digital technologies have proven important to both external and internal communication. Lately, an Augmented…

Nowadays, in many Italian and European universities, teachers' training includes one or more examinations related to new didactic methodologies and practices. The topic of this paper is how it is possible to realize a new video analysis laboratory as a didactic and research "tool" for teachers' training at the University of Salerno that…

One of the possible ways of assessing students' collaborative work in Virtual Exchange (VE) is by the use of Peer Assessment (PA) -- a formative assessment technique in which students review each other's work to provide descriptive feedback on the basis of a set of criteria. This article describes a VE procedure, in which students from three…

The incorporation of cultural productions and virtual experiences in museum spaces adds to the objects' significance and also turns them into important contributions to adult education. Yet, how far do they trouble, decolonise, revisualise, tell alternative stories, interrogate intolerance and privilege or stimulate critical literacies? This…

This paper presents some of the overall frameworks and models for language learning that were used under Avalon (Access to Virtual and Action Learning live ONline), an EU co-funded project aimed at developing language-learning scenarios in virtual worlds. The introduction and background summarize some of the theories that constitute the starting…

Since the rise of the Internet, the act of border crossing has become a pursuit that must necessarily be conceptualized in both real and virtual terms. By using theories connected to virtual communities, new technologies, fan cultures and tourism, this paper seeks to show that the culturally productive activities of a transnational virtual…

A context-based module to introduce secondary school students to the study of the optical properties of materials and geometric optics is presented. The module implements an innovative teaching approach in which the behaviour of the chosen application, in this article, the optical fibre, is iteratively explored and modelled by means of a…

Over the past decade, industry relevance and connectedness have evolved into a key requirement for students and their parents, who increasingly perceive employability upon graduation as a critical factor in the degree selection process. Simultaneously, professional bodies emphasise the need for high levels of industry engagement as a condition for…

Mobile devices are changing the way people work and communicate. Most of the innovative devices offer the opportunity to integrate augmented reality in mobile applications, permitting the combination of the real world with virtual information. This feature can be particularly useful to enhance informal and formal didactic actions based on student…

This article seeks to assess the impact of V-Pal (Virtual Partnerships for All Languages) on the student language learning experience within a conventional UK higher education (HE) curriculum. V-Pal is an innovative computer-mediated language scheme, based on a reciprocal, distance-learning language project, run by the University of Manchester in…

We propose, as a special way to explore the physics of flying objects, to use a flight simulator with a personalized scenery to reproduce the territory where students live. This approach increases the participation and attention of students to physics classes but also creates several opportunities for addressing side activities and arguments of…

Describes the "Virtual Cities" project, a virtual reality satellite teleconference with students age 12 to 17 from Canada, Italy, and the United States held during the International Council for Educational Media 1992 conference. A visual database overlaid with instructional gaming strategies provided students with the opportunity to…

Virtual environments are more and more used in primary schools. One of the most interesting potentialities of these environments is to foster cross-national applications. Yet, this specific feature is not fully exploited. This paper presents a successful virtual learning environment for primary education involving two European countries and…