Erica Southgate released a book titled Virtual Reality in Curriculum and Pedagogy: Evidence from Secondary on Classrooms May 19, 2020, which covers the theory and practice of using VR in classrooms. Southgate is an Associate Professor of Emerging Technologies for Education at the University of New Castle in Australia, and she is focusing on going beyond training and into applying the Deeper Learning Framework for using VR to help teach higher-order thinking skills, collaboration, academic mindset, self-directed learning, metacognition, and communication skills.
I had a chance to talk with her on the eve of her book release to talk about her approach to pedagogy in VR, her lessons learned from using Minecraft VR in classrooms to have students create their own content, some of the ethical considerations for VR in the classroom, and moving beyond the Remember, Understand, Apply, and Analyze of Bloom’s taxonomy to do more Evaluation and Creation.
She also explains a bit of her Actioned Pedagogy for Immersive Learning (APIL) as a middle-range technology integration framework that tries to provide more pragmatic suggestions for integrating immersive technologies that are more specific than the more universal, and context-independent approaches of the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) model by Mishra and Koehler (2006) and the Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, and Redefinition (SAMR) models by Puentedura (2010). Here’s a table from her book, which provides a bit more context:
Another interesting reference that I wanted to share from Southgate’s book is Dede, Jacobson, Richards’ chapter in “Introduction: virtual, augmented, and mixed realities in education” from 2017 that talks about four types of psychological immersion:
1. Actional immersion: Empowering users to initiate action or discover new capabilities that can have novel or intriguing consequences.
2. Symbolic/narrative immersion: Triggering powerful meanings and associations that can motivate learners or create affective or intellectual connections that can deepen mental models of what is to be learnt.
3. Sensory immersion: Immersive displays or headsets can create a panoramic egocentric view of a virtual world or objects that can be harnessed for procedural (knowing how) knowledge or connecting declarative (know what) knowledge with spatial learning.
4. Social immersion: Sharing reasoning to get things done and learning along the way with others.
This has a lot of resonance with the four types of presence I refer to as active presence, emotional presence, embodied & environmental presence, and mental and social presence, which I’ve talked about with VR researcher Dustin Chertoff before here.
Southgate’s book Virtual Reality in Curriculum and Pedagogy has a great balance between the theory and practice, and as a researcher she’d like to see more industry support to continue to do in situ research within classrooms to get more data and insights for how to integrate immersive technologies into secondary education environments.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. So, there's so many different applications of virtual reality that are out there, and I think one of the ones that people get really excited about is the future of education. So obviously there's lots of uses for VR when it comes to training simulations, but what's it mean to be able to use VR to be able to teach higher order thinking skills, critical thinking, creativity, and collaboration. That's a lot of what Erica Southgate has been focusing in on. She's an associate professor of emerging technologies for education at the university of. Newcastle in Australia, and she recently released a book called Virtuality in Curriculum and Pedagogy, Evidence from Secondary Classrooms. So she's out there in the field trying to integrate virtual reality technologies and to see what works, what doesn't work, to create different pedagogical frameworks and generally trying to synthesize all of the previous research that's been done and then start iterating and seeing what works out in the field and to be able to actually get some research and evidence for people to be able to look at. She's got a book where the first half, she covers a lot of the theory and the second half, the practice of a lot of the research that she's done within the classroom, looking at how virtual reality can be used for education. So, that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So, this interview with Erika happened on Monday, May 18th, 2020, here in Portland, Oregon, and for Erika in Australia, it was May 19th, 2020. So, with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:39.083] Erica Southgate: I'm Erica Southgate. I'm an Associate Professor of Emerging Technologies for Education at the University of Newcastle in Australia. And I'm really interested in a whole lot of technologies and how they relate to schooling in particular. And over the last few years, I've conducted with colleagues in schools and with students, kind of a major study into using virtual reality in classrooms. So embedding it in classrooms, in a curriculum-aligned way and in a way which leverages teachers' existing pedagogical knowledge.
[00:02:14.296] Kent Bye: Great. So, yeah, maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into virtual reality.
[00:02:21.404] Erica Southgate: Okay, so my background is as a teacher, I've got a teaching degree, but for a long time I've worked in research and in research around social issues and kind of interesting and difficult problems. So I'm a person who really is interested in difficult problems that have taken a long time to evolve but don't have simple solutions. And so, I became interested in virtual reality about six years ago when a colleague put me in a headset and I just thought, wow, this will play a really big part in the future of education and particularly education which isn't training necessarily. So, about education or projects which try to develop higher order thinking skills in students and critical thinking, creativity, collaboration. And so, I began a journey as someone who isn't a technologist but a humanist into this world and it took me a long time to learn the language and the concepts and the ideas and the technical aspects as well. And from there, I've decided to go and actually work with teachers in schools to kind of embed the technology. I think it's great if you design technology. And we've had a lot of lab-based research on the technology and how it should be designed correctly or for optimal kind of purposes. But It's not much good designing technology if we can't actually implement it and make it work in real life settings. So I'm really interested in the nexus between designing technology and implementing it ethically and safely and for good learning outcomes in schools.
[00:04:00.686] Kent Bye: Yeah, I know that I first met you at the IEEE VR conference a number of years ago in one of the education workshops that was going on there. And so you've been involved with looking at what's happening in the academic research community. And on Tuesday, May 19th, in the, I guess, my time zone, you're going to be releasing a book from Routledge called Virtual Reality in Curriculum and Pedagogy, Evidence from Secondary Classrooms. Maybe you could give a bit more context as to this book and how it came about.
[00:04:30.599] Erica Southgate: Okay, so all those years ago when I met you, Kent, at the Kelval workshop, which is part of IEEE VR, and that's been going now for, I think, six years, five or six years. All those years ago I met you, I told you that I'm starting to look at implementing VR. At this stage, it was high-end VR, so Oculus Rifts, in schools. And it's a long journey in terms of research. we have to be invited into schools, teachers have to want to work with researchers, and they have to see it as having some value. So I hunted around for some schools who might like to go on a kind of wild journey through VR. We had no money, but we did have a vision about being able to put VR in school communities and low-income school communities. where kids could benefit from its learning, but to also really systematically look at how VR could be used best for learning, because it's not good for all learning, but it is good for different types of learning over others. So I started collaboration with Callaghan College, which is a large school community right near the university where I am, and the teachers and the principal really came to do that. And it took a year and a half to pilot our work. So to actually think about how we might put VR into classrooms. Classrooms are industrial age schools, are industrial age structures. They're not built for six degree of freedom virtual reality with play areas. And so even just trying to find a classroom big enough or a classroom with an annex where we could set the equipment up took about six months. because we had to factor that into the school timetable. It was very difficult. And then to think about developing units of work in which we could integrate the use of virtual reality took another year and a half to ultimately get right. And then to run the actual project after the pilot took six months. So, it's a very long-term project when you work with schools. You have to co-research with teachers to make it authentic and students, and you really need to be very careful because we can't adversely affect students' learning outcomes by just plonking a technology into the classroom. We have to be very careful and thoughtful about that. So, we developed a whole lot of ethical and safety protocols, which were the first in the world, with teachers around the use of VR in classrooms, and they're still really relevant. and even more relevant today with the hygiene issues that are going to affect the industry, particularly embedding it into real context. And we put it in there and we gave kids access to Minecraft VR because they're quite familiar with Minecraft, many of them. And Minecraft VR is a sandbox. It has lots of tools for content creation. And we developed a unit of work around biology where they had to go and learn and research in groups about a body organ of their choice and actually reconstruct that in virtual reality to use the affordances of the toolkit to make it interactive and interesting, and then to take their peers and the teacher and the researcher through tours of their model of the organ in VR and explain. what that organ did, its functions and its structure. I mean, what was most interesting for me in terms of that particular case study was we explained a bit about the affordances of VR for kids, but they were really playful in that environment. And nearly all of them produced incredibly elaborate models at enormous scale, which you could tour inside and outside of. And then they could recite from memory incredibly detailed kind of scientific knowledge about the organ. So not only did they get the usual science labs where you dissect stuff and the didactic learning of science teachers who, you know, explain stuff and also some online learning, they also got to undertake this incredible creative experience where they melded creativity with scientific endeavour. And I think to me, that was like one of the major outcomes of the project. We also, of course, measured whether it affected their content knowledge acquisition, for instance, and they certainly didn't learn any more than the kids who didn't get the VR, but they didn't learn any less either. So it showed that we can actually make science, we can integrate new technologies into science, have less didactic teaching, less pedagogical teacher to student directed teaching, and more creative. learning in science, which is a kind of revelation, I suppose, for science teachers who are used to doing things a certain way.
[00:09:07.564] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, the book, I had a chance to look through it a little bit. It's broken up into a number of different chapters. And I'd say like the first half, you're really setting a deeper context of introducing yourself, your journey into this whole realm, a little bit about the history of virtual reality and some of the prior research, and then a deep dive into pedagogy. And then fourth through seventh, you're kind of really diving into this research project that you are explaining here with Minecraft VR and really picking it apart chapter by chapter. But maybe let's go back to the roots of pedagogy and knowledge. And so really trying to set the context. If we're talking about learning, well, first of all, what are we learning and how do we define what that knowledge is? And then the pedagogy seems to be that there is somebody who's helping to facilitate that process of knowledge acquisition. So maybe you could talk a bit about this landscape of pedagogy and how you make sense of that.
[00:10:03.119] Erica Southgate: Thanks, Kent. The book actually presents a couple of brand new pedagogical frameworks for understanding how to use VR in classrooms and what they can offer pedagogically for teachers. So, pedagogy comes from the Greek. It means to lead the child or to facilitate learning, I suppose, in more modern language. And I've got a very deep and long history, actually, of theorising pedagogy and working on pedagogical projects. And I've tried to bring that to the fore in the book. So much of what we look at and what's sold to teachers through the ed tech industry is the technology, what the technology can do. But very little is written about how we can pedagogically leverage that. So, how teachers can leverage that for learning in classrooms and how we might think about different types of VR in a pedagogical way rather than a technological way. And so one thing that I do in the book is talk about, you know, what is pedagogy? What kind of theories of pedagogy might be useful? And I'm really kind of aiming for a middle range theory of pedagogy, a theory of pedagogy which arises out of research, but also brings in much more theoretical concepts. So the type of pedagogy I'm talking about is really a pedagogy that excites learners. So it's about the coming together of the teacher and the learner. to create, to think, to mull over and have dialogue about difficult concepts and ideas, to experiment, maybe not to always get it right, but it's actually the journey around that that's most important for learning. And it's what learners actually learn during that journey that's important. So, very often you will have teachers look at, and this will be sold to them in this way, that they'll be given products which have very limited pedagogical merit, I would argue. So they're products in which the virtual experience is already packaged up. It's given to teachers with a set of instructions or notes about what to do with it. And teachers guide the students through it. And that's the end of the experience. And it's integrated into a, it's either a stimulus, piece of stimulus material for a unit of work or the beginning of a unit of work, or it's put into a unit of work as a kind of extra experience. But we really don't know and we really haven't thought about pedagogically how to use the technology best. And this is what the book's about. So I argue that, for instance, there's a type of pedagogical experience where you can just turn around and look at stuff, which is fine. It can be guided or unguided. Then there's a type of pedagogical experience where you can actually have much more autonomy or agency in the space. So you might be able to manipulate certain components for learning in that space. Then there are sort of sandbox applications, I mean like Tilt Brush or like Minecraft, in which the application gives you the type of tools you need to create. And you don't need to code to do that, which is really actually important in schools, because coding is a very niche area, despite popular dialogue around that. So, it gives you the creative potential to really show, to demonstrate learning mastery, demonstrate what you can learn in really creative ways. And then, of course, there are experimental settings which are set up where you can do certain types of experiments. You're given the tools for that. There's other types of code to create pedagogical applications. So, you might introduce older kids to Unity or Unreal Engine and get them to code to create, and there's different learning outcomes from that. But for teachers and educators in general, we need to be able to differentiate between what VR can offer in terms of both its tools for learning, but also the degree to which the learner has autonomy and agency in that space. and the kind of embodied interactions. I'm really interested in the notion of embodied cognition in terms of these types of applications, because you're not only learning with your mind, with VR, you're learning with your body and through your body and being able to interact with and have nonverbal communication with others. And a lot of that went on when we actually took it into the classroom and we systematically collected screen capture video of students in VR. We could see how they were working in an embodied fashion. through nonverbal communication. So it really is about trying to unpick and differentiate different types of VR in terms of the tools that it offers, the agency it gives a learner to be able to demonstrate learning mastery or mastery of learning objectives and the embodied nature of that. It's a very complicated weaving together in terms of a pedagogical framework. But I hope that it offers something both to technologists working in the space, that we begin to think about designing applications which offer much more agency to learners and that we begin to really investigate embodied and non-verbal learning through these spaces.
[00:15:02.833] Kent Bye: Yeah, I really get that. You know, the technology is not going to come in and solve all of your pedagogical problems and take away teaching and the whole constructive process of learning with others. But I think there's a lot of the learning that has happened that is in this, what you call like this transmission model of pedagogy, which is the teacher in front of the classroom didactically giving a lecture and imposing and transmitting knowledge that is to be received by those who are listening. And that's great if you learn that way. And I think it's one mode of transmitting knowledge, but there's a counterpart where you say it's like this more philosophically infused theories of pedagogy, which consider teaching as a contextualized practice involving the way knowledge is transmitted, exchanged, co-produced, reproduced, transformed, and challenged. It's much more of this interactive participatory process and you sort of contrast those two. And then you're introducing this whole other new pedagogical framework of the action to pedagogy for immersive learning. So maybe you could contrast a little bit of those different models of the transmission model, the normal, maybe constructivist model and what you were trying to get at with this other philosophically fused approach and then why you saw there as a need for like a new pedagogical framework.
[00:16:18.352] Erica Southgate: Okay. So, the book offers quite a pragmatic framework, the Action Framework, which teachers can use to actually make decisions about what VR is best for their classroom and for the type of learning they want to encourage in their classroom or facilitate. So, that's a very pragmatic, it's not a checklist approach, but it is an approach which asks teachers to reflect on particular domains before they actually introduce the technology into classrooms or when a vendor comes to offer a product, they can ask some kind of pragmatic questions and pedagogical questions about the technology. To me, we have to think about What is education? What is learning? Like, why are we doing it? Like, are we ultimately just about transmission from expert to novice? Are we about that? Or are we about building and developing other skills and students? And there's a lot of, for a long time, there's been a lot of dialogue about 21st century learning schools. But honestly, it often bamboozles teachers and it bamboozles me as well. I mean, what are these 21st century learning schools and how do you develop them? particularly in the context of an overcrowded curriculum. So, we try to stuff that much into the curriculum that teachers are often forced to enact didactic pedagogies or transmission modes of pedagogy where the teacher just delivers the information or it's very highly structured. And to be frank, that's not that interesting for most students. Even those students that learn well with that kind of lecture mode, I still enjoy doing other stuff. So, it's about how we can use new types of technology, in this case virtual reality, to offer a different studio, a different space and a hybrid space that can meld and be woven into classroom practice. So, it's not about the VR offering the whole learning experience. It's about empowering teachers to understand how they can weave the VR. into their traditional ways of learning. And it doesn't really take much to do that. Although in the case studies we did demonstrate there are technical and practical and ethical issues to overcome. So why do we have education? It has to be for a larger philosophical purpose. And so whatever we do needs to be orientated towards that. If we're going to use the technology, it has to have some kind of role in a larger philosophical purpose about really engaging and enabling people to have a better life and a better life for our planet as well. So it really is about asking for deep reflection on our pedagogical project and where technology fits with that. But the reason we do research is that we always have caveats and we always are very honest about what works and what doesn't. So we're in a particular space where we can begin to do very exciting things with virtual reality in the classroom But at the same time, we need to get beyond the spruiking mode of the EdTech industry around that and to offer much more authentic case studies about how that can be done. The other thing that the book does is that, and this came out of the research and it wasn't something I thought about before, but it really is about how teachers can leverage their existing pedagogical knowledge. So, all teachers have pedagogical knowledge. They have pedagogical content knowledge. so they know how to teach their particular subject well pedagogically, and they have content knowledge. So, this is Shulman's framework. But teachers themselves, interestingly, were leveraging their pedagogical content knowledge. So, this is the way they would normally teach their subject. And then they were thinking about VR as a new mode to do that. So, for example, all scientists, when they teach, all science teachers, when they teach, use models. And so it makes sense, and all students, they see models, they see skeletons, they see cross-sections. So it makes sense for those teachers to think about creating a learning task with VR, which was model-based. So it wasn't so far-flung and crazy and an extraordinarily long leap from their pedagogical practice. It was a leveraging of what they already did. And in the other case study with Dungog High School, which is a small rural high school about an hour away from me, The drama teacher, we had a drama case study where they used Tilt Brush for costume and set design. So costume and set design is usually done with a small cardboard box, which you make tiny little furniture and elements of the sets and you put it in a little set box. But they used Tilt Brush to do that, so they could make an experiment with set and costume design at scale. which is something you can't do in a normal drama classroom. But of course, the task was something that they would do with a small cardboard box, but now it had been leveraged using the affordances of Tilt Brush into something much more extraordinary. So to me, it's about saying to teachers, you've got all this knowledge, let's leverage it using what the technology can do and what it's good for. and I think that's a different approach to the kind of spruiking which is about, oh, this is innovative learning, this is new, it has to be something that's different to what you normally do for a teacher. I think we can actually use teachers' knowledge really well with the technology, but we have to work with them to do that.
[00:21:35.478] Kent Bye: Well, I wanted to ask you about the deeper motivation that students have for learning. I feel like there's a certain amount of innate curiosity or passion that is what I see as kind of the heart of this self-directed learning, action-based learning, inquiry-based learning, all of these that are trying to get at either questions that you're asking to drive someone's curiosity or to allow someone to look at, say, project-based learning as an example. where you want to make something and so in order to make something you have to learn how to do that. In my own experience of learning, I feel like I have this insatiable curiosity where I'm able to go and interact with all these different people from across this industry and ask them all these questions and then in that process of asking those questions, then I get answers. And then I feel like it's in that exchange of my curiosity being met with facilitating some sort of process that allows me to come up with people who have more knowledge than me to be able to share what information they have, just like we're having this conversation here about pedagogy itself. So I feel like there is inquiry-based learning or self-directed learning where a lot of it seems to be drawn by really catalyzing the student's interest or curiosity and their passion to be able to then have this larger goal they're trying to achieve, whether it's creating a project or whatever it ends up being. But that seems for me, my own direct experience of learning, that seems to be a key part of it. And I'm just curious how you make sense of that final causation or that deep intentionality that is maybe driving forward the learning process.
[00:23:07.923] Erica Southgate: It's a really good question. I think people who are good learners, we know people who are good learners or effective learners often like to collaborate with others in different ways. It doesn't have to be face to face, but there can be certain modes of collaboration. The other thing that we know affective learners is that they are curious and that they ask questions as they go and they don't simply consume knowledge. So they're actually stopping and reflecting as they go and often with others as well. And the other thing that's really important for affective learning is what we call metacognition. So I'm really quite interested in this idea of how we regulate our own learning. So, someone like you can regulate their own learning quite effectively, whether you are conscious of that or not. And the ways that you will do that is, for instance, you will often plan what you're going to do, and that becomes much easier the more expert you become, but you'll plan what you're going to do. You'll monitor as you go to see how effective your learning is or the project you're undertaking is, and you'll evaluate what you've done towards the end. And that will be formally or informally. So, you'll do it in both modes. And the thing about metacognition is that for some people, it does appear to come fairly naturally. You know, they often have very good experiences of education and they pick it up by osmosis. But for a lot of people, it doesn't. And we can actually teach metacognitive strategies like this is a really important part of learning. So it's teaching learners how to learn and how to learn best. and you'll see the better learning outcomes because of that. Part of what we're interested in in this project was part of metacognition, which is called regulation, how students regulated their learning. When you think about it, if you give kids, 14 or 15-year-olds, who aren't necessarily some of which aren't necessarily super engaged in science or other types of learning, and you give them this amazing world that they can go into with their mates and play and have a great time, what are they going to do? What would you do? And we're really interested in the idea of what will happen? Will they just go and, you know, run around and have a good time, or they actually get on with the learning task. And not only do they have to learn how to use the equipment, they have to learn how to troubleshoot with it, they have to learn what the actual program can do, what's available for them, and they need to be able to learn to regulate their learning in that. Not only their own learning, but the learning of their teammates or their classmates because they're in a group, remember, so we actually decided to look at this because it's such an important part of good learning by using screen capture video. And the screen capture video had a lot of methodological issues. We had a number of issues, which I think is really important for the sector to understand in order to advance knowledge. But apart from that, the key finding that came out is that almost all groups of students, because we had screen capture video of all those students working in VR, all of them had high levels of collaboration. and high levels of the type of regulation where they would co-regulate each other. So, they weren't bossing each other around. They weren't saying, Kent, you're off task, you need to do this. What they were actually doing was collaborating on the learning task together to solve problems in very gentle and meaningful and productive ways. And what was interesting is that when we put them in there, they were mainly on task. We didn't know whether they'd be off task or not. So they were mainly on learning task and they were mainly collaborating and self-regulating their own learning and the learning of others, the learning of their teammates in really effective ways. And I think we've stumbled across the future of VR in learning when we look at this. So if we can create environments where students can be given the tools to collaborate, to learn together, to demonstrate how creative and knowledgeable they are, then we're actually getting away from our didactical transmission mode of pedagogy into a much more deep form of learning. And we're teaching them at the same time that the types of skills they need, like collaboration, creativity, communication, and self-directed learning, that those types of skills they need to be successful are outside of school. and for the rest of their life. So I think, you know, part of what's interesting for me is that the focus on metacognition and regulation in our project is novel, but it also shows the real benefits of the technology.
[00:27:47.616] Kent Bye: Well, I guess part of my frustration that I've come across by talking to the ed tech or the broader educational community, I'd say is that there's a lot of, especially in the United States, there's been a lot of focus on trying to quantify and do the standardized testing and put a number on somebody's learning. And I feel like that just has so many problems. But at the same time, with knowledge and how do you know what you know, there's trying to have the dialectic between the will to believe some sort of theory and then the critics who come in and they're really skeptical. And you have this, what Agnes Callard says, is this adversarial division of epistemic labor where you have a process, whether it's a scientific method or the peer review process that really battles it out and tries to put forth things that you think are true and then have the community really test it and critique it. And then it's through that communal process that at the end, you understand what the truth is. So if you apply that model to individuals and trying to see, well, how do you transmit knowledge into an individual? Trying to quantify it and put a number on that seems to be, that's how we know, like, if there's a basis of being skeptical about what we really actually know, then you actually have to come up with some sort of proof. And so you have gone through and tried to do this user study, but at the end of the day, there's still this essence of like, well, how do we know what we know? And how do we know with whatever numbers you put forth? if there was actually an improvement through doing this whole thing with virtual reality. And I'm just wondering how you start to reckon that dilemma of the quantification lens, if there's other ways that you are able to really have some sense of like, no, actually we have a really good sense that learning is happening. And here's how we describe that through this mixture of qualitative and quantitative means.
[00:29:38.221] Erica Southgate: Yeah, I think you're right. I think we need a mixed methodology when we look at any of these kind of immersive technologies or any any learning that occurs really technology driven or not. So I think you need numbers and you need narrative and you need lots of diverse data sources and you know school based education is rich in multiple types of data. So yes, we actually did measure content knowledge acquisition through pre-imposed tests and we had a control group. So we could see if the VR group learned more than the non-VR group, the kids who didn't get it. And they didn't learn any more facts or concepts, but they didn't learn any less either. And yet they had this extra experience, which certainly had an increased cognitive load, I would argue. So, we did measure content knowledge acquisition, but of course, learning is more than content knowledge acquisition. I mean, you do need content, you need concepts, but you also need to know how to learn. And you need to have different avenues for your learning. So, not only did we look at content knowledge acquisition, we also kind of applied this thing called the deeper learning framework, which comes out of the US. It's a framework that's been developed particularly to assist students from low income school communities to develop higher order thinking skills and collaboration, self-directed learning or metacognition, for instance, and communication skills. at an academic mindset. So, in order to do that, we need to look at, for instance, student work samples. So, what do students produce in VR? What's the experience like? Do they know the facts so well they can narrate those and tell a story about what they've learned accurately without notes? I mean, that's a pretty incredible kind of learning outcome where you can do that. we look at talking to students and teachers about their experience. And so that kind of qualitative data is really important because you'll get insights that you won't normally get just by, for instance, doing a pre and post content knowledge test. We videoed usual learning or unusual learning behavior looked like actually in virtual worlds. And then we did quantify that using descriptive statistics. So we did quantify that using a coding frame that was taken on regulation of learning for verbal and nonverbal behaviours so that we could look at patterns. across learning behaviours and on and off task behaviours in VR, in actual VR. So you do need really diverse data sets. You need to be able to triangulate or marry those together to think about what findings or results there are. And all of this is complicated and messy. It's much more complicated and messy than looking just at content knowledge acquisition. So in the book, We argue that in order to use the technology, we need to think about how we can use it well. And really, I think in terms of collaboration and creativity and communication, they're the three things that I think VR can offer that often normal classroom or more didactic or teacher-directed classroom conditions can't. So, yeah, you do need lots of diverse data sources. You do need numbers and you do need narratives and you do need to be able to tell a story from that and a complicated story. So just putting statistics up like, you know, I don't know, 20 percent of learners learn more facts isn't enough, really. And so we're really at the beginning of doing this kind of interesting work in educational settings, in natural educational settings, not in labs. I mean, lab work's really important, but we need to extend beyond that. We need to extend beyond just experimental design. Experimental design is important, but we need more than that to understand the complex layers of learning and different types of learning. I think when we reduce learning just to content knowledge acquisition, however important that is, it's just not enough.
[00:33:34.505] Kent Bye: Well, one of the things I really appreciated about what you were able to do with this book was do a survey of both the history as well as pedagogy. And so I'm wondering if you could mention some of the other frameworks, other things that really jumped out for you to really make sense of this because You're really looking at these emerging fields and trying to make sense of the affordances of virtual reality. And so just wondering if you could comment on some of those either frameworks or systems that you thought really made sense, and also maybe some of the prior work that you're really building off of as you start to look at the research that you're doing.
[00:34:08.778] Erica Southgate: Yeah, now there's been some really interesting early work that came out of the 80s and 90s, and it's very important work on the affordances of virtual reality for learning. And that sort of set the scene where these particular authors, and you can read about them in the book, argue that we need to actually understand what you can do with virtual reality you can't do with any other technology for learning. So they argue that it's no use just replicating what you could do in a real life lab in a virtual lab, unless, of course, you can undertake an experiment which would be too dangerous, for instance, in a real lab if you're a child. You'd never be able to undertake that experiment in a real lab if you're a child, but you could do it in VR because it's safer. VR offers that kind of affordance. Really important work arguing that we need to extend beyond thinking about virtual reality just as simulation or training. Simulation training is really important, but really it's about procedural learning. Okay, so it's procedural learning. Sometimes it's safer and better to practice in simulation, but we need to be able to think about the technology beyond us, procedural learning and simulation contexts. So how can we use the kind of affordances of virtual reality, for instance, the ability to manipulate scale or to reify particular really difficult concepts. So for instance, one of the nicest, and it was a PhD project, one of the nicest affordances I've seen with the use of VR, and it might have been intentional or accidental, was when I was strapped into this kind of harness in IEEE in Osaka, and I got to swim because I was kind of suspended like a fish in a school. of other fish and it's very difficult for a middle-aged woman who's swinging around trying to swim with other fish and a big shark would come out in the virtual environment and you had to kind of keep with the fish, with the school of fish in order not to be eaten. Now what's really interesting about that from my perspective as a teacher, as an educator, is that's a reification. So really abstract ideas like instinct, how instinct works, can be brought to life through embodied interaction in virtual reality. And for instance, I really got the sense when I was trying to like flap around like a fish to avoid the shark and stay with my school, what it would be like, I suppose, a little bit of what it would be like in terms of instinctual survival mechanisms. And then, of course, the shark ate me, which was pretty horrible. But what's really interesting is that it's an affordance of VR. using embodied technique to teach something that's really highly abstract. And that's what VR is good for. So there's early work that argues that kind of framework. But I mean, what happens is that a lot of energy, of course, and commercial energy gets put into building training simulation. which is really about being able to learn something, to remember something, to be able to understand it and apply it, which is a kind of middle order, lower to middle order Bloom's taxonomy level of thinking. But not much work gets put into thinking about how we move up Bloom's taxonomy, for instance, how we think about using VR for more evaluative, creative processes, and where we begin to really think about how can we use this technology to deepen to deeper understanding of really difficult concepts, for instance, symbolic or abstract concepts. I actually think that's the beauty of VR, that we can use it for those things, not just for lower and middle order thinking, just not for the delivery of content. I mean, why would you just deliver content through it when you can probably do the same thing in class as a teacher or with a video or some other media? Why would you do that? We want to use it for what it's best for and what it's good for. And so there's a really interesting early work around that, but it never got picked up. It never really got picked up in the tech industry. It's overlooked. And I think that's the space I'm interested in, that overlooked space. And that was part of the book. How can we use it for higher order thinking? How can we develop metacognitive skills? How can we do the hard stuff in terms of learning with this technology?
[00:38:34.368] Kent Bye: One of the, as I was looking through those chapters and the references to different frameworks, one of them that jumped out to me was from Dede Jacobsen and Richards from 2017. And it's from their introduction on the virtual augmented and mixed realities in education. And they had these different types of psychological immersion, which kind of match my own concept of the different levels of presence that I usually use as my lens. But they say that there's actional immersion, so empowering the users to initiate action. There's the social immersion, so sharing reasoning to get things done and learning along the way with others. The symbolic narrative immersion, triggering powerful meanings and associations that can motivate learners to create intellectual connections and deepen mental models. And then the sensory immersion of the immersive displays or headsets that can create a panoramic, egocentric view of the virtual world. So with each of these, I think of different modalities of like video games, for example, of your agency and active presence is like this actional immersion and VR is incorporating that. The mental and social presence of abstractions of language and being able to communicate with each other. This social immersion that happens with being able to actually either interact with people while you're in the experience or as you come out of it, be able to talk about it with other people. The direct sensory experience, I think, is something that is completely unique to VR, this embodied presence and being able to take you into this another place of environmental presence. A lot of what Slater would refer to as the place illusion and the plausibility illusion, that you're in a place and that you believe that you're actually there. And then the symbolic and narrative immersion, I think of movies and ways of using film and storytelling that really engage with your emotions and being able to tap into the consonance and dissonance cycles of a good narrative and a good story. But those, I think, were very interesting to start to look at and casting them in terms of what Dede is referring to as these different levels of immersion, actional immersion, social immersion, symbolic and narrative immersion, and sensory immersion. Just wondering if you could expand on that a little bit for how you see that plays into the broader learning theory of how to use VR.
[00:40:41.253] Erica Southgate: Yeah, no, I think that that's a really powerful framework that they've developed. I think that we need to, and they do do it to a degree, but situate it socially. So I think a lot of this stuff, it really needs a social psychological perspective. So it's great to go and learn something individual in virtual reality, but it's much more powerful if we learn it with others and we discover along the way. So I think the social aspects are very important. The social aspects of nonverbal communication and working together in particular. virtual environments and what you learn from that is really important. So we found that children, for instance, or young people in the virtual environment would work together and not necessarily talk while they're working, because we could record that, but would actually begin to cooperate and learn together just by looking and doing. And so what we did was we brought, you know, something from, you know, usually that you study at an early childhood setting into a high school setting. But VR allows for that. If you give the kids the tools, they'll actually begin to learn and communicate in non-verbal ways and learn through that as well as verbally. I think the immersion framework, the trouble with the concept of immersion is that there's always this big war about it's a technical term versus presence. That's not very helpful for learning, I have to say, to keep having the technical versus the definitional issues. It is for technologists and scientists, but it's not pedagogically useful. The whole immersion framework is interesting because it puts people at the centre of it. It puts experience at the centre of it, but it needs to shift, I think, towards much more social conceptions of what learning is, because we know most people learn best when they learn with others, but most people learn best when they have others who can help them learn. It's usually a more competent other. It can be a peer, it can be a teacher, it could be a kind of a non-player character in a game that helps someone along, you know, a computer generated character. So, it really is about social interaction and learning. And it's not about I mean, the issue is it is about the experience, not necessarily about the end product. So while in our research, we found that the end products were quite extraordinary, actually. I mean, we had groups of students make a big model of an eye in which you could tour that through a roller coaster. So you jumped in a roller coaster, you could tour up and into the eye through the optic nerve and ride around and then come back out. And then they've made viewing platforms. which you could fly up to and view the eye. And they had placards which had information about the eye on it, but they could give you a tour of it as well. But what was interesting about that is you did have psychological immersion. You had social immersion because you're actually in the cart with someone else. It was a bit nauseating, but you're in a cart, hurtling along on your tour of the eye. the model of the eye, you had a whole lot of symbolic kind of immersion in that you could actually really see, you could jump out of the cart and slosh around in the liquid that is in the eyeball, and you could splash around in that, which is good because it would generally be quite symbolic. So you could see all those kind of aspects of immersion, I suppose, in that model. and how it worked. Now, none of those children were explicitly taught that, about the affordances. They weren't really taught, and we did tell them you should manipulate scale. We did tell them, you know, that you can do things in here that you can't do in real life, so think about that and explore what you can do. But they really got, I suppose, and not all of them were gamers. Some of them had never tried, most of them had never tried VR before, and not all of them played video games. But they were really very interested and curious about what you could do with the technology. And they did create really powerful sensors, really powerful types of immersion in their models just by experimentation. And that in itself is really powerful for learning.
[00:44:42.477] Kent Bye: So one of the other things that as I was doing a talk for the Immersive Education Summit, I did a deep dive into different approaches of learning theory and I actually came across the SAMR model, the substitution, augmentation, modification and redefinition. And I saw that you mentioned that in one of the theories of technology-enhanced learning, where the SAMR model has this sort of progress where the first couple of phases are just about trying to take a one-to-one substitution. And then eventually you start to modify and redefine what's even possible. And then you mentioned another one here, the technological pedagogical content knowledge model by Mishra and Kohler from 2006. And then you put forth your own action pedagogy for immersive learning framework, which I guess tries to fill in the gaps between these two. But I guess if I take a step back and look at education it's chronically underfunded, undervalued, which means that it's not usually on the first wave of technology adoption. If anything, there's like educators that are still using Google Cardboard. They're still using the Oculus Go when it's, you know, functionally being slowly phased out, these mobile VR headsets. So there's like this diffusion curve where it feels like educators are kind of like in the early majority, maybe late majority, even laggards a lot of times. And so when we're thinking about this, it's hard for me to not remember this challenge of access of getting this technology into the hands of people. It's still very early in both the evolution of the technology and the diffusion of the technology out into the broader culture for it to be affordable. So you're in this theoretical bubble of looking at something that is possible, but yet we may be a long ways away from actually feasibly being able to distribute all this technology out to schools. Or maybe if the coronavirus, you know, COVID-19 continues for a number of years, then maybe there will be a larger context that drives the technology into homes that becomes more of a facilitator. But even that has issues with access of what about everybody getting access to it. So I'm just wondering if you could comment on these different models of technology substitution in the broader context of access and also just that experience of being on the bleeding edge of something that you're kind of like ahead of a lot of your other peers that even are thinking about this or also have the means to actually execute some of the theory.
[00:47:11.330] Erica Southgate: That's a really good question. In the book, I actually talk about what theory means and types of theory. That's because I've got an educational and sociological background, so I understand levels of theory. There are universal theories, theories which are meant to be applied across contexts. For instance, Samir and Tupac, universal type theories, are meant to be applied across technology types. And in some ways, they're very, very helpful. And they certainly did come from practice. There's no doubt that they've come from an authentic base. The trouble is with universal theories, where they give you some good thinking tools about what's possible, they're not pragmatic enough or detailed enough to really empower teachers or educators, even in higher education, in schools or higher education or vocational education, with enough practicality to really think about how they might use it in their classroom, particularly given classrooms are set up and they're absolutely industrial age. Schools and universities are industrial age structures. but they haven't got the spatial configuration, the temporal configuration or the pedagogical configuration, which would make these technologies powerful, despite people trying to kind of put the technologies in or integrate the technologies in in certain ways. So, the issue is, I argue, that with any technology, we need to look at its affordances, what's special about it and we need to be able to use what teachers already know and put those two things together. And Samir and TPAC, to a degree, do that, but not to a level of specificity that would allow most teachers, and most teachers aren't technologically super savvy, they are interested and they'll always try something new, they're curious people and they're always learning, but would enable most teachers just to pick something up and have a play and a go with it to take a risk in a classroom. You're right, in the ed tech sector, my main issue is that with our technology, we have pedagogical mindset, which means that any product that's developed, teachers need to have main control of it. When they introduce in the classroom, the teacher's in control of the product, rather than actually giving students the tools to create their own content. There's a lot of issues about students as content creators, but it doesn't happen in VR very often. We've got, you know, teachers taking students have got to as teachers creating their own content, for instance, their own 360 content, rather than letting students do that, because everyone's a bit worried that the teacher will lose control, whatever that means of learning or the students will be too empowered and out to the teacher, I suppose, which would be wonderful. But they're really worried, for instance, that the product, the actual product that's being produced with the technology won't be perfect enough. And I argue in the book that it doesn't have to be perfect, actually, and it will never be perfect or beautiful, although some cases it will be extraordinary. But it really is about students being given the tools, and these are virtual tools, virtual environments, to be able to learn as they go. And the stuff that they learn as they go will be far more powerful and be retained at a far greater rate and be far more useful for them in the long run than anything that a teacher may deliver in a kind of didactic manner. So, for instance, when I did the case study, with little rural Dungok High School with a little drama class there. Rural kids, a lot of them haven't even got internet at home. They get to class, they've got this incredible technology, they've got Tilt Brush and they move in and out. Suddenly the virtual studio of Tilt Brush merges with the drama studio. and they begin to create costume and set design to reflect directorial vision. Very abstract concept, very abstract ideas. And they can experiment in such a fast way. They can prototype in such a fast way. They can share and get feedback with their peers and the teacher very quickly with this tool. would never make them, and the kids say this too, would never make them better artists. Most of them just haven't got the kind of technical artistic skill to be able to create something super amazing in Tilt Brush, but that actually doesn't matter. What they do learn along the way is the importance of symbolism and how symbolism works in theatre design and how an audience might view that. Because when you're in Tilt Brush, you can take it actor's vision. You can look at how the actor might see the set or the costume design. You can go and see how the audience might view that. As a director, you could move around that. So, it's actually about the whole collaborative, experimental mindset where you can take very abstract ideas and make them real, where you can talk about that with your peers and your teacher. You can communicate, build your communication and collaboration because it's about that that's important. So this kind of fear of things not being perfect or controlled is actually, I would argue, not what good pedagogy is about. We need to loosen the reins and we need to actually hand the control of the autonomy, the agency, around learning over, but we need to do this in a careful and scaffolded way. So, teachers can develop very careful units of work, very careful plans of study, very careful online resources that can help students achieve their goal, but in the end, it's not how perfect a product is, and we know that. We know that in industry, it's about the experimentation, the learning along the way, and what's next. The third part of the question was really about education being a poor cousin, I suppose. And it's really very difficult because most schools are struggling even to get enough devices, like mobile devices, for students, let alone put something like high-end VR in class. So, and we know this through COVID, there are a lot of kids that went home who didn't even have access to a device, or there was one device amongst many siblings. So, I mean, I think the issue for the sector about scaling up and there's always this discourse about scaling up an industry kind of made up. The main issue for me is in order to scale up, we have to show how you can use it and use it well. We have to talk about where it could be used very easily, could be used at home for online learning. We could give kids headsets. There's no doubt about that. But until we actually talk about how we can use it practically in real classrooms. Not in labs, real classrooms with real teachers, with real students and how we can show how it adds value to learning or how you can do different types of learning with the technology. It will never scale up. And to be frank, the industry needs to invest in that. It's very difficult to get any funding. If I was an engineer, I would argue I'd get much more funding and support than if I'm a humble teacher. So the issue is the industry needs to invest in the research, invest in systematic research, which is conducted over time in situ in schools with diverse groups of learners. And we need to have very rigorous methodologies that collect lots of different types of data in order to understand learning. Some of that will be measurement and some of that won't. But until we do that, it's a big ask to talk about scaling up. of the technology. So, I mean, really, you're right. We're at a very interesting space. I mean, my favourite experience in the whole of the VR school project to date has been two boys, two 15-year-olds, standing next to each other while the Oculus Rift tracking went out for the fifth time that lesson. And Australians are quite dry, actually. And one kid turned to the other kid and he said, aren't you glad you signed up for this? And I had a little giggle and I said, I know, mate, if we could get the technology to be reliable, you know, it will be a lot better. We found, you know, 15 percent of the time the technology just failed, you know. But the point is, you know, the kids are up for it. The teachers are up for it. But we really do need to be able to put in a much more comprehensive research program. I know researchers always say we need more research, but in this case, we actually do. Because then we can collect the evidence around effectiveness for learning, and then you'll get the investment.
[00:55:58.461] Kent Bye: Yeah, I feel like it's still really early days in terms of actually deploying this stuff out there. I think one of the other things I wanted to point out that you briefly mentioned, and I know we've talked on panels at IEEE VR about privacy and ethics and having a broader ethical approach to how you relate with the technology to different students. Maybe you could just expand a little bit and set a little bit more of a ethical context for this type of work and some of the things that you were trying to put forth in this book as well.
[00:56:28.558] Erica Southgate: Yeah, so there's a whole section on practical issues and ethical issues. So we need to make sure first and foremost that the technology is safe. We need to make sure it's designed with safety mechanisms built in. But we also need to know that sometimes those engineered solutions will not work. So we need other safety procedures. And one of those examples is you might have a guardian system, which is great. You can even at the moment, of course, have see-through cameras where when you step out of the guardian system, you can see the real world. However, often it can be so intense experience in a virtual world that a student might run. So, for instance, one of the kids had put on the Survivor version of Minecraft, where the monsters and the giant spiders run at you. And they weren't allowed to do that. But of course, you know, kids being kids, they did. And one of the young women who had a giant spider running at her in Minecraft started to run across the room. And so although there's a guardian system there, when you're running at speed away from a giant spider, you did need what we call a spotter, which we put in place to hold her shoulder and say, stop, take the headset off. So the kind of visceral embodied nature of VR means that we actually do need really powerful ethical protocols for this stuff and engineering solutions will not always work. I mean, the fact that you have to put equipment on and off and you have to train kids to do that, that you might have to touch their shoulder to be able to put them back into a safe area, means that you need touch protocols. You need to be able to... Many children who are touch adverse. because of life experiences or because of religious reasons or because of they have special needs. And so we need protocols around that, for instance. And that came out of being in a class and working with a teacher on that protocol. We need hygiene protocols now to make sure things are safe around sharing of equipment. And, you know, what we really do need to do is think very carefully about the privacy implications. of the realm of VR and AR, for instance, it's not very super clear from the companies that are developing and marketing this stuff what the privacy implications are. As soon as we start to introduce artificial intelligence into this or types of biometric data collection, that's sensitive data and we need very, very clear policies and regulation around that. So, I know that at IEEE VR in Osaka, so in 2019, there was quite a bit of talk around eye tracking, pupil dilation, to look at engagement in learning. And this poses a lot of ethical questions. And we really do need to empower, and then to use machine learning to really analyze it, I suppose. So we need to really understand what's going on. As soon as you use machine learning or pedagogical agents in virtual environments to nudge learners in certain directions, that has ethical implications. And we should know when we're interacting with machine or what machines are doing. So this is a little bit future forward, but not too future forward, I would think. So I really think teasing out all those issues and understanding educational solution to those as well as kind of engineering solutions and regulatory or governance solutions to those ethical quandaries is really important. And that's part of the space I'm working in at the moment. And I know that you're working in as well.
[01:00:05.162] Kent Bye: Well, the last question I have about your book in particular is the final chapter where you are talking about schooling, virtual futures, what we need to know and do to ensure powerful learning through immersive virtual reality. So you're really looking forward both into the future, but also into your conclusions, I guess, from this big extended study that you cover through chapters four to seven. So maybe you could just talk a bit about what's next, where do you see this going and some of the big takeaways you have from this deep dive that you've gone into immersive education so far?
[01:00:38.751] Erica Southgate: Okay, so I do a section on, you know, what we know already and what we need to know and then what we need to do. But I suppose, you know, the main takeaway for me is that we need to actually, researchers need to get out into schools or even into university classrooms, whatever education setting they are, and actually work with teachers and students in situ. because, as I said, it's no use designing educational applications if you can't actually implement them in real settings. So, we need actually a bit more authenticity in terms of our approach to that. I think that there's a whole partnership that needs to take place between industry, government and research around this. We need longitudinal studies, for instance, on the effects of immersion on children. To date, there's been two studies, reasonably small scale. Both those show minimal effects on children under the age of 12 or middle school children, really, but they're very small sample sizes. We need much more sustained research in the area. And we know children are trying this technology because it's all over social media. with parents showing their kids in headsets and they can be very young children. And I have conversations with people all the time about that and the safety implications, but we really do need very systematic research to make sure that it is safe and there aren't any long-term effects to immersion for young children. We need to be able to understand how to use the technology best for learning and to leverage teachers' pedagogical expert knowledge. that they have a key role to play in this. And if we don't leverage their pedagogical knowledge, there's no way this technology can be scaled up. It just will not be scaled up. It will be relegated. Except for, say, simulation training applications. We really do need to be able to put into place some sort of projects which have educational engineering and kind of governance structures around ethical and legal frameworks for this technology and its use in schools in particular. And there needs to be a curriculum project around that too. So young people themselves need to understand the implications of biometric harvesting, for instance, and what informed consent means with applications. So that's important. I mean, Mainly, I see the future is quite bright if we can work together and democratise the kind of project. But we need the technologists and the humanists to come together on this, because education is a humanist project. And when we have both sets of kind of expertise or people who work at the intersection of those expertise, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary knowledge, I think we can get amazing kind of knowledge outcomes around it. But we do need a rapprochement around that, much more than we have currently. I also think we need a bit more honesty from the ed tech sector, and a bit more honest engagement. And I'm working with technology companies, small tech at the moment, for instance, a small technology company out of Sydney called Verdi, which does 360, who are interested in genuine engagement, interested in genuine research, publishing the findings, supporting teachers genuinely in schools. So that kind of really not just giving teachers a product and saying, here you go, it's ready for you to implement and you have all the power and the learning, you can guide it and isn't that wonderful? It's easy to use, but really much more complex, messy and difficult. approaches to using the technology for deeper learning, deeper, higher order, kind of metacognitive learning in that space. If we can do that, then it'll be very attractive. Because at present, we don't have a lot of evidence and we don't want to have a lot of will to find out, I suppose, how we can use technology for that really complicated kind of interesting learning, which develops lifelong learning skills, either skills we need for life. And if we can do it in schools using the technology as part of the toolkit, that would be great. And I do feel quite confident about it, but there just needs to be a rapprochement between technologists and humanists in this space. And if that's why I go forth into the technical conferences to learn so I can learn, but also to say, hey, you know, let's do some research in real classrooms. Let's think about those ethical issues that emerge. Let's, you know, start to really have conversations beyond engineered solutions.
[01:05:19.915] Kent Bye: Yeah, that's what makes virtual reality as a medium so exciting for me is because there are so many opportunities for that interdisciplinary collaboration that really does need to happen in order to really get into these new frameworks, new models, new ways of understanding. And yeah, that level of cooperation that you're talking about here, that you can't do this alone. You have to get either support from business collaborators to be able to do the type of research to get this more evidence. But just to kind of wrap things up here, I'm just curious for you, what do you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality might be and what it might be able to enable?
[01:05:56.443] Erica Southgate: Well, I'd like to see it woven into the everyday fabric of the classroom for when it really, you feel like, yeah, that virtual experience will really enhance learning here. It will really add something. It will really build a new skill or develop a new type of learning or allow students an exciting and creative way to demonstrate content mastery, for instance, or learning mastery. I would like to see it embedded, woven through as a normal part of the classroom, not in the way that you have often seen these pictures of students sitting in rows with headsets on, being directed to look certain ways. Not in that way, but in a way in which children and young people have much more control and are given much more control around content creation. and given collaborative spaces, safe collaborative spaces to do that. So, not only within their classroom, but across the world. So, you can actually collaborate. We know that there are virtual spaces, there are social VR spaces where you can collaborate with others from the other side of the planet. I mean, that's an exciting thing educationally to be exposed to difference and diversity to people and peers and other people, experts with other perspectives. So, I think, you know, That to me is the exciting future. And if we can get it right, it will revolutionize what we're doing. I've no doubt about it, but we have to get it right. And we have to do the stodgy research groundwork first. We have to kind of know what it's good for, how to use it well and how to use it safely for learning.
[01:07:33.599] Kent Bye: Great. And is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the Immersive community?
[01:07:39.408] Erica Southgate: I'd just like to say I'm really thankful for the immersive community. I'm really thankful for the curiosity and the generosity of the community, I have to say. When you reach out, people do respond. But I would like to see a little bit more interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary cooperation, I suppose, particularly in the education space, particularly with schooling, around schooling and the setting of schooling and VR and AR, for instance. But yeah, I have to say I've always found the community welcoming and supportive because I need technical help. I need technical knowledge. I'm not a technologist and I do need to reach out often and invariably someone can assist me. So, you know, thank you to the community. But if anyone's interested in partnership, collaboration or discussion on any of the issues around using virtual reality in schools, I'm totally open to it.
[01:08:31.730] Kent Bye: Great. So yeah, this interview marks the launch of your book, The Virtual Reality in Curriculum and Pedagogy, Evidence from Secondary Classrooms, published by Routledge. It's being launched on May 19th, 2020. So congratulations on completing this book. I know that's within itself a hero's journey just to be able to put all of this knowledge down into a rigorous form, gather from the community, but also putting it forth in this book in the way that you have. So we've just sort of scratched the surface here in this conversation. And if it's interesting, then I highly recommend people check it out to be able to check all the citations and to get a lot more context and details. So yeah, with that, Erica, I just want to thank you for all the work that you're doing and for joining me here on the podcast today. So thank you.
[01:09:15.875] Erica Southgate: And thanks, Ken, for your support. You've just launched my book. I'm so happy. And in the time of COVID, that's a big thing since I can't have a real book launch. So thank you so much.
[01:09:26.227] Kent Bye: So that was Erica Southgate. She's an associate professor of emerging technologies for education at the University of Newcastle in Australia. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, Well, the thing that I think was really striking about this conversation is Erica really advocating for there to be a lot more research that's being done out in the field with emerging technologies within the classroom. There isn't a lot of that that's happening, and she's wanting to see a lot more of that and to have more support from industry and to have more of an effort to see what we know about learning and the affordances of these immersive technologies. Now, with the coronavirus, obviously, that makes it a lot more difficult. So, as we move forward, I'm interested to see, you know, how you continue to fuse all this together. You know, in a lot of ways, education sector tends to lag behind a lot of the other industry verticals. And so they're cash strapped and they don't have a lot of resources to actually push forward a lot of these technologies into the classrooms. I am interested in seeing what's happening in China with a lot of the different research that's happening there. They seem to have a lot more support from the government to actually support and sustain the pushing out of these immersive technologies out in the classroom. But even at that, just having the technology there doesn't mean that it's going to be well integrated as well. And so I think Part of what Erica is saying is that you need to go beyond just the training mindset and to think about what she sees as applying this deeper learning framework that is focusing on things like higher order thinking skills, collaboration, academic mindset, self-directed learning, metacognition, and communication skills. So the cultivation of a lot of these things is what she's really interested in focusing in on. And so looking at higher levels of collaboration to solve problems, this concept of co-regulating each other. So you're able to collaborate in learning with each other and to demonstrate to each other how each individual participating is either expressing their creativity or knowledge about being able to learn these tasks. And to move away from just the dynamic learning and more towards this collaboration, creativity, communication, and the self-directed learning. So, she's saying that these skills like metacognition and how we regulate our own learning, where you have to plan what you're going to do, monitor as you go, and evaluate at the end. And so, as she's doing these different studies, she's focusing on how to teach these metacognition skills and these regulation processes. And another thing she said is that they're really focusing on what does it take to really get the learners to be excited, to be able to create, to think, to mull over, to have dialogue over difficult ideas, to experiment. It's around the journey around all of that and fostering the sense of curiosity and engagement at a deep level. And certainly virtual reality technologies are able to do that. In her study, she was really focusing on putting the creative power within the hands of the students themselves to be able to create experiences that embed these different concepts from themselves, but also to allow them some sort of immersive experience that they're going to be able to teach other students as well. That's something that I also see is lacking from a lot of different approaches that I've seen in education is this real focus of creation and to not just rely upon content that's being created by the teacher and the larger community and the culture, but for them to be empowered to be able to create their own content. And so using something like Minecraft VR, where Minecraft's been out for over a decade now, so it's very likely that they'll have at least some experience of what it means to create these voxel-based art. And so creating these environments that allow students, without having to know all the nuances of 3D modeling, to be able to actually create content for themselves, to be able to teach themselves. And that, you know, to really look at evaluation, it takes this fusion of doing some quantitative assessment, but also the qualitative questioning from many different sources, and to look at how they're collaborating, communicating, and the expression of their creativity. And so it can't always be reduced down to a number, but they need numbers, they need narrative, and they need lots of different diverse data sources to fuse all these things together. It was also interesting to hear a little bit more context as to why Erica has put forth this action pedagogy for immersive learning, which she is categorizing as more of a middle tier, meaning it's a little bit more concrete to help people walk through these different steps that they need to be able to actually implement some of the immersive technologies. The other two major competing models are more universal models that are more independent of the context. The same remodel is talking about substitution, augmentation, modification, and redefinition. That's whenever you're thinking about using technology, you look at to see, okay, if you're going to replace previous ways of doing it, how do you do a one-to-one substitution? And then you start to slightly augment it, and then you move into modification, and then eventually you start to completely redefine what the task is. just by using the technology itself and so that's an evolutionary process where you have to at first replicate what's being done and then eventually you move into this complete redefinition but you don't start with introducing technology and completely innovating everything that's possible you can't really extrapolate what's possible until you have a little bit more of integration of the technology. So that's the SAMR model. And then there's technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge model, which is essentially like a Venn diagram, where you have your knowledge about the content, you have your pedagogical knowledge, which is how to teach that content, and then the technological knowledge, which is the affordances of the technology that are able to then go through the pedagogical process to be able to teach the content. And so at the center of those three circles is TPAC, the technological, pedagogical, content knowledge. Framework that is able to integrate all these things together and that you know One of the things that Erica is saying is that you have to really leverage the pedagogical and content knowledge of the teachers you can't just expect that the content is going to come in and replace all this other aspects and I know, the thing that makes me think is that it's actually very difficult to author content within VR right now. And so it's a pretty high friction for anybody to go in and start to create immersive experiences. And so the technological barrier, I think, is pretty significant. Therefore, it requires other people to offload and create those experiences, which means that the teachers content and pedagogical knowledge is limited. Although, you know, in talking to Google expeditions teams, they'll have like 360 videos that they'd be able to show into different classrooms and have Google Cardboard 360 videos and to be able to, to show what is essentially like a 360 video experiences like this virtual field trip. And then the teacher is able to use their content knowledge to be able to take the experience that everybody just had. to be able to then talk about it. And I think that's perhaps another way to think about it as well, is that maybe the immersive experience is a supplement to the existing content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge that the teacher has. And to really fuse that into the immersive experience itself, you know, we're pretty far ways away from being able to achieve that. And I think it's going to take quite a long time before there's a critical mass of immersive technologies that are just more of a commodity and accessible at all the different levels, and maybe then start to see how it can start to be integrated into the classrooms. And, you know, with coronavirus still spreading and, you know, no clear roadmap to see how this is going to be contained, there may be an additional catalyst to see how some of these immersive technologies can start to be used and piloted. I know that certainly at the case Western Reserve University, there's medical students that had the HoloLens where they already had the HoloLens. And so in order to teach anatomy classes, they were able to do that remotely. And so that's a case in an instance where there's a small pilot community at a university that happened to have enough resources to have all of these AR devices and spread out to all the different students. And they're able to experiment a little bit with remote learning and remote teaching. But for early and primary education, I think that's a little bit more difficult and would take funding and resources and a grant to be able to actually like give the technology to the students. And, you know, I think there's actually a lot of other social VR type of environments that are out there that could be a little bit more of a neutral playground for different social dynamics to happen, especially if we still have different aspects of social distancing. And so, Anyway, that's what Eric at the end is saying, is that we just need more research and more in-situ of using these technologies in actual classrooms, and that you're not going to learn anything if you're just theoretically talking about this in the lab. You need to actually deploy it out and have more iterations and learn from that way as well. And then finally, just some of the more practical and ethical issues of the different safety mechanisms that they've had to be able to establish and like a peer to peer guardian system where if people get so immersed that they forget that they're in a simulation, then they may be putting themselves at danger. And so thinking of different protocols around being in these visceral and embodied environments. What are the touch protocols and being aware that some are touch adverse due to life experiences or special needs or religious needs. And so what are the touch protocols, hygiene protocols and privacy implications and regulations around that, as well as different things like eye tracking and using the cutting edge of the technologies to be able to track engagement. But when you pair that with machine learning, then what are the different algorithmic biases and how do you start to make sure that you're not Propagating any existing bias through some of these different things like machine learning and powered eye tracking So, you know just looking at these larger issues around privacy that need to be discussed and talked about a little bit more Actually was on a panel with Erica at the IEEE VR back in March I hope to put that out as a podcast soon as well to be able to dive into a lot more of the ethical issues around education And that, you know, she thinks that eventually it's going to be woven into the everyday fabric of the classrooms and embedded as a normal part of the classroom where children are going to be able to be given more control for content creation, more agency, and more social VR spaces where they're able to collaborate with people from around the world. And eventually focusing on some of these higher order aspects beyond training, the higher order thinking skills, critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and metacognition skills and self-regulation as well. So the book, again, is called Virtual Reality and Curriculum in Pedagogy, Evidence from Secondary Classrooms. It was released on Tuesday, May 19th, 2020 by Erika Southgate. So that's all that I have for today. And I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a list of supported podcasts. And so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So, you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
