Presenters: Robert L. Sanders, Library Science; Barbara Bonham, Higher Education; Stephen Bronack, Instructional Technology; Alvin Profitt, School Administration; Gayle Turner, Educational Foundations; Marty Link, Project Manager, Appalachian State University, Boone, North Carolina, USA

There is a general lack of cross-course and cross-program dialogue in colleges of education; program areas remain distinct and separate from one another, promoting program-specific purposes with little regard for analysis of the purposes of others. Few, if any, opportunities are provided to engage students in authentic dialogue about real school problems and issues (Angel and Sanders, 2006). The Reich College of Education’s (RCOE) Conceptual Framework describes a learning environment in which knowledge is socially constructed in a community of practice. One way to accomplish this ideal is to provide common space and common activities to bring students together from different program areas to interact and collaborate. This presentation proposal describes a project built on a successful constructivist model, in which the AETZone Commons, a 3D Immersive Learning Environment was expanded to include the space, tools, and resources for all program areas in the Department of Leadership and Educational Studies (LES) to interact and collaborate. The focus of the project was on the reconceptualization of teaching roles in terms of designing and developing curricular connections to engage students in a larger interdisciplinary conversation about teaching and learning.
The Expanding the Universe project involved faculty from five different program areas. The purpose of the team meetings was to identify common themes, threads, and activities in the discrete program areas to be addressed collaboratively and collectively in the shared common space of the virtual world. It was our belief that the enhancement of existing curriculum in each of the five participating programs could lead to more sweeping changes in each. This project had the potential of forcing program faculty to reexamine existing curriculum in light of new tools and new possibilities afforded by the curricular connections AETZone supports. The use of AETZone encouraged additional program growth by making the LES department unique among graduate programs. At the conclusion of this project, a robust and expanded virtual Commons was developed in response to the collective needs and wants of the cross-program team. This virtual space currently provides a wide variety of tools and resources to encourage student exploration, discovery, interaction, and collaboration, and will continue to support newly designed cross-program experiences and activities developed by the team.

References

Angel, R.B. & Sanders, R.L. (2006). Creating a 3D environment for case study
analysis: Issues raised during reconceptualization of a graduate teaching and learning environment. Published in, Proceedings of the IADIS International Conference on Web Based Communities. San Sebastian, Spain.