Less Time Teaching? More Time Learning?

I took yesterday off, recovering from the canceled flights, three-hour taxi rides, and two-and-a-half hours of sleep from my calamitous Watertown, New York trip — where, by the way, I made a lot of great new friends. Taking the day off from programming, I’d figured that I would be able to write a nice blog and do some relaxing. As it turned out, it was 2:00 PM before I got through my e-mail, and then had to solve some problems with Blogmeister. Alas, I wrote nothing.

So, sitting in the middle of a three-hour morning flight to Minneapolis, I’m taking a break from Powerpoint preparations to write. I’ll be presenting a keynote address tomorrow at the Minnesota Educational Media Organization conference. The address is called Riding the Edge of the Wave. I’ve done the presentation only a few times, and over several years, so, naturally, it’s changes, as the wave keeps lurching forward.

In one section, I’ll be showing an edited down video called “The NICE Project“, a fully immersive virtual reality environment that was constructed for young children at the University of Illinois. In the video, a boy and his teacher are tending a computer-generated garden, where the boy can water plants by dragging a rain cloud over them, and provide light by positioning the a sun.

Watching the video, my initial reaction is, “How hard is it to set up a real garden in the school yard and learn about plants, water, and sun light?” A valid “old story” reaction.

My “new story” occurs when I learn that inhabitants of this VR can shrink themselves down, find and observe bugs and their interactions with the plants, and even slip down beneath the surface to see the roots.

To explore these aspects of our biosphere requires expensive tools, and a lot of abstract conceptualizing for a mind that is bound by a three and a half foot body. However, with immersive VR, we can make accessible to our students experiences that allow them to break through boundaries, and perhaps start studying biology in the third grade.

With the access that we might give to students to exploratory and constructivist experiences, might there be a way to achieve an appropriate education in significantly less time than today. Shouldn’t it be our endeavor, as a compassionate society, to inflict less education time on our children, instead of more?

Pretty weird thought, even for David Warlick. Must be the altitude.

2¢ Worth.