Teaching with virtual worlds provides new means for collaborative learning but creates challenges for teachers in terms of IT skills. To address these challenges, we developed a teaching model for using virtual worlds in classroom practices and applied it to Minecraft in several rounds of design-based research experiments. Our conceptual framework…

This article addresses the challenges of supporting students' engagement with complex, challenging texts. How do teachers sustain students' interactions with texts that many see as irrelevant to their lives? How do they provide space to name and challenge the simplistic or problematic portrayals of cultures and communities often found in the texts…

Despite the growing use of virtual worlds in distance education, no studies have shown how self-representation in these environments impacts collaboration in multicultural learning groups. In this article, Paul Wallace and Jim Maryott report on a preliminary study in Micronesia designed to investigate the impact of negative social attitudes based…