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August, 1993.
Virtual Reality (VR) has caught the imagination of many people. Frequent
reports in the popular and technical press describe the hardware and software
that permit people to "enter" a computer-created "world" and give accounts of
what the VR experience is like. Invariably, these reports end with claims for
the applicability of VR to all manner of activities, including education.
This paper discusses the potential value of VR to education. It does so in the
light of research conducted at the Human Interface Technology Laboratory at the
University of Washington and on the basis of recent developments in cognitive
theory that are relevant to human learning. The case is made that immersive VR
offers very different kinds of experience than those students normally
encounter in school. The psychological processes that become active in
immersive VR are very similar to the psychological processes that operate when
people construct knowledge through interaction with objects and events in the
real world. Such a convergence of learning processes with experiences permitted
by technology is relatively rare and requires that we rigorously examine both
the psychological and the technological sides of the equation. This paper
therefore starts with a description and analysis of VR. It then describes
recent psychological theories of knowledge construction. Finally it examines
the nature of the confluence of VR and constructivist learning theory -- the
"goodness of fit" between the two, concluding that constructivism is the best
basis for building a theory of learning in virtual environments.
As a new technology seeks its identity, there is bound to be ambiguity in early
attempts to define it. The roots of the field, at least in its popular
conception, can be traced to the development of head-mounted devices (HMD's)
for use by fighter pilots (Furness, 1989) and for computed-aided design
(Sutherland, 1965). The point of these early projects was to place participants
in environments that provided them with just the information they needed and
with which they could interact as naturally as they could with the real world.
This required: 1) HMD's with a wide field of view so that objects in the world
could be detected by peripheral and well as foveal vision, ideally subtending a
visual angle of 200 degrees horizontally and 120 degrees vertically (Furness,
1989); 2) tracking the position and attitude of the participant's body; 3)
transducers that interpreted participants' natural behaviors, such as looking
and pointing, as commands to the computer; and 4) negligible delays in the rate
at which the virtual environment was updated in response to participants'
movements and actions. These four conditions are necessary for immersive VR. As
a result of total immersion in a virtual world, participants report a very real
sense of being in another place -- a phenomenon known as "cognitive presence"
(Bricken, 1990) -- as well as a conviction that a virtual world is a valid,
though different, form of reality.
Recently, the term "Virtual reality" has been applied more widely (Heim, 1993)
to include graphics applications that allow users to walk through a simulated
environment and, possibly, to interact with objects in it. However, "desktop
VR" (e.g. Lavroff, 1992) does not meet the four necessary conditions for
immersion mentioned in the previous paragraph and therefore does not engender
presence. The user interacts with it, as with any other computer program, by a
mouse or keyboard or joystick rather than by looking or pointing. HMD's and
position-tracking are usually not used. Although this kind of non-immersive VR
has a great many potential uses in education, and costs but a fraction of
immersive systems, it offers no more than a few modest extensions of computer
graphics programs. The following discussion is concerned only with immersive
VR.
The VR systems that Furness (1986) developed for the Air Force were designed to
simplify the interface through which pilots interacted with the airplane. The
"Super Cockpit" was one in which the pilot could access the data he needed and
could operate some of the aircraft's controls by performing natural actions,
such as looking, pointing, and touching. The interface was simplified to the
point where it became totally unobtrusive. In fact, for immersive VR, the
interface has ceased to exist altogether (M. Bricken, 1991a).
The removal of the interface between computer and user is a necessary condition
for immersion in VR. The participant "wears the computer" (W. Bricken, 1991),
is inside the data. As a result, participants can interact with the virtual
world, which might be a simulation of some aspect of the real world, an
instantiation of some abstraction that would otherwise only be accessible as
numerical data, or a creation entirely of whim or fancy, as naturally as they
do with the real world. It is largely on the advantages of the natural
interactions that occur when the interface disappears that many writers have
based their endorsements of VR.
Two other less obvious but more profound changes occur as a result of immersion
which are particularly important for education. First, the subject-object
distinction that exists between people and information in computers, or between
students and much of what they learn in school, disappears (W. Bricken, 1991).
Second, immersion permits entirely non-symbolic interaction with the world.
Both of these deserve comment.
First-person experience in virtual worlds.
We know the world in two ways. First, we know the world as a result of our
everyday interactions with it. This knowledge is direct, personal, subjective
and often tacit in the sense that we often do not know that we know something
(Polanyi, 1958). Second, we know the world as it is described to us by someone
else. This knowledge is vicarious, communal, objective and explicit. We always
know when we have acquired this kind of knowledge, because it has been taught
to us.
The experiences that lead to the first, subjective, kind of knowledge are
called "first-person" experiences, experiences and knowledge of the second kind
"third-person" (Clancey, 1993; Searle, 1992). Here is an example. A
first-person account of my listening to a piece of music would express in some
way my enjoyment of the melody and harmony. A third-person account would
include an explanation of how vibrations in the musical instruments cause sound
waves to form in the air, which create sympathetic vibration of my eardrum,
which causes small amounts of electrical current to flow through my auditory
nerve to my brain. I could, of course, give a third-person account of my
first-person enjoyment of the music by describing it to a friend. However, that
account would be qualitatively very different from my personal experience.
The experiences and actions that arise from first-person knowledge are normally
characterised by an absence of deliberate reflection. This means that action
flows directly out of perception of the world without the intervention of
conscious thought. In fact, most of what we accomplish in our daily lives is
achieved without our deliberately thinking about it. Heidegger (1962) refers to
this phenomenon as "throwness". We are "thrown along" the busy course of our
lives with no time to reflect on what we do until after the event, if at all.
Lave (1988) and Suchman (1987) present extensive evidence that thinking in the
real world about real-world problems, such as using a Xerox machine or making a
recipe, is non-reflective in this way. People do not usually plan ahead about
how they will solve day-to-day problems. They simply use what is on hand at the
time and attempt to perform the task. A recipe problem involving liquid
measures is therefore solved very differently from one requiring the
measurement of solid quantities. Even professionals only reflect when a dilemma
confronts them, and even then the reflective act is not dissociable from action
(Schon, 1983, 1987). Winograd and Flores (1986) go further and imply that,
until things go wrong and we are forced to attend to a problem, reflection gets
in the way of action. And Varela, Thompson and Rosch (1991) propose that all
cognition is based on real-time action in the world, going so far as to claim
that perception itself is not possible without action.
Recently, neuroanatomical evidence has been cited as grounds for removing
reflection from the perception-action loop (Clancey, 1993; Edelman, 1989,
1992). The idea is that connections among perceptual and motor groups of
neurons are "re-entrant". This means that they are connected bi-directionally
and can interact with each other and simultaneously with new information from
the senses, without the intervention of what Edelman (1992, p. 89) calls a
"supervisor" that summarizes and interprets the information the neural groups
send back and forth. The higher areas of the brain that are implicated in
active thought do not appear to be involved at all.
First-person experiences are therefore natural, non-reflective, private, and
predominate in our everyday interactions with the world. On this view,
interacting with a computer through an interface is a third-person experience.
Even though we may master the keyboard or mouse to a level of skill where we
use them automatically, the information the machine presents always requires
reflection before we respond to it, is always objective, usually comes from
someone other than ourselves, and precludes interactivity on the basis of
natural behavior. We experience the computer as an object "out there" in the
world. The information it gives us is contained in it and is not directly
accessible. It is for this reason that software designers are frequently
concerned, first and foremost, about our mental model of the system projected
by the interface (Norman, 1986), and only then with the functionality of the
program. The interface creates a boundary around the computer and its
information, and establishes the distinction between us -- "subject" -- and it
-- "object". In short, it defies first-person experiences.
As we have seen, however, immersion in a virtual world effectively removes the
interface allowing us to cross the subject-object boundary that exists between
us and the machine (W. Bricken, 1991). Once this has happened, our experiences
in the virtual world can be of exactly the same quality as our experiences in
the real world. The knowledge they engender is direct, personal, subjective and
often tacit, in other words first-person. Immersive VR allows us to create from
our experiences the kind of knowledge that has hitherto been accessible only
through direct experience of the world, never through computer interfaces,
desktop VR, or any of the third-person experiences that predominate in
school.
Non-symbolic interaction.
From my description of first-person and third-person experiences, it is clear
that the latter are symbolic and the former usually are not. Any medium, like
the computer, has its own symbol system (Salomon, 1979) without which it can
convey no information at all. We read text symbols and pictorial icons from the
screen. We are shown data as charts and graphs. We hear earcons which tell us
something about the state of the system or direct the next step in our
interaction with it. All of these are conventional and have to be learned at
some time or other. In fact, in many school subjects learning the symbol system
of a knowledge domain is a prerequisite to learning its content, as in
mathematics or music. Unfortunately, mastery of the symbol system is often
mistaken for mastery of the content, and teaching stops before students really
"get into" the material. They learn a lot about Mathematics without
really learning Mathematics at all.
If mastery of a symbol system is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition
for learning through third-person experiences, it is not so for learning
through the first-person experiences of immersive VR. Immersive VR allows
students to interact with the world using what W. Bricken (1991) calls the
"natural semantics" of the world. It is perfectly possible, for example, for
students to learn the conceptual basis of Algebra without learning its
conventional symbols (Winn & Bricken, 1992) provided that the learning
experience is direct, personal and implicit. If students learning Algebra in
immersive VR are forced to symbolize their experiences so that they can be
communicated in the third person -- to a teacher or in a test, perhaps -- the
reflection this requirement imposes gets in the way of the natural course of
learning, just as any unbidden reflection destroys first-person experience.
(Heidegger [1962] calls this "breakdown".) It is therefore the case that
immersive VR can allow students to learn concepts and to solve problems
non-symbolically. Indeed, the symbol system can be learned subsequently once
the concepts have been mastered. However, knowing the symbol system is neither
a precondition nor a catalyst for learning, an eventuality that is certain to
be beneficial to students who have particular predispositions to learn that are
not supported in third-person symbol-based classroom activities.
These observations anticipate a more extensive examination of educational uses
of VR in section V below. Before dealing with that issue, we first turn to a
review of relevant aspects of psychological theory underlying learning and
instruction.
The chances are that VR would be little more than another educational gimmick
were it not for the fact that the theory that directs the design and use of
technology-based educational systems is currently undergoing a radical
revision. In fact, educational computing has gone through three generations
and, coinciding with the advent of VR, is entering a fourth.
The first generation was shaped by the same enthusiasm for behavioral theory
that gave rise to traditional approaches to instructional design (e.g. Gagne,
Briggs & Wager, 199?; Dick & Carey, 19??). The assumptions underlying
this "first generation" of computer-based education were: 1) Student behavior
is reasonably predictable if enough is known about the intended outcomes of
instruction, the methods it employs and the conditions under which it occurs
(Reigeluth, 1983); 2) The knowledge and skills students are to master can be
reduced, using appropriate analytical techniques, to "atomic" components
(Landa, 1983), the mastery of which will, in aggregate, produce the intended
behavior; 3) Prescriptive instructional theory is sufficiently reliable for the
procedures of instructional design to ensure that instruction developed by
their systematic application will work effectively without further intervention
from designers or teachers (Gagne & Dick, 1983). Arguments that these
assumptions are seriously flawed have been made on a variety of grounds
(Streibel, 1991; Winn, 1990, 1993). Nonetheless, a great deal of computer-based
education still goes on that follows this content-oriented approach based on
the traditional procedures of instructional design.
The "second generation" of computer-based education saw something of a shift
from the instructional designer's emphasis on content to the message designer's
emphasis on how information is presented to students (see Fleming & Levie,
1993). This emphasis arose from the realization that how students process
information has a greater impact on what they learn than the accuracy of task
reduction and the prescription of instructional strategies on the basis of
content. The focus on the design of instructional messages arose from
psychologists' realization that behavioral theory provides an incomplete
account of human learning, leads to inadequate prescriptions for instructional
strategies, and that cognitive theories of learning and instruction are more
satisfactory sources for instructional designers to draw upon for guidance
(Bonner, 1988; Champagne, Klopfer & Gunstone, 1982; DiVesta & Rieber,
1987; Tennyson & Rasch, 1988; Winn, 1990). The emergence of the second
generation got a considerable boost from the realization that no two students
are alike in their psychological make-up (see Gardner, 1983, 1993) and that
sometimes these differences among individual students are sufficiently
important to require the prescription of instructional methods matched to their
aptitude (Cronbach & Snow, 1977) and their ability (Tobias, 1976, 1989).
The "third generation" of computer-based education arose from the belief that
the nature of the interaction between the student and instruction is a
determinant of learning of equal if not greater importance than content or how
information is presented. This orientation is also strongly grounded in
cognitive science. Indeed cognitive theories, such as Anderson's
ACT* (Anderson, 1983), have formed the basis of just about all
attempts to develop highly interactive "intelligent" computer-based tutors
(Wenger, 1987). The strongest and one of the most recent expressions of this
approach is Merrill's (1991, 1993) "Instructional Transaction Theory" which is
based on the idea that all learning results from an interaction ("transaction")
between student and program.
From an approach to computer-based education that relies on an understanding of
how students interact with courseware, it seems, at first sight, to be but a
short step to the assumptions of the "fourth generation", that knowledge is
constructed by the students themselves, not delivered by the courseware. The
idea of knowledge construction is by no means new to cognitive science.
Bartlett (1932) was among the first to propose that learning occurred as people
constructed "schemata" that represented the world for them. Neisser (1976)
extended this idea to suggest that schemata guide the way people search the
environment for information, causing them to anticipate what they might find
there. Today, most textbooks on teaching and learning describe the tenets of
cognitive science in some detail. And many of the recent theories that deal
specifically with knowledge construction are soundly based in cognitive theory,
for example Spiro et al's (1991) "Cognitive Complexity Theory", and Bransford
et al's (1990) theory of "Anchored Instruction".
However, many "constructivists" are taking the more radical tack of rejecting
cognitive science as a basis for instructional design and technology (Allen,
1992; Bednar, Cunningham, Duffy & Perry, 1992; Cunningham, 1993; Streibel,
1991). The emergence of this fourth constructivist "generation" is driven by a
vigorous criticism of the assumptions of cognitive science. It is in this
criticism, and in the theories that are promoted as the hiers of cognitivism,
that the confluence of educational theory and VR technology is becoming
apparent.
The accounts of learning provided by cognitive science are built around the
ideas that the mind works like a computer, and that cognition consists of the
mental manipulation of symbols (Boden, 1988; Jackendoff, 1987; Johnson-Laird,
1988; Pylyshyn, 1984). For example, Marr's (1982) seminal work on vision is
based on the premises that the brain is too complex to understand and that
therefore we must explain cognition by means of computations based on
mathematical functions that purport to model cognitive processes. (Marr was
extremely successful in explaining low-level vision in this way. The question
is whether a computational approach is appropriate for higher-level processes.)
As a second example, Larkin and Simon's (1987) account of how people process
the information in diagrams desribes a production-system model of how people
store and inspect nodes in an internal information network.
The criticism of cognitive science is aimed particularly at its computer
metaphor for mind and at the inevitable consequence of this assumption, that
cognition is essentially symbol manipulation. You will recognize that these two
grounds for criticism are exactly those that we saw above to be the reasons why
the presence of a computer interface limits students' experiences in
computer-based education to the "third person". The corollary, of course, is
that non-symbolic, non-reflective, first-person psychological activity that
occurs when people interact directly with worlds, whether real or virtual, has
no place in the theories of cognitive science. This is a fatal omission
according to the constructivists and to critics of cognitive science generally
(Dreyfus, 1972; Edelman, 1992; Searle, 1992).
Criticism of the dominant paradigm cannot be taken seriously unless those
making it propose a valid alternative. The constructivists offer a variety of
accounts of how knowledge is constructed and learning occurs. While these
accounts have not yet been drawn together into a unified theory, the following
three assumptions about knowledge construction provide a basis for guiding the
design of learning experiences and for implementing VR.
Humans are informationally closed systems.
The work of the biologist Maturana (Maturana & Varela, 1987; Varela
Thompson & Rosch, 1991) has been particularly influential with some
constructivists (e.g. Cunningham, 1993). Maturana proposed that living
organisms, including humans, do not take information in from the outside, but
rather react to "perturbations" in the environment through the adaptation of
existing structures within them. Interaction with the environment therefore
does not add "ingredients" to an organism's physical structure or symbols to
its mental structure, but causes qualititative and quantitative changes in the
structures that already exist. The ability to detect perturbations and the kind
of structural change that they bring about is determined by the phylogeny of
the species and the history of the individual's previous adaptations. The world
as each of us understands it is therefore the product of structural adaptation
to perturbations.
There is no "standard" objective world.
It follows that the world each organism constructs is unique. To give an
extreme example, a bat is equipped to adapt to very different perturbations in
its environment than humans. A world constructed primarily from ultrasonic
reflections from objects in the environment will be very different from one
built from information limited to the visible portion of the electromagnetic
spectrum. As Nagel (1974) has pointed out, even though we may be able to
construct a third-person description of the bat's sensory and
information-processing apparatus, we can never know first-hand what it is like
to be a bat.
The same is true among humans. Although we can communicate with each other, we
usually do so symbolically. This means that my experience of someone else's
world can only be my experience of a description of that world. It is
inevitably a third-person experience. I can never really know the true nature
of someone else's world. This conclusion has been the basis of claims by
constructivists that instructional designers are wrong to assume that they can
base instructional strategies on the analysis of an objective, standard world
(Duffy & Jonassen, 1992) and that evaluation of learning can only tell us
what students appear, or pretend to know (Winn, 1993), not what they really
know.
Meaning is negotiated socially.
The previous two assumptions bring constructivism dangerously close to
solipsism. If we are informationally closed and if there is no standard
objective world, then it is tempting to conclude that we cannot ever
communicate with each other. However, we know this is not the case.
Communication is made possible by what Maturana and Varela (1987) call
"structural coupling". Organisms of the same species have basically the same
apparatus for detecting and adapting to perturbations. Also, they inhabit
similar environments and are likely to encounter the same perturbations. As a
result, the history of their structural adaptations will be similar. Their
structures are "coupled", which is why we can communicate with other humans but
not with bats.
Communication between people separated in time or space occurs when we place
symbols into the environment that act as perturbations of other people who
share the environment through structural coupling. However, in spite of
structural coupling, each person's construction of the world is unique with the
result that the symbols I place in the environment will mean different things
to different people in the group. In order to make communication possible, we
therefore have to come to an agreement about what the symbols mean (Vygotsky,
1978). The negotiation among members of the group over meaning may lead to
compromises and may result in only temporary agreements. Nonetheless, in
practice constructivists frequently insist on providing opportunities for
learning that require students to work in groups and arrive at a consensus
about meaning (McMahon & O'Neil, 1993).
These three assumptions tempt one to conclude that instruction cannot be
designed -- that prespecifying content, or message format, or the kind of
interaction students have with an instructional system is to no avail because
learning takes place entirely within the student who is impervious to the
influence of instructional strategies. However, the environments within which
students construct knowledge still have to be provided. These environments may
be natural environments. For example, proponents of situated learning recommend
apprenticeships (Brown, Collins & Duguid, 1989; Brown & Duguid, 1993;
Lave & Wenger, 1991) and reflective practica (Schon, 1987) as means for
allowing students to construct knowledge from "authentic" activites. These
environments may also be artificial environments that simulate aspects of the
real world which may not be accessible through direct experience. Zucchermaglia
(1993) describes such artificial environments as "empty technologies", or
shells, within which students, teachers and designers can construct anything
they want. ("Full" technologies are content specific, like computer-based
tutors.) Kozma (1991) makes the point that technologies can create learning
environments that cannot be created using traditional strategies, and that it
is this quality that makes them superior to other kinds of pedagogical
method.
The emerging "fourth generation" of computer-based education is therefore
founded on constructivist theories of learning. With it, the focus shifts from
the design of prescribed interactions, or "transactions" (Merrill, 1993) with
the learning environment to the design of environments that permit students any
kind of interaction the system is capable of. Such environments are
characterized by a potential for interaction rather than by
prespecified instructional transactions. This is precisely what VR
affords.
With some exceptions (among them M. Bricken, 1991b; Bricken & Byrne, 1993;
W. Bricken, 1990; Winn & Bricken, 1992), educators have not made the
connection between constructivist theories of learning and VR, thereby missing
the opportunity to provide a theoretical basis for applying VR in education. In
this section, I make the case that the characteristics of immersive VR and the
axioms of constructivist learning theory are entirely compatible and claim that
constructivist theory provides a valid and reliable basis for a theory of
learning in virtual environments.
The key to the compatibility of VR with constructivism lies in the notion of
immersion. We have seen that first-person experiences account for a great deal
of our activity in the world and our learning about it. We have also seen that
first-person experiences occur when our interaction with the world does not
involve conscious reflection or the use of symbols. According to constructivist
theory, knowledge construction arises from first-person experiences that can
never be entirely shared. Immersive VR allows first-person experiences by
removing the interface that acts as a boundary between the participant and the
computer. In this, VR technology is unique. It alone allows a synthetic
experience to capture the essence of what it really means for a person to come
to know the world.
Immersion in a virtual world allows us to construct knowledge from direct
experience, not from descriptions of experience. Any learning that is mediated
by a symbol system, whether text, spoken language, or computer, is inevitably a
reflection of someone else's experience not our own. Any requirement that we
use a symbol system to communicate about the world we have constructed to
someone else can never permit that other person to know our world as we know
it. Constructivist theory describes how first-person worlds come into being,
and argues that the imposition of symbolic representations for the sake of
communication require negotiation about meaning leading to compromise. However,
multi-participant VR, in which a group of participants inhabit the same world
at the same time, allows the negotiation of meaning to take place should
communication among participants be required.
Immersion in a virtual world allows the same kind of natural interaction with
objects that participants engage in in the real world. If cognition is
non-symbolic and learning intimately tied to action, then it is through
interaction with the virtual world that knowledge is constructed. Papert and
his colleagues (Papert, 1991) use the word "constructionism" to describe
knowledge construction that arises from physical interaction with objects in
the world. Immersive VR permits both physical and perceptual interactions to
occur.
To the extent that VR can simulate the real world, it allows students to learn
while they are situated in the context where what they learn is to be applied.
As we have seen, the case has been made that situated learning is both more
relevant and successful than learning out of context (Brown, Collins &
Duguid, 1989; Lave & Wenger, 1991).
Because a virtual environment is computed from data, it allows the participant
three kinds of knowledge-building experience that are not available in the real
world, but which ahve invaluable potential for ecuation. These concern what I
call "size", "transduction" and "reification".
Size.
Immersion in virtual environments permits radical changes in the relative sizes
of the participant and virtual objects. In the real world, an object appears to
become larger as I approach it and smaller as I move away. However, there are
limits to both extremes. There is a point at which I can get no closer to a
physical object and this point sets the object's maximum apparent size.
Likewise, there is a point where an object disappears as I move away from it.
In a virtual world, on the other hand, I can get infinitely close to and far
from objects allowing extremely large changes in size. For example, rather than
bumping into a virtual wall, I can keep getting closer to it so that smaller
and smaller details of the material from which it is made are revealed. I can
see the cellular structure of the wood panelling, and can even enter the
molecules and atoms of which it is ultimately composed. At the other extreme, I
can "zoom out" from the wall, out of the house, the city, the country and the
planet if I want, while still not violating any of the four conditions for
immersion. (Some readers may be familiar with the film Cosmic Zoom,
produced by the National Film Board of Canada, which conveys this idea far
better than any written description.)
The advantages of such changes of size for education are significant. On the
one hand, it is possible for students to enter an atom, inspect and replace the
electrons in their orbitals, thereby altering the atom's valence and its
ability to combine to form molecules (a project that is currently under
development at HITL). At the other extreme, it is possible for students to get
a sense of the relative sizes of and distances between the planets of the solar
system by flying from one the other.
Transduction.
Transducers such as eyephones and earphones are used in VR hardware to present
information to participants, and to convert participants' behavior into
commands to the rendering software. The notion of transduction discussed here
is concerned with the first of these functions.
Transducers are devices that convert information that is not available to our
senses into forms that are. A depth sounder on a ship bounces sounds that we
cannot hear off the bottom of the ocean that we cannot sea and converts the
echos into digital or analog displays for us to read. HMD's convert data into
images on CRT's and sounds in earphones. But the data from which these
transducers construct visual and auditory displays need not be originally
obtained through the human senses. It is perfectly possible to construct a
world from data that represent the spread of the Mediterranean fruit fly and to
move around a virtual population distribution superimposed over a virtual
California. It is possible to convert the ultrasonic echolocation data from a
bat into lower-frequency sounds or into visual displays so that we may indeed
experience the world of the bat, albeit in the third person.
What is important for education is that as soon as students put on HMD's, they
put on an infinite array of transducers. They can see the world as if through
infrared or ultraviolet light. They can lay trails of pheromones and watch the
behavior of the moths that they attract. They can journey to the center of the
sun and observe or alter the convection currents that move material from the
core to the surface. They can slow down the speed of an atom and, like
Rutherford, watch what happens when it hits a sheet of gold foil (another
project that is under development at HITL). And all the time, they are enjoying
first-person experiences and constructing first-person knowledge about objects
and events that are accessible to them in the real world only as third-person
descriptions.
Reification.
Changes in size and transduction give first-person access to experiences that
students could not otherwise have. Some of these experiences arise from
simulations of aspects of real objects and events, such as atoms or bats.
Others arise from representations in perceptible forms, through transduction,
of objects and events that have no physical form, such as algebraic equations
or population dynamics. "Reification" is the process of creating these
perceptible representations.
Reification stands in contrast to simulation. In simulations, virtual worlds
contain facsimiles of real objects and their behavior. Their advantage is that
students can interact with them safely and that often virtual simulations are
cheaper to build than full-blown physical simulators. However, it is often the
case that the power of VR is wasted when it is used for simulation. For
example, if you enter a virtual world in which there is a virtual microscope
through which you can look at a virtual drop of water, you gain nothing.
Learning about the microscopic life-forms that live in the droplet is
accomplished far more effectively by using a real microscope in the biology
laboratory. The microscope in the virtual world is a transducer (revealing to
the eyes what would not otherwise be revealed), and the participant is on the
wrong side of it! VR comes into its own when, through a massive change of size,
the participant jumps through the virtual microscope's eyepiece and into the
drop of water, attaining the same relative size as the microorganisms that live
there. At this scx1ale, the experience is first-person. But then you do not need
the microscope at all. As a general principle, the construction of virtual
transducers with which participants can interact gains you nothing. VR is not
used wisely when it used to create simulations that can be realized by
traditional simulators.
This paper has made the following points: 1) Immersive VR furnishes
first-person non-symbolic experiences that are specifically designed to help
students learn material. 2) These experiences cannot be obtained in any other
way in formal education. 3) This kind of experience makes up the bulk of our
daily interaction with the world, though schools tend to promote third-person
symbolic experiences. 4) Constructivism provides the best theory on which to
develop educational applications of VR. 5) The convergence of theories of
knowledge construction with VR technology permits learning to be boosted by the
manipulation of the relative size of objects in virtual worlds, by the
transduction of otherwise imperceptible sources of information, and by the
reification of abstract ideas that have so far defied representation.
This leads to the conclusion that VR promotes the best and probably only
strategy that allows students to learn from non-symbolic first-person
experience. Since a great many students fail in school because they do not
master the symbol systems of the disciplines they study, although they are
perfectly capable of mastering the concepts that lie at the heart of the
disciplines, it can be concluded that VR provides a route to success for
children who might otherwise fail in our education system as it is currently
construed.
I. Introduction.
II. Virtual reality.
III. Immersion.
IV. Learning by Constructing Knowledge.
V. VR Applications in Education.
VI. Summary and Conclusion.