Global Learning- Pedagogical Concepts involving Virtual Globes

Recently, virtual globes like NASA Worldwind, Google Earth, MS Local Live and of course ArcGIS Explorer have become significant building blocks for learning environ-ments in Geography and beyond. Due to their free availability and attractive interfaces these virtual globes for many have become synonymous with GIS, even though they 'only' offer an additional interface paradigm by projecting distributed geospatial services onto a globe surface and allowing free navigation without constraints of map sheets, spatial scales of representation (to a degree) and themes. Using these ‘catchy ’ and widely accessible virtual globe interfaces for teaching Geogra-phy-related topics of course is becoming increasingly popular in schools and other educ-tional environments. This paper explores some of the specific characteristics of learning in virtual globe environments. Several types of interactions and workflows are peculiar for navigation and learning in these kinds of environments. Examples are the frequent changing of scales to switch between overview / context and local detail, free lateral pan-ning in order to explore a location's wider surroundings, moving to perspective views fo