ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates Digital screen mediation in action in both autonomous—independent—online learning and formal online coursework. Just like in live classrooms, intelligent uses of digital visuals in online learning venues can boost learners’ active, authentic involvement with target content. Visuals are central to most online learning materials, including for-pay publisher sites and products. In addition to straight exposition via text, visuals, audio, and/or video, there are educational interactives with which to engage in order to learn. Online conversations via social media are most often supported and enhanced by commonly viewed visuals. A key advantage when experiencing 3D environments is many opportunities to virtually examine and manipulate targeted phenomena that avatar perspectives afford. The visually immersive worlds of videogames are constituted of images that invite not only simple interaction but also entryways into intriguing places. The visually immersive digital environments that are now prevalent in daily digital screen uses are reminiscent of transcendent quality of the early twentieth-century Arcades Project.
