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WW Education and Research Conference

It's been a while since I last posted, and this really should be the last time I make that apology---get real! This week, I'm attending the Sun's Education and Research Conference and got involved in a couple of pretty interesting discussions.

First, the technology that grabbed everyone is virtual reality. Aaron Walsh, from Boston College, gave a series of wonderful demo's of uses of interactive, 3D technology in education. An example of this is the Theban Mapping Project, which allows the visitor to explore tombs of the Pharaohs. It's a great site and worth a visit. Compared to your standard, musty textbooks, you can imagine how much more engaging a site like that can be for a student, and how much fresher it can be for the academic.

As interesting as such a site might be, even more compelling demonstrations were shown where students could participate in explorations of spaces like the Valley of the Kings. A related technology, which we are using at Sun is MPK20/Project Wonderland, which provides a 3D virtual space for collaboration and dissemination of information. There's a great demo here that everyone should watch. It's a great glimpse into what the office, and school room, of the future could be.

There was an interesting presentation by Neil Howe on the Millennials, the generation of people born since 1982. He brought up a lot of interesting characteristics millenials, but one that I think is relevant is that they tend to multi-process much more than people of my generation. They are constantly IM-ing, emailing, and twittering with their friends. Their active groups aren't geographically defined. In many ways, they have begun the process of breaking the limits of our physical locality. They don't need to find a single, centrally located coffee-house to get together. When they share a bottle of wine, it doesn't need to a single bottle.

How does this affect the way that students learn? Won't the physical models we are creating in these 3D models be limiting to our students? Should their avatars exist in more than one place at once? Can't we as educators use this dispersive existence to help identify the connections between different topics in education. While exploring the Thebes, shouldn't we also be exposed to the developments in China? The state of language in different regions?

In other words, aren't we limited enough in the real world by having a single localized physical body? Why do we need to be similarly limited in virtual worlds?

Posted at 07:26PM Feb 27, 2008 by rezippel in Sun  |  Comments[0]