Steps Toward an Ecology of Writing in Digital Environments: A 21st-Century Walk Through van Gogh's Bedroom

This study examined how exposure to a computer-generated, avatar-based environment influences student composition of an essay in response to a writing prompt. Drawing on the distinctions between firsthand and secondhand experiences, this article sketches an ecological model of writing that attempts to explain why students exposed to an avatar-based environment wrote first-person essays in the present tense, whereas students exposed to a comparable web page-based environment wrote third-person essays in the past tense.