The concept of embodied cognition is a hot topic within immersive education circles, and was a featured topic at during the Embodied Learning educational workshop that happened at the IEEE VR academic conference. Embodied Learning could help revolutionize education by incorporating our bodies within the learning process.
We generally believe that humans think with our brains, but embodied cognition theories suggest that we also use our bodies and surrounding environments in order to think and learn. This has huge implications for VR since it both provides a mechanism to be able to more fully engage within the learning process as well as have more control of our contextual environments that are optimized to teach different concepts.
I had a chance to catch up with educator Erica Southgate from the University of New Castle at the Embodied Learning workshop this past March. She’s from the University of Castle in Australia and is using serious games and augmented reality to teach literacy. She’s exploring how to use social VR to enable high prestige professionals to mentor disadvantaged youth, and she’s also studying how indigenous cultures use social structures and knowledge holder rituals in order to train youth, and how this could inspire open world collaborative learning environments in VR.
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For more information on Embodiment Theory and Embodied Cognition, then be sure to check out my previous interviews about using dance to teach computational thinking, as well as with Saadia Khan and Embody Learning workshop keynote presenter Chris North.
Homework for Immersive Analytics: Read Margaret Wilson's "Six Views of Embodied Cognition."https://t.co/1kQffI3Y2Z pic.twitter.com/kbXzS7QLKK
— Kent Bye (Voices of VR) (@kentbye) March 20, 2016
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Music: Fatality & Summer Trip
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. My name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. So at the IEEE VR conference this year, there was a workshop on embodied learning. And in that workshop, I had an opportunity to meet an educator from the University of Newcastle in Australia, Erica Southgate. So Erica comes from an education background, and she's trying to give access to some of these new emerging technologies to disadvantaged youth and connect them to these high prestige professions. And so she's trying to use augmented reality for different learning applications as well as serious games. And so in this conversation, we talk about these concepts of embodied learning and why embodied learning is important and how virtual reality is going to play a part of moving behind our existing conceptualizations of a cognitive paradigm of education and standardized testing and how VR and AR could help us do something different. She's also been working with indigenous cultures and how they transmit knowledge through different social structures. And so she's been looking a lot at collaborative learning as well as learning in open worlds. And so we'll be covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of the Hour podcast. But first, a quick word from our sponsor. So today's episode is brought to you by my Patreon supporters. So if you enjoy the Voices of VR podcast as a service to you and the wider VR community, then consider sending me a tip to be able to help continue both all of my living and travel expenses and to continue to bring you all the latest information about how this virtual reality ecosystem continues to grow and develop and evolve. So just a few dollars a month really does make a huge difference, especially if we get a lot more people who are contributing. So contribute today at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. So this interview with Erica happened at the IEEE VR conference that was happening in Greenville, South Carolina from March 19th to 23rd. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:12.752] Erica Southgate: I'm Erica Southgate. I'm from the University of Newcastle in Australia, and I'm an educator. So my degrees are in education, and I'm here to actually look at what the latest thinking is on VR and AR, and to kind of, I don't know, ask some provocative questions in the field, I suppose.
[00:02:30.636] Kent Bye: And so tell me a bit about, like, what are you doing with either AR or VR in terms of education?
[00:02:36.310] Erica Southgate: So what we're interested in is using VR and AR to build serious games to look at improving the literacy of young people and adult learners. What's interesting for me I suppose from an education perspective is the kind of challenges that it brings because we don't want to kind of reproduce the bad things in education through a virtual reality or augmented reality tool or platform. What we want to do is be able to challenge some of those issues. So we want to be able to build tools which are culturally sensitive, that can be personalized, and we really want to be able to understand how to build environments that are inclusive of all learners, rather than exclusive of some.
[00:03:20.449] Kent Bye: And so, in terms of being inclusive and having that diversity, what kind of things do these immersive technologies allow you to do that you couldn't do in a real classroom?
[00:03:29.433] Erica Southgate: Okay, so what I think is really interesting is that I'm looking at the way VR or AR, for instance, could be used to link disadvantaged youth or youth facing disadvantage to high status professions. So it's really hard, for instance, to understand what's involved in being an engineer or being a doctor or being a lawyer if you're a young person from a disadvantaged background, because you have none of those people in your social networks. So with VR and AR, we could actually build environments which could give authentic or more authentic kind of learning or connecting experiences for those young people. That's an example of what we're looking at or working on at the moment. Because you can't be what you can't see, but if you can see it in front of you and interact with it, then in fact it could broaden your educational career horizon. So that's just one example of the kind of area that we're interested in.
[00:04:19.402] Kent Bye: And you had a lot of really interesting things to say when we were talking about the issue of standardized testing and how that's driving a lot of the educational experiences and how AR and VR could actually provide us a way to break out of the mold of what the status quo is. And so maybe you could tell me a bit about that.
[00:04:37.152] Erica Southgate: So I mean I think it's very interesting that a lot of people in the workshop on education and VR and AR were very interested in understanding what works or having evidence for what works. But we have education systems now around the world that are driven by standardised testing and standardised testing only measures very limited things like literacy, numeracy and scientific knowledge. And these are important things, but they're not the only things in an education. And so I think, you know, we need to understand that even with a strong education or evidence base, it won't necessarily drive education policy or change in classrooms. However, VR and AR could actually kind of break down or challenge some of the hegemonic or dominance of standardised testing. I mean, because I think we're in an education system that works for maybe at the most 50% of learners. in schools. So what's happening to the other 50%? Are there ways that we can engage them in both the co-production of curriculum, so that we're not just opening their heads and banking our knowledge into theirs, but the co-production of curriculum and the co-creation of, you know, learning and knowledge. So it really is, I think AR and VR has the potential to kind of radically rethink that space, but in some ways the teacher has to get out of the way of the student. and set problems they need to solve and equip them along the way, rather than us, you know, enact a perfectly manufactured curriculum. So it's a different way of thinking about education.
[00:06:03.162] Kent Bye: Yeah, and you were mentioning a number of different educational researchers and, you know, kind of theories and approaches to education. Maybe you could recount some of those that you were mentioning in the workshop and kind of what the implications of their theories might be.
[00:06:15.881] Erica Southgate: Okay, so the workshop was actually on embodied learning, or learning and embodiment, and there's a huge and very long history of theories of embodiment from social theory, from anthropology and sociology and philosophy, that I think could prove quite interesting if brought into dialogue with the kind of VRAR field. And so when we think about embodiment learning, learning goes beyond just kind of cognitive processes. So we have to think about, you know, what's that kind of the natural body in the state? How's the natural body reacting in a VR or AR environment? How do we represent bodies or types of bodies, particularly around inclusivity in that environment? Because representations are very important in that space. We don't want to kind of replicate racism or sexism or homophobia in that space. The other issue is a phenomenological point of view. What does it mean to be in the world once you're in the VR and AR space? Can we use those tools so that people become kinder or more empathetic when working with others? I think probably some of the most interesting stuff around what we call the ontological basis or the notion of being in the world, what it means to be in the world, is coming from journalists working around VR and AR actually, who are asking quite profound questions once they strap on those headsets. And so what does it do to me as a person? And how does it recalibrate my relationship with others for a better world, I suppose? And so I think it has great potential.
[00:07:44.353] Kent Bye: And you mentioned something about, like, with standardized testing, it's very specifically applicable to a certain number of, like, literacy and some other things. Maybe you could expand on, like, what is standardized testing good for and what are the realms that may not work as well for?
[00:07:58.958] Erica Southgate: So standardised testing should be a tool for which classroom teachers should be able to diagnose the kind of literacy and numeracy and scientific knowledge needs of their students and then actually put together personal learning plans or a kind of differentiated curriculum to match those students. So in that way it can be a really great thing. However, if used by governments to rank schools or to try to manipulate teachers into a particular type of curriculum or pedagogy, it can become a real disaster. It becomes really disastrous when we start, I think, to compare countries against other countries, as if education is some kind of competitive race to the top. I know that you've heard that expression here. And so what you have are very, very different education systems with different cultures, in which they're embedded in different cultures. And it's very difficult to compare them, for example, but we do that, and the OECD is driving that. Actually, it has been for over a decade. And more and more countries are kind of picking up this sense of, you know, competition and rankings, and so they're implementing standardised testing as a way of measuring that and then comparing each other. But, you know, the education system in the US is different to the education system in Australia or Korea or Finland or Singapore. And so each of those has a different history and different cultural attributes. So I think we have to be very, very careful around standardized testing in that mode. Great for diagnostics for teachers, very bad if it begins to be a global race.
[00:09:31.073] Kent Bye: So it sounds like standardized testing could potentially be integrated in some sort of like immersive technology solution that could track the progress of each student and then potentially start to personalize education. What are your thoughts in terms of trying to do more specific personalized types of teaching?
[00:09:49.515] Erica Southgate: Well students, teachers shouldn't only be tracking students, students should be monitoring themselves actually and being able to understand what they know and what they don't know and we call this metacognition in fact. So it's not only education in a cognitive realm in terms of information acquisition and retention but in terms of self-regulated learning, perseverance, persistence, understanding what you know and what you need to improve on and practice, that's metacognition. So, in fact, you know, VR and AR tools could be quite good in terms of personalising or feeding back to students in terms of what they need to improve on so that they could actually personalise their education for themselves. I get a bit worried when we talk about students, whether they're, you know, little kids or teenagers or university students, as if there's something to be enacted upon. Education is something we enact upon them. In fact, you know, it should be an incredibly creative and interactive and collaborative experience. And we know when we do those things together that new knowledge is created and that we learn best actually as humans. So I think VR and AR have great potential for bringing people together to learn off each other.
[00:10:55.230] Kent Bye: And so what kind of like more idealized vision of education would you see using all these technologies? What would that look like?
[00:11:02.236] Erica Southgate: It's really hard to think about, you know, what's idealised, I suppose. I mean, we often think about state-of-the-art, state-of-the-art in terms of technology. If it was perfect, this is what we'd be able to do. But really in education, we've had very long and vigorous debates around what's the purpose of an education system. It is the purpose, in fact, to create a competitive atmosphere where we are not only competitive against each other in classrooms as individuals but as nations. Or is it, in fact, you know, is education system about being there to produce a social good, a more harmonious and collectivist kind of society, I suppose, where people don't fall through the cracks and, you know, we have a much kinder, I suppose, vision of the world we want to create. So it's not for me to talk about some idealised version but there is a debate to be had and I think engagement in that very long debate that we've had in education could benefit the realm of computers and education. So you're not just producing tools, you're saying I'm producing tools for what purpose, for what learner and in terms of what wider vision. I think this is the kind of conversation that many people in education have quite a lot, actually. But it would be great to bring others into that.
[00:12:14.779] Kent Bye: Well, just in terms of, if we don't know what the idealized version is, maybe we could look at it from the lens of what you see the biggest problems are, what the biggest open questions are in terms of education.
[00:12:25.015] Erica Southgate: Well, I think there's huge problems with education in terms of equity worldwide. I mean, it might work for 50% of the people, but for the other 50% of students, it's just not working. They're disenfranchised from education, and we know this. Because even in many rich countries, we have a very long kind of what we call inequity tails to our bell curves. So lots and lots of students from particular cultural backgrounds and from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds who are just missing out. So I think that's a huge challenge. But for me, one of the things about sitting in that room was really how do we create a translational dialogue between people from different disciplines. It seems to me that we'd all benefit from a space in which we could actually somehow pick up the big issues and talk about what we all know about them and create some new knowledge. and take some risks, take some risks around trying to fix some educational problems, and take some risks together. I think that would be a powerful thing, actually, rather than just keep replicating what's already been there and only works for 50% of learners.
[00:13:29.553] Kent Bye: Yeah, one of the things that you mentioned in the workshop is that a lot of times standardized testing will give you some indication of what someone does not know, but yet we're not focusing as much as to what they do know, and that they're trying to flip that on its head. What did you mean by that?
[00:13:44.926] Erica Southgate: Okay, so one of the really interesting papers was around using curriculum and pedagogy produced by an African-American teacher with her students to teach some mathematical concepts. And she drew on hip-hop culture and dancing to do that. And it had incredible effects in terms of mathematical grades in standardised testing. Now the reason I would say as an educator that that was successful is because it drew on those students' culture. directly from the culture on exactly what they know, how they are in the world, on their cultural assets. And so they just weren't any students anywhere and it would work with any students anywhere. It was effective pedagogically and in terms of, you know, its impact on learning because it drew directly on the culture. And it viewed that culture not in a deficit mode, not as something that had to be fixed or mended or patched up or corrected, but as a true asset to the learner and valuable. And so I really think that if BA and AR can kind of respond to that notion of cultural and social difference and build pedagogical tools around that, that's when it will be really powerful.
[00:14:49.239] Kent Bye: That sounds like an example of embodied cognition, and I'm just curious if you have other examples of a clear benefit or win if they're using an embodied cognition approach.
[00:14:58.888] Erica Southgate: Okay, so it is embodied cognition, but not embodied cognition in a very individualistic kind of way. I think a lot of the time we get caught up in psychologized versions of cognition. I mean, the way we think and how we think and how we process information just isn't about the architecture of individual brains. It comes from where we are, where we grow up and how we learn and what we value, what we learn. So, I mean, there are any number of examples around the world, I suppose, of trying to come to grips with the way other people understand knowledge production and ways of learning. And Indigenous cultures around the world are a fabulous example of that. where if we just took the time to sit down with Indigenous people to understand how they learn best, how they produce knowledge within their culture, and how they actually deliver knowledge in particular ways, because often you have to be in a certain position within a kinship network or community to possess knowledge or to pass it on, that if we get away from Western concepts of knowledge, very Westernised concepts of knowledge, as something that's produced and automatically given to a learner to master, then in fact we might learn a few things about using cultural assets much more effectively because all learners in the classroom are not the same and they all come from different places and we need to understand that and we need to get away I think from very individualistic notions of what learning is and cognition.
[00:16:26.242] Kent Bye: So what does that indigenous cultures method of knowledge transmission look like?
[00:16:31.515] Erica Southgate: OK, so I'm speaking not as an Indigenous person, so I'm speaking as an outsider who knows a little bit. So I just need to preface these remarks. But for instance, within particular Indigenous cultures, you have to go through certain rituals or be of a certain age or hold certain positions within the community to know some things and to be able to pass them on. So it's not like in Western culture where knowledge is just out there to be found or acquired and mastered. In fact, knowledge is a very precious thing that's nurtured and added to and passed down through generations and through very complicated kind of knowledge holder systems within the community. And it's passed down in very particular ways, pedagogically in particular ways, through teaching and learning methods which are traditional within the culture. So, I mean, I actually think this also happens, I suppose, in much more, say, mainstream white culture. We just don't recognise it as such. At what age do we learn different things? Why do we learn them and how do we learn them? And I think understanding learning both within formal and informal context is really, really important. And if we can bring the informal context into the formal context and draw on that as an asset, that would be useful.
[00:17:43.885] Kent Bye: Well, to me it kind of speaks to this social dimension of learning where it's not just an individual transmitting to a group, but there's within this kinship network type of model in indigenous cultures that they would either have to reach a certain age or reach a certain social status before they would be entered into this circle of knowledge. So, like, what are those characteristics that determine when they're ready to learn something then?
[00:18:09.480] Erica Southgate: I think if we just bring it back to our own context for a minute, I mean, if you've ever worked in an interdisciplinary team to learn something, you'll know how difficult it is. And it takes perseverance, persistence, respect. It also takes a lot of translation back and forth. So I've worked in an interdisciplinary team with software engineer, educator, instructional designer, musician, and we've all had to sit in a room over a long period of time in order to produce a serious game, for instance, and it wasn't an easy process. What we really needed to do was develop some strategies around knowledge, giving knowledge to each other, translating, kindly translating knowledge to each other, respecting when we didn't know something, and stepping back, being able to have, you know, quite vigorous conversations or debates when we thought something wasn't working or not. And so coming from even different disciplinary perspectives, I mean, there's a whole lot of strategies that we need to develop around what it means to produce knowledge and new knowledge and work together to do that. And so this is not an easy thing and it's not just about cognition, it's actually about knowledge of social interaction. So even within a team of university-educated lecturers and students from different disciplines, the same kind of principles apply.
[00:19:30.125] Kent Bye: So how have you seen classrooms bring a more social dimension to the learning process then?
[00:19:36.259] Erica Southgate: Well, there's a huge push around collaborative learning. So collaborative learning, and there's many classroom environments which are based on collaborative learning models, actually. So collaborative learning is key. I think VR and AR have the benefit of being able to put learners into a space where they could learn off each other and help each other and assist each other. And there's good psychological kind of principles underpinning that. So Vygotskyian theory talks about being helped by a more able other to accomplish your goal and learning from that. And AR and VR is a perfect environment for that. Of course, what we need to watch out for is that we don't have harmful dynamics in those environments. As teachers, particularly, we don't want our students harmed in any learning environment. particularly not a virtual one. And so part of that environment is around, you know, educating users to use it respectfully. And there's been huge debates around respect and the gaming community, for instance, and women. We don't want to replicate, you know, have girls go into those environments and be bullied or other types of learners. So we really need to think about, you know, what are those environments? How do we collaborate? How do we get people to work with more able others, whether that's a teacher or another student, often it's another student who'll help out, in order to be able to facilitate or scaffold learning. But, you know, the big thing is in the real world there are particular dynamics of power and in virtual worlds there are particular dynamics of power. And that isn't just cognitive, that has an affective or emotional kind of economy to it in the real world and the VR world. So, you know, what do we do to address that? I mean, I don't know. I don't know, but as an educator it's something that we want to work on.
[00:21:13.428] Kent Bye: You had mentioned something about using augmented reality technologies with Indigenous people. I'm just curious what you were doing and what you were trying to show there.
[00:21:22.210] Erica Southgate: It's a discussion. We haven't used it. It's a discussion about it. I had a discussion with two fantastic colleagues from our Indigenous Institute around what the landscape would look like if we could augment it with Aboriginal stories. When white people in Australia look at a landscape, non-Aboriginal, non-Indigenous people look at a landscape, they see it in certain ways and interpret the land or the country, what we call the country in certain ways. However, when Aboriginal people look at the country, particularly if they're from that country, they see it in very, very different ways. And we thought it would be really cool to develop with Aboriginal people because this always has to be collaborative and with respect. some kind of augmented reality tool where you could actually have the landscape, as you scanned around the landscape, the dreaming stories or the interpretations come up, as long as it was possible for those to be shared with people outside the culture. So we'd always have to negotiate that. And so, for instance, you could look at a mountain, and to your average non-Indigenous person, it's a mountain with maybe a, I don't know, a telephone kind of tower on it, a mobile phone tower on it. But to an Aboriginal person, it could be a very sacred place, which has dreaming stories attached to it, and those dreaming stories tell young people, for instance, about particular social mores or customs, things that they need to learn. So it was a very, very cool idea. We're going to explore it. But of course, you know, there's a cultural sensitivity issues around it as well.
[00:22:48.484] Kent Bye: Yeah, it seems to me that Aboriginal people have a completely different cosmological worldview and that augmented reality glasses could give you a peek into their ontology for what they believe is real and to make some sort of bridge by using the metaphors of the landscape to be able to transmit these.
[00:23:05.129] Erica Southgate: Yeah, and with the permission of Indigenous people, anywhere you could do that, and with them. So it would be a great way to bridge cultures and to build understanding, I suppose, and respect through a tool.
[00:23:16.062] Kent Bye: Yeah. And so what's next for you? What type of projects are you working on?
[00:23:21.065] Erica Southgate: We're working mainly on serious games for literacy, to improve literacy, so I'm very interested in equity and education. I've just been appointed as a National Equity Fellow in Australia, so I'm interested in how do we get in particular disadvantaged kids connected up with high status professions in ways that are authentic and interesting for them and looking at AR and VR for that. and other emerging technologies, and also looking at learning literacy through open worlds, collaborative open world learning, if we can get some funding. So that's on paper, so we're just trying to attract some funding for it. But yeah, so I mean, how can people help each other become more literate, both younger learners and older learners?
[00:24:03.916] Kent Bye: And so in terms of teaching literacy through a serious game, what does that look like?
[00:24:08.428] Erica Southgate: So we've got a couple of mini-games available for free download if anyone wants to have a go. One's called Apostrophe Power and one's called Sentence Hero. So they're built for young adult and adult learners. It lets you kind of diagnose what you don't know about punctuation or using certain types of punctuation or grammar and then play a little game with some cute characters and some tasks that you have to undertake in a mini-game format to actually look at improving on your literacy. And it looks like they work, because we've done an evaluation and it looks like they actually have a very beneficial effect. And they're free. So jump on the app stores and look for Sentence Hero and Apostrophe Power.
[00:24:50.081] Kent Bye: And is there an augmented reality or virtual reality component to these?
[00:24:54.022] Erica Southgate: That's the next phase, is actually to teach literacy and what we call academic literacies through an open world. That's what we're trying to get funding for. So we've taken the first step and now we're trying to attract funding for the next.
[00:25:08.185] Kent Bye: And so what would that look like in this ideal open world? How would you teach ideas about grammar and literacy through virtual environments? Would that be just through the mechanism of their avatars that are embodied by other people? Or is there other things that the affordances of virtuality environments or AR environments would provide you?
[00:25:27.569] Erica Southgate: So interestingly we're working with our Indigenous colleagues from the Wollatuka Institute at the University of Newcastle. So it's a collaboration between them and computer engineers in the School of Education to look at what a culturally inclusive literacy acquisition open world would look like. And we want to build that through kind of agile design with Aboriginal students and non-Aboriginal students. and teachers to do that. So if you ask me what it looked like, I don't know. But wouldn't it be interesting to be able to build it?
[00:26:00.776] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you see as kind of the ultimate potential of virtual and augmented realities and what they might be able to enable?
[00:26:08.879] Erica Southgate: So once again, I mean, I don't know what the final vision is. I don't have a utopian vision, I suppose, of society or education, but I think there are certain ways that we can work towards individual and social good through learning environments and learning tools. And so what I would like to see is a much kind of greater emphasis on dialogue across the disciplines and with, for instance, teachers in schools and students particularly are very interested in co-production of resources with students and co-production of curriculum, so how they might be embedded in the curriculum with students and teachers. So I think there's some principles that could underpin the use of AR and VR, like co-production and interdisciplinarity, but as for final vision, I don't know. I think it's probably good not to have a final vision at this stage, actually, but to create the dialogue.
[00:27:01.082] Kent Bye: Awesome, well thank you so much. Thank you. So, that was Erika Southgate from the University of Newcastle in Australia, and she's been looking at using augmented reality in serious games for literacy. So, I have a number of different takeaways about this interview, is that first of all, this concept of embodied cognition I think is huge for virtual reality, and I think it's something that is going to continue to be one of the real strengths and breakthroughs for what VR is going to enable. So one of the things that Erica is saying is that their current education system really doesn't work for, at a minimum, a half the people. So about 50% of the people aren't really being served by the existing educational systems. And so I think VR and AR actually represent this huge new ways of being able to incorporate your body, being able to engage other people to be able to do social collaborative learning, to have knowledge holders who are able to have information to be able to directly mentor people through these different immersive technologies. And I think it's also going to allow people to think beyond just their brains and to actually incorporate their whole body into both physically doing things, but like Erika said, to start to take what people already know. So in episode number 412, I talked to Nikita D'Souza, who was talking about how to use dance to be able to teach computational thinking. So the thing that Erika was saying was that these students already have a certain amount of cultural knowledge that they're bringing to the table. And so why not use some of that? And so if people know how to dance already, then why not use the concepts and principles of dance and going through different steps and dance moves and start to break that down into different conditional statements or if you step to the left then you punch out your right hand and if you step to the right you punch out your left hand you could break that down into some sort of computer code and computational thinking such that it's able to both teach the concepts of computer programming but also allow the students to be able to put it into their body and create a fun way of being able to make a virtual human dance and then to go into the VR experience and to dance with them and so That's just one of the examples that was happening at IEEE VR that I saw that was really starting to use these concepts of embodied cognition. And so the basic idea is that we think more than just our minds. We're actually using our entire bodies to think. But the other aspect is that we actually use our environment to think. And I think that is a huge thing as well. As you start to immerse yourself into these different virtual worlds and different environments, that is going to enable all sorts of new opportunities for learning. Just like when you go on field trips, there's just such a visceral part of that that allows your brain to kind of get it at a deeper level because you're changing the context in which this information is really being shared. And so I think that we're going to have a lot more types of field trips and being able to really take the students to these other places, like with Google Expeditions that has been doing a little bit of that already. But in the process of that, you can just think about the environment being an extension of your brain. And that when you're in that environment, it actually changes the way that you think. And so starting to use VR in that way, I think is going to be really huge and super important for the future of education and just open up all sorts of new possibilities. The other thing that I think is really important for what Erica is doing is really talking about disadvantaged youth and trying to address this issue of equity and people who may have not had as much power or privilege in their life. And the way that she sort of phrased it was the inequity tails of the bell curves. And so with the Gaussian distribution of equality, the people who are at the tail ends of that, How can you start to use these immersive technologies to not only help and improve their learning, but start to connect them to high prestige professions? So to be able to go to disadvantaged youth and to start to teach them how to use some of these new emerging technologies such that they actually have a little bit more of a leg up as these new technologies start to really play a bigger and bigger part of the future of our society and our culture. So that's one way. Another way is to actually use the serious games and augmented reality, collaborative learning environments. The thing that she was talking about with the indigenous cultures is that there's a certain amount of social structure that's happening within these tribes and that there's knowledge holders that are only going to transmit this knowledge once the youth reach a certain age or they go through a certain rite of initiation to be able to receive the knowledge. And so there's a transmission that happens, an oral transmission between two people. And I think this is what teachers are doing in schools, but could there be more informal or even formalized ways of doing this even further within these augmented and virtual reality technologies? And so perhaps there's these social structures within this different world, and it's actually represented by a real human, or maybe eventually at some point it'll be driven by AI NPCs. But let's just, for the sake of argument, saying that's actual real human, and there's a part of the social dynamics that can happen with the real human and being able to transmit and mentor and teach people in a new way. And imagine what you could do with some of these augmented reality glasses at some point if somebody's trying to learn how to read you could start to do all this computer vision to be able to actually see what the words are to be able to read it back and just have some sort of like mentoring processes that can happen with the future of augmented reality and education. So I think there's just a lot of huge opportunity to be able to use some of these immersive technologies and education and it's still really early days and right now we're kind of in this standardized model of testing and I think that one of the things that Eric was saying is that you have to really look out for how that could be misused or abused within these situations and There could be a ways of actually doing assessment for students. But, you know, one of the things that she said, there's actually a whole model of kind of meta cognition where the student is actually taking responsibility for their own learning. They know where they're at. And maybe in the future, there's going to be more of these gamified different environments where they kind of know how many different learning objective achievements that they've been able to unlock and really not just unlock them, but really understand and comprehend within their body. And finally, I think, you know, some of the other stuff that Erica is doing with these different indigenous cultures, not only to kind of look at how they teach and learn and train their youth, but also looking at how can we use these new immersive technologies to be able to bridge cultures and to be able to start to document the meaning of different landmarks within a landscape, the different stories and meaning behind some of those, and could there be a specific augmented reality application that as you're going around these different areas, you could start to connect to some of these deeper stories of meaning that are within these different geographic locations. And so this is something that Erika says she's in the process of trying to really get buy-in and do this in a way that's just not doing some sort of cultural appropriation, but kind of do it in collaboration with the intent to be able to start to bridge the two cultures and to build more understanding. And I think this is a huge opportunity for augmented reality applications, especially that are geographically based, such that if there's a culture that has a lot of meaning around these different landmarks, then how could you use these different augmented reality technologies to both connect you to the stories of these places, but then from that, be able to actually connect you to these people of different cultures as well. So I think that's like a super fascinating takeaway from this interview. So that's all that I have for today. I wanted to just thank you for joining me for the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy this podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends and become a donor. Just a few dollars a month really does make a huge difference. So contribute today and go to patreon.com slash Voices of VR.
