Virtual and Other Learning Spaces: Introduction to the Special Issue

Abstract

Welcome to issue 7(2) of SiSAL Journal, which is a special issue on virtual and other learning spaces. The idea for putting together this special issue arose for two reasons. Firstly, we were inspired by the of submissions for the Self-Access Stories project edited by Katherine Thornton whose aim was to “highlight specific experiences of various areas of self-access management in practice, with a view to providing multiple perspectives on each issue” (Thornton, 2015). Some of the submissions and the ensuing discussion on the topic of virtual and other learning spaces prompted the editorial team to do a further call for papers for this special issue. The second reason for putting together this issue reason is that our own institution is currently preparing for a move to a larger, brand new purpose-built facility and this has inevitably resulted in our reevaluating interpretations of self-access for our own context. We wanted the opportunity to learn from others and invite them to the conversation. Environmental factors play a role in students’ learning both inside and outside the classroom and through this special issue we hoped to explore physical spaces, virtual spaces, and even metaphorical spaces in learning, e.g. Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development – ZPD, or Murphey’s Zones of Proximal Adjusting – ZPA (Murphey, 1996; 2013) from both the practical and theoretical perspectives. This issue contains four full papers, one discussion article edited by Hisako Yamashita, and three papers that form the fifth part of the language learning spaces column edited by Katherine Thornton.