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Manifestations of hard and soft technologies in immersive spaces

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Open access
Authors
Dron, J.
Reiners, Torsten
Gregory, S.
Date
2011
Type
Conference Paper

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Dron, Jon. and Reiners, Torsten and Gregory, Sue. 2011. Manifestations of hard and soft technologies in immersive spaces, in Proceedings of E-Learn 2011: World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education, Oct 17-21 2011, pp. 1895-1904. Honolulu, Hawaii: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education.
Source Title
E-Learn 2011
Source Conference
E-Learn 2011 - World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education
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School of Information Systems
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NOTICE: This is the author’s version of a work in which changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication.

Copyright by AACE. Reprinted from the Proceedings of E-Learn 2011: World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education (2011), with permission of AACE (http://www.aace.org).

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Abstract

Immersive spaces are innately flexible. However, for learners, some constraints and scaffolding may often be valuable. This paper looks at immersive spaces as soft and hard technologies. Soft technologies are technologies enabling creative and flexible use, while hard technologies embed processes that limit creativity but provide efficiency and freedom from error. Technologies may be softened or hardened by assembly. For instance, if your Learning Management System (LMS) has no wiki, then it may be softened by adding one from outside the system. If your wiki has no assessment management system, then it may be hardened by using a LMS. For learning, the intrinsically soft nature of immersive spaces sometimes requires scaffolded hardening. This paper provides an example of an ongoing project that realizes these soft and hard technologies in an immersive virtual space and discusses the rich potential of such spaces for technology assembly.