Slashdot Mirror
Oculus Rift CEO Says Classrooms of the Future Will Be In VR Goggles
jyosim writes "Oculus Rift isn't just for gaming. Brendan Iribe, CEO of the VR company, says the immersive tech will be "one of the most transformative platforms for education of all time." In an interview with Chronicle of Higher Education, he imagined laser-scanning every object in the Smithsonian for students to explore, and collaborating in shared virtual spaces rather than campuses. "The next step past that is when you have shared space, and not only do you believe that this object is right there in front of me, but I look around and I see other people just like we see each other now, and I really, truly believe that you’re right in front of me. We can look at each others’ eyes. If you look down at something, I can look down at the same time. And it’s every bit as good as this. And if we can make virtual reality every bit as good as real reality in terms of communications and the sense of shared presence with others, you can now educate people in virtual classrooms, you can now educate people with virtual objects, and we can all be in a classroom together [virtually], we can all be present, we can have relationships and communication that are just as good as the real classroom," he says.
I taught for a while in the early 2000's. We had to do inventory every year, and our department had a number of giant boxes that incorporated speakers, amps, and eight-track players. No one knew how to work them or if they even worked, and no one remembered ever having any eight-track tapes to play in them, but we had the machines in pristine condition. They'd been moved from the old school building to the new one in the late 90's and kept in the teachers' workroom, and we doubted anyone had touched them in twenty years. After much wrangling, some of us convinced the department chair to let us asset-transfer them back to the school system's central warehouse; we gained an invaluable amount of storage space from the deal.
One aged teacher had 16mm filmstrips. His chair wouldn't let him transfer the filmstrips from his inventory, even though he had no projector for them -- it had broken back during some Presidential administration I probably didn't remember. He said the students had never learned anything from the filmstrips anyway.
Every year the system would buy more clutter that wasn't actually useful for teaching, just for looking good for having new technology. Once the technology isn't new anymore, it finally becomes licit to tell the truth: that the filmstrips and record players never really helped the kids learn to read or add and subtract. The cheapest things -- pencil and paper, chalk, books -- were the most effective tools, because they gave practice. The rest was just inventory, or rather it became inventory once the next fad came along and the hype surrounding the previous fad had faded enough that we were allowed to think that it wasn't the silver bullet that would magically teach the students in place of practice and human interaction.