I was inspired by much of the literature pertaining to the adoption of virtual reality found within innovative learning designs. These technologies have an enormous potential to completely redefine what experiential learning looks and feels like within the contexts of math and science education. I can still remember the many field trips I took as a child and the power of experiential and hands-on learning. Many of these experiences opened my eyes to science at an early age. Novel environments coupled with long bus rides and hands-on activities grounded my learning to something real and secured newly-formed knowledge into my long-term memory for life. VR technology has the potential to dramatically improve student access to experiential learning opportunities and promote student curiosity.
While field trips have enormous pedagogical value, they are expensive, logistical nightmares and a pain to organize. I am excited by the affordances that emerging technology provide classrooms to explore the world like never before without ever stepping foot outside of the school. I see promise in the continued developments into Google Earth’s Street View and virtual reality technology which continue to allow students to explore their world in ways never before imagined. Who knows, Google Earth might one day house a virtual world where online communities share, collaborate and learn from one and other, in turn, completely disrupting the status quo in education and truly transforming the nature of how we teach and learn.
“The same way that you use Internet Explorer or Chrome or Safari to go and visit websites, you’d use Google Earth to go and visit places, and you could author information about those places within Google Earth and then share those things. For example, ‘this is where I went on holiday,’ or ‘this is my view of the political geography of South Africa,’ and use Google Earth as a tool for making that story available to people.” -Ed Parsons (Google Earth’s Chief Geospatial Technologist)
While I acknowledge nothing beats hands-on learning in the real world, virtual learning experiences are far more economical and time efficient. There is no question that VR will become a standard educational tool in every classroom. Soon, it will become common practice for science teachers to take their students for walks along the beaches of Galapagos, for students to virtually stand on top of Mt Everest to conduct experiments and fly across the Arctic to survey the sea ice melt. There will truly be an infinite number of possible ways for teachers to inspire their students to understand the world and draw deeper connections with the curriculum.
This future is not without concern. The questions I have for you are:
1) How will schools adopt VR in their classrooms? Will schools invest in VR “carts” or will students be expected to bring their own device similar to BYOD?
2) What are some limitations to using VR in education? When conducting scientific inquiry, does a lack of touch, smell and taste hinder the learning process?
3) What will be lost in the learning process if hands-on experiences are increasingly replaced by virtual experiences? Are virtual experience less memorable than real experiences? If so, how does one improve the “stickiness” of a virtual experience?