#FINAL 6: Your View of the "Future of Immersive Education"

The Immersive Education initiative is certainly an interesting one, but it is really hard for me to judge how far or how much potential there is to this form of teaching. I will start off by saying there is huge benefits of teaching in an online or virtual environment. These include convenience, exploration, immersion, and really just overall fun. But, at the same time during an earlier assignment for the Sunday course I mentioned some of the issues with Immersive or online education, particularly in virtual worlds. I will once again quote the Terra Nova article (which can be found here: http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2007/05/teaching_in_vr_.html

I will try to echo some similar points, without quoting or repeating myself. My other post is available here: http://mt35801-tang.blogspot.com/2011/04/class-11-4.html

Teaching in a virtual environment is extremely restrictive. Rocket World, in my honest opinion is severely outdated and massively broken. It is simple, but that's about all it has going for it. The MP3 we listened to detailed Moore's Law and the tremendous speed the video gaming industry is growing at, while also mentioning John Carmack and id. Looking at it from an optimistic point of view, sure the possibilities and potential of Immersive Education seem endless, but right now it is stuck using freeware and Open Source software. Prof. Walsh also mentioned that virtual worlds tend to lag behind video games, even though they are directly tied to VG development. This, coupled along with the fact that the video game development scene is nothing like what it was before, is the main obstacle to overcome for Immersive Education.

Second Life is dead; people may still be playing it, but in the grand scheme of things it means very, very little. On that same note, OpenSim (Wonderland) is even more unstable and outdated. There needs to be another platform for iED to operate on in the near future. This necessity brings me back to my previous point of how VGs are not what they used to be. The big releases nowadays are not created by a small number of people working on it for a month or two. They take two to four/five years to make, with staffs of over 100 members. Everything is about making money and profit. As such, nothing is free anymore. People do not give away their products, so finding something like Second Life (but a more quality product) is nearly impossible. Unless someone gives out the source code for their product and someone in the iED initiative actively takes their time to mod that product, no virtual environment is going to come close to being sufficient with the technology at the time.

I skimmed the beginning of Patrick's write-up to see what he touched upon. He mentions the privatization of iED as something that will occur in the future. I don't know whether it'll happen or not, or the current landscape of online classes (yes they are available, but are the number of people taking these classes growing exponentially? I am ignorant of such statistics). But at the end of the day, I think this is something that needs to happen. Regardless of where the funding comes from, I think there needs to be more resources and manpower poured into the iED platform to continue making it viable. I'm not encouraging making iED purely for profit, but the limitations of the platform can largely be fixed by utilizing better tech. Making a profit off education is just the added bonus.

As the worlds in video games grow more and more immersive with each iteration, virtual worlds are not improving in the slightest. The rift between the two grows larger and larger, and how "fake" virtual worlds becomes more pronounced. There is a large difference between this two screenshots:

The Elder Scroll V: Skyrim

My avatar in Rocket World

I fear the more pronounced the differences between video games and virtual worlds is, the more irrelevant "Immersive" education will become. That's not to say I think iED will die in 10 years. The virtual worlds/environments part of the initiative needs to be revamped, but I wholeheartedly support online education. Audio Whiteboard (when working) is an amazing tool, which should also be iterated on to add new features. There are a few options to "fix" the virtual world issues. While I did say that games have staffs of over 100+ people, projects like Minecraft still exist.

While it isn't free, an open playground like Minecraft could an interesting tool for education. Question is... where does the licensing fee for using Minecraft come from. Another option would be to invest in augmented or virtual reality tech. Kinect and/or PS Move+Eye is relatively cheap consumer-grade tech, and the possibilities there are endless. Whether all the research being done at universities (hacking, at this point) to implement different uses for the tech trickles down to mass market education, I'm not sure. But if highly specialized fields such as medicine are going to use the tech, I'm sure classrooms could get some benefit out if it too.

Again, I'm not sure what the situation with iED is currently, but resources (money, mostly) and manpower don't magically appear. However, I am still very curious how Immersive Educaiton will all play out in ten years, but beyond these concerns I'm not really sure what to predict. For now, I think it is more than sufficient to use iED for K-12 (maybe like K-6) students. The magic of virtual environments has not escaped their young minds yet :) It does make me glad to hear about the students in South Park Elementary really enjoying and embracing the technology. I am glad to have been able to help in creating objects to be used for education.

For more information about the Immersive Education platform, please visit  the homepage:

http://ImmersiveEducation.org/