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Transmedia – a single experience that spans across multiple forms of media – is still a new media in the educational landscape and therefore may pose a challenge to educators wanting to create opportunities for interactive media communications in their classrooms. In this chapter, we share an instance in which a university professor introduced transmedia to support graduate student learning to encourage inquiry, critical thinking, problem solving, creativity, contemplation, and critical discourses. Further, we examine how two of the graduate students took their learning a step further by designing and creating a model transmedia lesson tailored for the 6th grade Social Studies classroom. This chapter provides a theoretical framework within which transmedia may be used: Learning and teaching as communicative actions theory – LTCA.

This chapter discusses two instructional designs that sought to leverage the multiuser virtual environment Second Life to support learning and instruction with both undergraduate and graduate students at two different universities. We examine each of these curricular developments in depth and provide findings from research conducted with each. Using data collected from students and faculty, we describe 11 research-based virtual world design principles that emerged from each experience that include such suggestions as Create opportunities for sustaining virtual community beyond a task and Expect your learners to go off-task. These principles may be used by readers to guide future designs that use virtual worlds to support learning.

This chapter argues that the process of imagination is molded by the intersecting notions of space, time, and measurements. It shows that economic spaces are shaped by notions of particular space-time held by historical actors and by imaginations of their past and future fictional spaces. The case study of colonial period South Asia examines how financial accounting and other measurements were co-opted to give form to future “fictional” expectations. South Asian economic spaces are shown to be the locus for control and dominance of future economic relationships, which were visualized in particular ways by the colonial rulers.

A conclusion reached is that economic spaces are not just enclosed spaces within borders where economic activity occurs shaped by the dominant culture and economy of a state. The economic spaces in colonial India were sites of economic conflict and violence, where contesting notions of economic time collided, and where widely contrasting economic futures were imagined. Indian nationalists looked into the past to spur their imagination of a different future for India. In fact, the conflict or violence that was part of the recasting of India’s national economic space was not entirely between racial groups (European colonists and native Indians) or strictly between economic classes (bourgeoisie upper castes and proletariat lower castes). Contrary expectations amongst the nationalists themselves are apparent. The process of imagination reveals the ensemble of cultural, social, and technical practices that actors used to give form to fictional expectations of the future and the spatialisation of economic spaces.

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.

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.

Peter Adds is Associate Professor and the current Head of School for Te Kawa a Māui (the School of Māori Studies), Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He has worked in Māori Studies at Victoria since 1984 following on from attaining a Master's degree in anthropology and archaeology, and he teaches Māori and Polynesian history and Māori customary concepts. He is on the executive committee of the Māori Association of Social Science. He is of Te Atiawa ki Taranaki descent and is in their Claim Negotiation team, having led the Waitangi Tribunal research for the Taranaki land claim. He is currently engaged in negotiations with the Crown seeking a Treaty settlement for his tribe. A former Ministerial appointment to the Board of the NZ Historic Places Trust and a member of the Maori Heritage Council, Peter has a strong background in heritage issues and was the keynote speaker at the NZ Archaeological Conference in 2010. He is an internationally recognized researcher and scholar and has extensive consultancy and training experience in areas relating to the Treaty of Waitangi.

The chapters in this book focus on using different types of multimodal, multimedia, and transmedia technologies to create technology-rich learning environments that have the potential to enable higher levels of academic motivation, participation, and engagement. Developments in relatively low cost and abundant digital technologies, coupled with the improvements in contemporary learning theories and pedagogical practices, are quickly enhancing and transforming the way we teach and learn in the 21st century and changing our understanding of what it means to teach and learn in a highly web-based multimedia world. At the individual, group, and institutional levels, these technologies are being used in a variety of ways for a variety of purposes. In teaching and learning, they offer promising and innovative ways to create more interesting and enjoyable academic environments and offer more meaningful and authentic ways to better engage the senses of learners. Mayer (1997) states that multimedia-based teaching and learning offers many benefits to educators (e.g., a variety of instructional options, more effective learning, and more efficient use of instructor time especially for very large classes). This is based on the core multimedia principle posited by Mayer (2005): people tend to learn more deeply with both words and images than from words alone.