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This chapter provides information on using virtual worlds for faculty and teacher professional development. The information presented in this chapter has been discovered through an examination of relevant literature with regard to utilizing virtual worlds in higher education. Among topics explored, the authors discuss the following: information regarding theoretical frameworks of teaching and learning, including social constructivism, experiential learning, and problem-based learning; the process for teaching instructors how to use virtual worlds across a variety of curricula; modeling of good practices in teaching and learning in a simulated environment; and the process of teaching faculty how to teach with virtual worlds. In addition, issues of access, technology needs, student training, expectations, and assessment within virtual worlds are discussed. Examples of faculty development including single workshops and entire conferences are shown with specific focus on successes and challenges of conducting these activities within a virtual worlds. In presenting these examples, it is hoped that individuals in higher education will gain a better perspective of utilizing virtual worlds in their practice.

Youngkyun Baek is professor of educational technology at Boise State University, USA. He had been teaching since 1991 at Korea National University of Education. Previously, he worked at Korea Educational Development Institute. His research interests are on instructional games, simulation, and mobile devices in education. He has presented several papers at SITE, NECC, AERA, and OECD Expert Meeting on gaming and simulations. Recently, he published two books on educational games and wrote several book chapters. Now he is designing a social network game on global warming and doing a research on intrinsic motivational factors in instructional games.

The part covers the planning process from the perspective of the instructor. Our global set of authors span Europe, Asia, and the Americas. The principle concept is that the science of learning, the cybergogy, that has emerged in technologies like virtual worlds requires faculty to think in terms of learning archetypes. As faculty plan for activities and ways to manage attention in activity-based learning environments, they will think in terms of building around avatars, engaged in finding things, and responding to critical incidences. In doing so, teaching and learning grows around visual stimulation, engagement, collaborative motivation, personal interest, context in the subject matter, and “contemporarity” of the learning environment. The process for teaching in virtual worlds mirrors other emerging technology. Educators need to lead by example, using the technology themselves to build their expertise. They must garner support from their stakeholders and create and engage in professional development courses that focus on virtual worlds so they can prepare and be prepared for delivering in the environment.

In this paper I bring together interaction, media, deviance, self, and identity to make sense of how young Singaporeans consume Korean popular (hereafter, K-pop) music and culture. My overarching goal is to highlight that being a music fan is not a straightforward or even easy experience. Rather, the self as music fan is continually developing within a complex variety of social processes, from the circulation of global, mass media representations to inter- and intra-personal interactions. I present data collected from a study on K-pop music consumption in Singapore, a small island-nation in Southeast Asia with an insatiable thirst for foreign culture. The data show how a group of Singaporean K-pop fans were regularly bombarded with largely negative messages about what it means to be K-pop music fans, and how these meanings affected their own negotiations as fans. K-pop fandom provided a sense of shared identity and status within popular youth culture, yet their experiences were often soured by negative media portrayals of deviant fans, whose behaviors risked stigmatizing the K-pop social identity. This paper thus deals with some of the problems for self that being a music fans entails.

In this qualitative case study, we examine pre-service teachers’ understandings’ of history as narrative. This analysis specifically explores the kinds of new historical narratives pre-service teachers create as a result of purposeful secondary social studies methods instruction that juxtaposes traditional narratives (e.g. individual achievement and motivation) and alternative narratives (e.g. those attentive to empathy and race, class, and gender) in an effort to help future teachers understand the nature of critical historical inquiry. In examining the understandings and initial efforts of young secondary social studies teachers, the study concludes that while troubling the traditional narrative is viable and likely event, the challenges of developing critical historical inquiry are clear and persistent.

This paper aims to provide an introductory overview and selected annotated bibliography of recent resources on library instruction and information literacy across all library types.

It introduces and annotates English-language periodical articles, monographs, dissertations and other materials on library instruction and information literacy published in 2014.

It provides information about each source, discusses the characteristics of current scholarship and highlights sources that contain unique or significant scholarly contributions.

The information may be used by librarians and interested parties as a quick reference to literature on library instruction and information literacy.