The big transition in learning is the “extra dimensions” we are connecting to that “input” information. in a powerful learning context. We are well on the way to transitioning from textbooks elaborated upon by an in-person teacher/ instructor in sequential “word” based information…to… mobile and immersive multimedia “input” from numerous sources. Whether in a school building, on the school bus, at home, or nearly anywhere else a “student” happens to be, the cloud is there and a teacher/ facilitator can be present in the cloud as well.
Below is just one of the coming flood of “VR Learning Apps”…whose distribution and use are still limited by cost, ease of use, and not yet mature technology. Few would have predicted the ubiquity of smart phones, and how broadly they would impact the population, even of poverty plagued countries and peoples. AR and VR exploit coming new networking technology such as 5G, to create new dimensions of “Immersablity” and “mobility”, and that will take some time to be universally accessible, or at least accessible in concentrated populations such as towns and cities.
Video is becoming ubiquitous as a communication medium. YouTube is generating content at “way beyond conceivable” speeds (see subsequent post)…and it’s affordable, more or less, for most. One can produce YouTubes using a smart phone. Of course, “quality video” costs more to produce, but it’s not Hollywood $$. Many teachers are doing it already, producing content and looking for ways to turn that into a “job”, perhaps similar to the “Lesson Plan Market Place” we learned about in earlier posts.
After that comes AR and VR tech, which has yet to quite cross over into the “everyone has one or is getting one next week” category. It’s complex technology, and requires even more miniaturization than smart phones that fit in one’s pocket.
Yet it will be here, and it will flood the demographics of learners because of what it can do. As one example below. Presumably there will be an aggregator and support platform for content, and tools that make it feasible for mom and pop, and son and sister.
[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/VR-app-gives-students-a-new-way-to-see-inner-workings-of-cells.pdf”]