I listened to VR, the metaverse and education by Edtech Innovators which interviewed my pal Ian Stuart.

Apart for a little dip into Google Expeditions a few years back (eek!) I’ve not really paid much attention to VR.

Of course I’ve read a lot of tweets from Ian who is now working in the VR field, but not dug in. So I was interested to listen Ian talking on this podcast. It is well worth a listen, a quick 30 minutes.

I liked the way Ian linked VR to his previous use of technology. Ian insisted that the technology should be developed in response to classroom needs as opposed to the repurposing of business software. Ian had some nice examples of the use of VR and touched upon its use as part of project based learning.

Ian also mentioned an experience from his Islay past, when project based learning needed a fair bit of scaffolding to get off the ground.

VR does not come naturally to me. I did see how engaging it was for my class using Google cardboard back in 2016. We didn’t have the time to get past engaging to learning but Ian explained some of the ways it could be added to real learning.

Ian pointed to Eduverse The World’s First K-12 Metaverse where there is a fair bit of free content to explore even without a headset. I’ve only had a short browse in my browser, but I think I’ll see how well it runs on our iPads on the school network.

Side notes:

• One of the things that puts me off is word Metaverse, it is so linked to Facebook I naturally balk.
• Anchor/Spotify is a pain to winkle podcasts out of. I add episodes of show I want to listen to, as opposed to sub to the whole series, with Huffduffer, it relies on an mp3 being linked to in the episode.
• Ian should have had a blog for all these years he has been involved in interesting things.