Ok we've seen people addicted to virtual reality (VR) we just haven't been cognizant of it. Modern video games of course, love them or hate them are predominantly VR worlds. For a long time a small community of people have been trying to adapt gaming to education and some have even succeeded! I applaud the successes. I also congratulate the failures for trying to make education fun. Gaming though imposes certain limits on education that another type of VR does not.
Virtual Reality modeling is a very exciting technology that's available to everyone. The "Story Telling Alice" software from Carnegie Mellon University specifically can be a potential learning goldmine if utilized properly. How?
Get someone excited about something and they'll want to do it and learn as much as they can about it. That's what makes video games so popular. Some people REALLY get into them. An "F", "D" or "C" student academically may surprise you with his/her extensive knowledge of a particular game, its intricacies and peculiarities. Without looking at this persons grades you might think they were excelling academically.
Take this same person and get them excited about story telling and that person will surprise you academically. After all everyone likes to tell stories especially kids. They want to tell you about their problems, successes, issues important to them, friends, plans for the future or a million other topics. The problem is the tools they use. Pen and paper or word processor don't excite most people let alone kids. That becomes a chore. Put them in a class that is specifically designed to make them tell stories in worlds that they've created, with characters of their choosing and with stories that they've imagined and they will pull out the pen and paper or the word processor to write their stories so that they can put them into VR worlds. Now the story telling isn't just for the teacher, it's for everyone. No one but the teacher would read their story. But with a VR project they can post their work on the web on myspace or utube and share their stories with the world.
Kids want to do real work, not school work. VR makes their work real. It's something that they can show the world.
Now that's exciting!
Did I mention interdisciplinary studies? We'll save that for next time....
Stan Cerin
www.ivydatasciences.com
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