Connections is about trial and error. Life doesn’t come with an instruction book or an answer book. The tests of time are almost always pass / fail in that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. We can learn from our connections with others who have passed those trials of our first love, our first car, our first house, our first child. Connections are important, even in failure. More often than not, we learn from those who fail by realizing how they could do better, at least as much as from those who succeed.
While these individual connections we develop are important, equally important is how those successes and failures are reflected inside our social circles. As Alain de Botton (July 2009) notes below, our connections bring with them a host of issues that we are simply not equipped to address. From our first days in the classroom, we develop behavior patterns that are informed by our perceptions of others. In systems using a meritocratic approach to definite success and failure, this has certain advantages, but also sets the stage for longer term issues which we are just now beginning to understand.
Immersive environments allow educators to break down these walls. In a virtual reality, there is no rich or poor, white or black, old or young. The negative drivers which can lead to low self-esteem later in life can be mitigated by controlling for those effects early in the life-long learning process. Immersive environments have the unique property of allowing these negative influences to be stripped away from the learning process. It engenders more of an apprenticeship type of approach, even in situations where participants would normally be in a peer-to-peer relationship. That is a power we don’t have in other educational settings which, used effectively, could be a healthier and more positive influence.
In this conference, we want to focus on how immersive environments have extended the reach of educators into worlds without boundaries. These worlds free us from self-imposed constraints and open us up to new ways of thinking, imagining, expressing and building.
We invite you to bring your best ideas. Reach out and connect with people, not because they are the same, but because they are different. Play in the maze of knowledge that everyone brings to the sandbox that is VWBPE.