Tracing Learning Across, Within, and Between Real and Virtual Worlds: A Discussion of Methods, Ethics, and Findings

There is a renewed recognition that we must study people across different spaces in their lives to better understand situated learning. Since most studies across spaces have been published in the last five years, it is time to step back and share what we know about cross-spatial learning. Further, developing methods to study people across these cross-disciplinary, multi-world spaces is challenging to say the least and involves pragmatic as well as ethical challenges. This symposium brings together researchers from different disciplines in education who have engaged in multi-year studies across informal/formal/virtual/real worlds. The object is to share diverse solutions to methodological and ethical challenges and synthesize major findings concerning learning in these cross-space studies for future directions in research