Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

This is pretty much my view as well: virtual reality is "unlikely to be more than a complementary teaching tool for the foreseeable future." That said, "some of the biggest barriers to adoption that survey respondents listed — the prohibitive cost of VR headsets and compatible computer hardware, along with a lack of awareness about virtual learning — have since broken down." That's true - to an extent. But limitations to the modality haven't changed. And that's why (I think) this article focuses on pedagogical affordances. For example: Stanford's Jeremy Bailenson writes, "My avatar … can outperform me as a face-to-face teacher any day. It can pay perfect attention to every student in a class of all 200 or more." Well - no it can't. Nor is it like the illustration for this article. So, beware the oversell of VR and related technologies.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Mar 28, 2024 2:40 p.m.

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