I'm reading "Virtual-Reality School Is the Next Frontier of the School-Choice Movement/The conservative education activist Erika Donalds envisions a world where parents can opt out of traditional public school by putting their kids in a headset" (The New Yorker).
"In the K-12 setting... 'Nobody has any idea, scientifically, about what happens when a child wears a V.R. headset for hours per day, over weeks and months on end.'... V.R. use can cause simulator sickness, a kind of motion sickness.... Long-term V.R. use can also lead to something called reality blurring.... [I]n some studies, when people stay in headsets for long periods, they have trouble distinguishing between real life and V.R.... The other potential issue with V.R. school is the lack of community.... Reducing the social importance of school in kids’ lives is perhaps a feature of the virtual school, not a bug. Several people I spoke with mentioned that many of the students had previously been bullied, and that V.R. school can be a haven for children with social anxiety...."
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So put them in a mask and have them attend by zoom. That’s the way.
V.R. school can be a haven for children with social anxiety
I hate to see kids suffer. But - is it the best thing to remove all social challenges? Unless a child is going to grow up in an environment where there will never, ever be a mean person or an awkward moment, isn't this robbing the child of vital training?
I can see a place for VR in a classroom. But I doubt that full-VR school is going to turn out well for kids' development as human beings, however engaged they may be in their lessons.
I'm not the smartest person in town but isn't a VR headset a little overkill for this job? Even if costs come down, using headset money (or likely less) to buy a large, high quality flat screen monitor seems like a better option.
How important will it be to have a lovely VR view of early settlers riding down the Ohio River in a canoe? Or ... Oh Look! I see the square root of 25 hiding over there behind that tree.
Complete inability to see the irony. Now not going to school in person is a "conservative" idea. Great link!
Wonder why Erica didn't mention the negative affect on teachers' unions, the potential reduction in property tax bills and the elimination of school drag queen story hours? I'm sure those things were at the top of mind at the New Yorker.
Will the Classical virtual reality depict the Greek and Roman slaves?
A school recreates the issues of Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace
An overemphasis on technology drew attention away from the story line, the choice of actors and dialogue (i.e., Jar-Jar Binks), and audience appeal. It was a fine kids movie for small children, but made most adults gag. I suggest using virtual-reality technology in moderation and in a way that is akin to field trips, or suffer a similar fate.
School always begins with the "boring" 3Rs. Those alone teach you how to survive and solve new problems, while the rest of schooling is nice but often surface decoration.
Anything that gets young people involved in a positive way is a good thing. This is especially true of boys.
Why would the teacher "spawn a set of bleachers" when you can just as easily seat the children in the actual Roman Coliseum, or create a virtual reconstruction of it during its heyday? These people don't even have the imagination to be teachers.
And the objections to VR are equally stupid. Nobody had any idea, sciencifically, about what happens when a child wears a body restraint for long periods of time and yet we invented seat belts anyway. It's possible to do responsible virtual reality learning and still have schools where children congregate with other students and get that training alongside it.
The resistance here is that teachers don't want parents knowing what they are teaching the children and VR allows the parents to watch. Can't have that now can we?
We're done with public schools. Only the stupid and poor will attend them. America is going to become a two-tiered society ... "Smart" people and "Idiots."
Much in the same way that when people stay in the academic world for long periods, they have trouble distinguishing between real life and AR (academic reality).
For example, their field distortion causes them to believe that "perfect communism" can in fact exist and be very much like, well, their campus life - minimal workload, big pay check, career tenure, cushy retirement benefits, and best of all, everything paid for... by a capitalist system. OK, never mind that last part. Perfect communism can exist. Oh, and "perfect diversity" too (i.e., without too many black people on the faculty, if you check out the statistics). Never mind that too. AR is totally "Optima".
We traveled to all those exciting places with books. I sound like a geezer, I know. Books were also a haven for kids with social anxiety. What happens when a child reads all the time?
I didn't enjoy the VR goggle experience. It was visually very cool, but it made me carsick.
As the real world gets worse, our over-lords will demand we put on our VR masks, have some legal drugs and segue into a state of fake bliss.
I was an early adopter of VR, getting an HTC Vive six years ago and have taught physics in high school for 25 years.
VR has very limited use in education. In physics, students have to do challenging problems. Virtually operating a catapult would be cool, but doesn't have much to do with figuring out where the rock is going to land. The same is true in math, and I suspect most other fields.
VR might be useful in a foreign language course, geology and a few other educational situations.
A key objective, if our democracy is to survive, is to move from mandatory tax-financed public schooling to true school choice. Civilized countries, such as Sweden, have made this switch decades ago. This program can be seen as one choice parents might make if such choices were available.
https://www.cato.org/commentary/sweden-school-choice
Yes, let's spend more money on technology in education. Throwing more money at the problem has solved every educational issue we have encountered, right?
And why not have the parents do VR work while the kids are doing VR school? Or join Meta and do coding or legal briefs in one of the rooms? Come home with an auto driver car if they must do in person work? Eat food obtained from DoorDash? And finish off the day with Netflix?
"Virtual reality" is an oxymoron. Education is focused on reality; focusing on unreality is not helpful. True, it can try to substitute for imagination.
Use of V.R. is obviously not an all or nothing choice. I see it maturing into selective use and for limited periods of time. A picture is worth a thousand words, right?
My eyes kept wanting to see “classical virtues related” curriculum, which would be really cool.
VR sounds like a solution looking for a problem to solve. Schools are probably full of people who would rather mess around with VR than do the actual difficult and repetitive work they were hired to do. Doesn't make it a good idea.
"Classroom" VR just strikes me as a gimmick, and I suspect that the effort to link it to conservative homeschooling is mainly a marketing strategy.
A truly radical, innovative reform would be a return to traditional classroom instruction, coupled with homework, on traditional classroom subjects, devoid of any ideological indoctrination or instruction on how to be a future left-wing activist. And not including any sexual content beyond teaching how babies are made.
Whatever it takes to get them out of the public school child abuse centers.
Randomizer said...
I was an early adopter of VR, getting an HTC Vive six years ago and have taught physics in high school for 25 years.
VR has very limited use in education. In physics, students have to do challenging problems.
Agree. I get the feeling that a lot of people think being in "STEM" consists of taking some survey courses and then being an HR manager at some tech company. Sometimes you really do have to do the math.
And the objections to VR are equally stupid. Nobody had any idea, sciencifically, about what happens when a child wears a body restraint for long periods of time and yet we invented seat belts anyway. It's possible to do responsible virtual reality learning and still have schools where children congregate with other students and get that training alongside it.
Several assertions in here.
1. Objections to VR equally stupid to the examples of use of VR in the piece (when we do have evidence of what lack of social interaction does to kids, as well as evidence of what over-exposure to the "virtual reality" of social media does).
2. No (scientific) evidence for how restraining children for long periods would affect them (except for cradle boards, baby slings, etc., in which babies and toddlers spent a lot more time than they typically do in cars). (I know this was used just an analogy, but in the interests of completeness...)
3. It's possible to do responsible VR in schools (but who defines "responsible" when we're talking about a culture in which so often more is better, and school choice people seem willing to jump on any bandwagon as long as it bears the name "charter" or "cyber"?).
I am very pro school choice. And personally I've been an early adopter of a lot of technologies, some of which have failed spectacularly. But I am also small-c conservative, and therefore skeptical of things that haven't been tried and shown to be effective, especially (in my case) where kids are concerned. It seems to me that the burden of proof here is on those who want to introduce VR into education, whether "responsibly" or for the cool factor.
Virtual reality is great, but it can skew lessons on reality out of any correlation to reality. Did the villas have the slaves working in the kitchens, or wasn't that shown? Did the trash and bodies and crowding and permit fees on Everest teach the kids anything, or wasn't that shown?
I think a VR lesson of actual video from the present-day sites might be really useful. And the past can be reconstructed, but should include everything known about the past.
Compared to screens and regular headsets, VR can be much more immersive, not just taking students to new places, but also creating new virtual spaces where interaction and problem-solving can occur, adapted to student level and interest. Doesn't have to be all-VR all the time to be a useful component of alternative schooling. The question is not whether VR use in early education has intrinsic merit, but how much it can enhance education compared to the ordinary experience of kids in crappy schools. Jury's out, I think.
It's not the same, but...it's in the same vein. Reading this reminded me of an article I read just yesterday in The Free Press. One young person's views on educations. It's...refreshing.
A Constitution for Teenage Happiness. This seems like a much better solution than VR. VR would clearly eliminate the much needed human interaction, much needed for most people, but not all. And while the answer for this person is home schooling, to me the point of it is that we ceased intellectually challenging our young people. We ceased making school and learning a difficult, but rewarding task. We ceased to look at learning the classics as fundamental to knowing how to view the present, if not the future. Instead, we offer them new pronouns, a country to learn to hate, and parents as the enemy.
Mark said...
"Yes, let's spend more money on technology in education. Throwing more money at the problem has solved every educational issue we have encountered, right?"
Look at it from another point of view. VR doesn't have a teachers union. Maybe the little dearsd will actually learn history, civic, and literature.
Gotta be chaeper than keeping a brain dead lump on the payroll.
There is something to this.
The illustrious Scott Adams made an argument a year or so ago that virtual learning could be a great benefit.
Essentially, there are millions of kids stuck in crappy schools with crappy teachers and they learn nothing.
Why not identify the best teachers in the nation/world and have them teach millions of kids instead of just a single classroom.
They would also be paid millions of dollars because they are excellent.
The biggest downside I see is that, of course, the system will be corrupted and we won't get 'the best,' but rather a government lackey spouting gender and climate change propaganda...Big Brother come to life.
So there's that...
My own education was enriched immensely by the occasional record, or (happy happy joy joy!) crappy old film on a balky projector. High tech.
3D, VR, immersive media in general make me nauseous* pretty quickly.
*Pedant bait.
Why go to VR? just write up a computer program.
It just occurred to me that in Star Trek TNG, they didn't have any scenes of teachers holding classes for kids on the holodeck. They did use the holodecks for adult training, but they still maintained a traditional classroom for the kids. Also, holodeck classes for children might increase the odds of holo-adiction later in life if young children spend too much time on a holodeck.
Spending time with primary and secondary school chums last month on holiday reminded me again of how much i loved going to brick and mortar school. Even in the days before pocket computers and before the end of corporal punishment.
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