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You
are here: Intercultural Education and Virtual Reality
by Judy Bonne and Patrick McKercher
For the past two years, James Burke, author of many books and creator of the PBS/Discovery Connections series, has worked both passionately and tirelessly with a volunteer team to ready the Knowledge Web. The K-Web demonstrates that all subjects are connected and offers an innovative, accessible, interactive tool for their exploration. The Knowledge Web is not only the product of a community, but it is itself a community building tool. All contributors are potential resources.
Already, the K-Web has been field tested by a team of educators from the Edmonds School District, Vancouver, and San Jose. An article about that experience was featured in the Winter, 2003 issue of NHFL' s Journal.
Another dynamic gathering took place on November 21, 2003. Thanks to Mark Arnold, the Intercultural Educational Alliance (IEA, http://www.aweduserve.org/iea/) hosted a global online education summit. This event immersed participants in a multi-user virtual environment (MUVE). We gathered in this 3-D world and witnessed a powerful and inspiring tool for educational collaboration, connecting, and communicating with people around the world. One of the featured events was James Burke and the K-Web.
So how can a virtual conference even begin to mirror reality? How does a member of the audience feel a part of something that many of us may have regarded as highly impersonal? Well for starters, when a "conference coach" (you and everyone in the world has an avatar body) nearly jumps out of the computer screen to guide you to the auditorium, and then literally "finds you" when you're lost in the crowd, that's a start! When participants then engage in deep levels of conversation, construct new ideas, and make innovative connections, that's the foundation of some rich learning. As those learners continue to share their ideas and learnings, they become part of a unique learning community. That kind of community building has everything to do with the K-Web and it's potential to build upon, connect, extend, and expand learning of all kinds.
What follows is a portion of the speech that James Burke delivered that day and several screen shots of the environment http://www.virtuallylearning.com/services/ieascreen.htm).
"As a believer in the view that technology shapes society, I see the dramatically-increasing availability of tools and resources other than that of the schoolroom (or even of the established information media), generating more questions among learners than either teachers or TV programmers can answer satisfactorily, at the level of each individual.
However, the extraordinary speed with which technology costs have been falling and information-processing capability has been rising, now offer the possibility of additional approaches to the old, top-down, one-size-fits-all, ethnocentric classroom product. Moreover, in the wake of 9/11, and in the way information and communications technology is enhancing the abilities of even small communities to survive without having to submerge themselves in larger, more powerful cultures, it has also become urgent that we find ways to inform students about modes of thought other than that of their own locality. The world is already too interconnected for us to continue in the old isolationist paradigm. Nowhere is now too 'far away' to matter. It is no longer acceptable, in a world of electronic proximity, to ignore the views of other cultures. Fortunately, the same technology that has given rise to this complication, also provides means to deal with it.
In a very minor way, I have spent the last few years of my spare time putting together a tool with which to encourage students to think in a more contextual way about the materials they are studying. To work more collaboratively. To reach out, thanks to the Internet, to communities other than their own as far away as they chose, now that 'far' has little meaning any more. But at a time when information technology and telecommunications are about to enhance and empower the viability of even small communities (with luck, even to save many cultures around the world from being wiped out, as so many have been during the last two centuries of colonialism and top-down centralist power-bloc expansion), we are at last going to have the tools to think about diversity in a different way. Not in the old, cookie-cutter, paternalist way that sought to bring the benefits of so-called 'Western civilization' to what were deemed to be 'under-privileged' groups and communities and cultures, but, instead, to watch in appreciation as they use the technology to benefit themselves in ways they choose, based on their own heritage, and in ways that don't undermine their own cultural identities. And if they chose ways that seem to go counter to our own values, all we can (and should) do is try to understand those choices, and learn how best to live with them.
As for the fears (often expressed) of some kind of 'technological determinism,' that the technology brings with it certain technology-oriented way of thinking that put a culture at risk (the old argument that it's becoming a hamburger world), I have seen proof in my own life that this is not necessarily so.
In the 1960s I was living in an Italian city that viewed the arrival of television as indicative of the imminent loss of their centuries-old local dialect and traditions. Forty years later there are two TV stations there, broadcasting only in the dialect, and any decline there might have been in the local culture has been well and truly reversed. So the coming technology offers us the chance to celebrate difference, rather than to suppress it as part of some short-term politically-driven egalitarian ideology. We've already lost over ten thousand languages, and with them, idiosyncratic assessments of the world; each one, by definition, a rich and comprehensive view of things. Let's not lose any more.
I hope whatever else knowledge-webs do, they will also use the capability of the next generation of information technology to make it possible for learners to travel cheaply and seamlessly from a web structured by elements of their own local world, into other-culture webs, built in the same interconnected, easy-to-navigate way, and offering a glimpse of the dynamic that made that culture what it is, and perhaps where it may be going next, and what that ought to mean to us. Anything of that nature would be an improvement on the present level of mutual misunderstanding and over-simple solutions, offered on all sides, that daily make the world a more dangerous place to be. "
(For a complete transcript see http://people.ucsc.edu/~pmmckerc/IEA.html).
As part of this intercultural conference we were offered the chance to tour through some examples of recreation of various cultures as they are now and as they were in the past, and talk to their creators. The ability to not just read about Galileo or Madam Curie, but then go to their workshop or lab, talk to their avatar (either a teleactor or an artificial intelligence "chatbot,") read their notebooks, experiment with their equipment in realtime with other students from around the world is possible with existing technology, and will enrich the K-Web experience.
Later this spring we will reconvene with those educators who are field testing the K-Web. And in Fall of 2004 the K-Web will be launched in conjunction with Best of Connections 25th anniversary PBS special. If you'd like to know more or participate, see http://k-web.org.
Judy Bonne is an educational team lead for the K-Web. She has been a classroom teacher, a principal, a consultant for business and industry in project and change management, as well as a college instructor. She has helped design and develop a "multiple intelligences" school, and is involved in sustained collaborative professional development. An advocate for learning and learners, Judy currently is the Director of Instruction for the Crawford AuSable School District in Michigan.
Patrick McKercher teaches courses in writing, technology, and the environment at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He serves on several educational technology advisory boards and has long been involved in using technology for outreach to public schools‹particularly through the investigation of virtual reality spaces for educational exploration, collaboration, and mentoring. You may reach Patrick McKercher via email pat13@dslextreme.com.
© March 2004 New Horizons for Learning
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