The pedagogy of virtual design studios

Virtual design studios (VDS) are proliferating as schools of architecture experiment with the technology of the Internet. Discussions about VDS typically focus on technological issues — which hardware, what software — or environments — MOOs, ftp. Recently, some papers have been written on the perceptual issues and the social aspects of remote design collaborations, thus contributing to some of the contextual issues within which virtual studios are conducted. This paper contributes another perspective, presenting a review of the pedagogical issues raised in a VDS. It examines the difficulties and opportunities that present themselves in teaching a VDS.