Will Holograms and VR Change Education?

The Past

I still remember the first time that I saw a true virtual reality device.  I was a teenager wandering around Six Flags Over Georgia and, wedged between a ski ball machine and some other carnival games, was a boy wandering around an extremely small walled-in circle with this contraption completely covering his head and his hands in some sort of awkward gloves.  As I watched, he tilted his head and held up his hands like a zombie while walking slowly around the circle.  As a young tech nerd, I was completely entranced.  I had to try this "Virtual Reality" game.

This is how cool it looked!

After the boy finished, I plopped down $12 (no small sum for a 13 year old in the early 90s) and played.  I put the Vader-like helmet on my head and two small video screens smeared with the oil of countless other sweaty teenagers presented a landscape of absurdly large polygons meant to resemble an environment populated by "characters."  The gloves made it appear that I was holding a gun.  As I tilted my head and turned, I could see the landscape, which was limited to maybe 30 feet in any direction because of the draw distance of the processor.  I held up the gun and was able to shoot at a few shapes and then it all ended.  The "game" lasted about 2 minutes.  It was a thorough disappointment that was little better than sticking my head straight into a TV.

As the 1990's became the 2000's, virtual reality disappeared and rightfully so.  It was not immersive or a pleasant experience and traditional games were much more appealing.  Additionally, and most telling, virtual reality gained no foothold in education.  The real test of a technology is if it can exist long enough to become part of the glacial adoption process of education.

The Present

Virtual reality is once again gaining traction.  The reason for this is because of the general changes that have occurred in culture as a result of technology, namely the democratization of information.  Early VR was similar to early computing in that it was a closed platform that presented only information that it contained.  Present VR seeks to gather information from a variety of sources and add it into the user's "reality."  For instance, the new Microsoft HoloLens (http://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-hololens/en-us) attempts to overlay information from different sources onto your view using a small headset.  So, you could build a Minecraft castle on your living room floor, or you could examine a paper calendar that populates with dates from your Google calendar as you view it.

So, what about education.  Will VR be adopted as iPads and Chromebooks have?  For the moment, let's assume that it will.  Let's assume that students wearing headsets connected to wireless data will become common in classrooms.

The Benefits

Resistance to VR will be strong in education, just as it has been for almost every other change.  While our culture has adapted to the democratization of information in society, education, as a system, has not.  Education is still viewed by its members and the culture as the system that imparts knowledge to the youth.  While this was once an important function because knowledge was inaccessible due to various factors, the rise of the internet and Web 2.0 has rendered this function obsolete.  The role of education, currently, is to teach youth societal rules and how to create and process knowledge.  So, how will VR benefit this role?

1.  Tighter integration of knowledge with tasks.

The most tedious part of any task is information gathering.  If you doubt this, think about how much you enjoy writing research papers.  I remember photocopying journal articles to highlight before information became available in online databases.  Not a pleasant task.  Currently, though information is literally at our fingertips, it still requires time to pull out a smartphone and look up a piece of information to integrate into a task.  Imagine if the knowledge you needed for your task appeared in your vision alongside the task.  For instance, you are baking a cake and need to convert tablespoons into teaspoons and can't remember the conversion.  Beside the tablespoon in your hand could appear the conversion to teaspoons.

2.  Ability to experience tasks and processes that are dangerous or impossible.

Some processes that we want students to learn are impossible to replicate before them.  For instance, I want students to understand the process of splitting and combining atoms so that they can apply that process to creation of products.  However, if I split an atom in front of my students, I instantly incinerate them, which is inconvenient.  With VR, students could manipulate and play with atoms while learning their functions and the rules that govern their behaviors.  Additionally, imagine if medical students could practice that surgery on something other than a live human.  If students had been able to practice in that way, I would have felt much better than when I saw the group of med students standing in the corner as I succumbed to anesthesia during my most recent surgery.

3.  Cross-cultural and geographic exchange of information.

While the internet has allowed information to flow across geographic and cultural barriers, the greatest reservoirs of knowledge and information are still people themselves.  With VR, students would be able to exchange information and knowledge instantaneously without interruption.  Currently, students can collaborate on tasks using social media and Web 2.0 platforms, but if students could communicate and share instantly translated information across cultural divides within their "reality," knowledge would increase exponentially.

The Drawback

My one reservation with the proliferation of technology in education is very simple.  With the democratization of information, the amount of knowledge available to the individual is so vast as to be impossible to manage.  In the past, librarians, professors, teachers, textbooks, etc. all gathered and sorted information for the student.  With the rise of technology, this task has become the domain of algorithms.  

When we need information quickly, we enter search terms into some collector (usually a search box) and allow an algorithm to sort and present the information to us.  Each of the services that provide search results (Google, for instance) uses a proprietary algorithm to catalog and present information.

My fear is that these algorithms will curb innovation.  While it is convenient to allow a machine to sort and present the information, doing so does have an effect on our ability to sort and present information.  Also, the algorithm can exclude relevant information and bury information deep into the results.  Essentially, our minds become changed by the algorithm and begin to mimic its operation.

Conclusion

I am excited about the future of VR in education.  I believe that it has the power to be as transformative as Web 2.0, which allowed collaboration and the spread, exchange, and manipulation of information by society as a whole.  My biggest fear is that the innate behavior of many educators to fear machines and to attempt to be the gatekeepers to "holy" information will stifle its impact.