ABSTRACT
At the end of the 20th and start of the 21st centuries, technologies for teaching and learning were becoming more sensorially and spatially sophisticated and socially interactive, ultimately able to create educational experiences through a spatial immersion in and interaction with psychological perceptions or illusions of teachers, learners and subject matter in what was increasingly called the virtual learning environment. Education research had refl ected this evolution, as the classroom had embarked on a path from a once-linear, hierarchical, sender-message-receiver system drawing on the instructivist paradigm (Bloom, Englehard, & Furst, 1956; Blumler, 1979; Katz, 1959; Krathwohl, Bloom, & Masia, 1964; Rosen, 1998) to an interactive social network seated in a social constructivist framework (Bandura, 1977; Daft & Lengel, 1984; Hiltz, 1986; Levie & Lentz, 1982; Liao & Bright, 1991; Short, Williams, & Christie, 1976; Wright, 1970), to an engaging spatial environment that promoted cognitive (thoughtful) and affective (satisfying) performance from a cognitive constructivist perspective (Piaget, 1970; Satterly, 1987; Zajonc, 1984); and fi nally to combinations of these systems (Brunner, 1990; Margules, 1996; Strate, 1999; Zhao, 2002). The road had not been direct or smooth, however, as a balance of teacher, learner, subject matter and technology had been hard to achieve in the rapidly fl uctuating, often intimidating, and exclusive technology world.
