It is perhaps of note that Axios decided on 7 parts to their “Metaverse Deep Dive”, as back in the late aughts PSA decided that 7 elements were needed to describe an optimal ed tech outcome. One needed an approach that merged parts into one whole, one overall process or approach. Lacking same, one could not hope to advance to best practices for each element, or to reach that state where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
*Silos refer to single entities that lack connectivity, Pizzas are things were all the ingredients blend together into one experience.
The challenge being we know there’s a great disruption in communication underway, and we know the internet as a proper noun doesn’t begin to explain all the moving parts, or even just list them; to say nothing of revealing how those parts work together to change our ways of living.
It’s the same circumstance with EdTech, and now the attempt to gather most every communication disruption under one umbrella…and call it “The Metaverse”. One needs to start with a list, and the number seven has some historical import, some bit of mystical “rightness”. But of course any number might be chosen. How about ten elements of optimal Defined Learning Experiences, or parts of the “Metaverse”? Or five or twenty or a hundred?
Lists are relatively easy to assemble, but explaining how each element in the list brings change is harder. Somehow coming up with an awareness of what sort of whole the parts create is extremely challenging, if not beyond us.
Marshall McLuhan tried to talk about “media” as a whole, but was in some ways defeated in so doing, and “reduced” to what some complain were way too vague metaphors and similes. But we are today attempting the same task McLuhan did, albeit with more “media elements” to keep track of, and to merge into a whole that we can at least point to, if not understand.
Though “understanding media” is a pre-requisite for finding our way forward, we are in “early days” of accomplishing that task.
Such a circumstance is exactly what our academic culture, and think tanks, and journalists have great difficulty seeing, much less explaining for us in ways that lead towards advanced merging of such elements into something like a “Metaverse”. Other players that one might expect to be able to merge media elements into an “ecosystem of advanced capabilities”, have as yet not done so. (Big Tech, and Big Entertainment).
Perhaps even less holistic awareness is available for EdTech entities that hope to deliver on all the promise of merging the essential elements into a whole that can be funded and promulgated and enshrined as our new best practices for learning and education. To expect the educational bureaucracy at the national, state, or local level to figure it all out is an expectation unsupported by previous experience.