Well, my tour has moved from the warm and sunny West Coast to the wet and freezing East Coast. It’s hard to imagine that the country is in the same season. Orange County was 30 degrees Celsius where as it’s hardly risen about 10 over here in Massachusetts. Their rain radar has a snow and an ice option and, in the far north of the state, there has been snow this past two days. It’s cold.
Boston is a great place. It feels really safe, people are friendly and it’s easy to get around whether that’s on the train/subway line or by foot – which is how I did a lot of my exploring. Having nothing booked in on Sunday allowed me…squirrel… to catch up on emails, financial spreadsheets and the like – all the things that need to be done while on the scholarship. But it also gave me a chance to do some…squirrel… fun things too. I went to a great church in Parkside and spent some of the afternoon wandering around Boston. I started in Boston Common, the city’s major park, where there are squirrels EVERYWHERE. Sometimes I saw half a dozen, congregating together (as you do on a Sunday) ravenously collecting food as their impeding hibernation fast approaches. And you can tell Winter is approaching – it’s been so cold. Especially on Sunday with the strong wind whipping it’s way through the city streets.
The city is also in baseball fever at the moment with the Red Sox playing the Dodgers in the World Series. The first two games were played while I was here and it was all people were talking about. I thought about going to one of the games but at $500 USD for the cheap nosebleed seats – and the fact that it’s freezing cold (I don’t know if I’ve mentioned that yet), I decided to stay indoors – can’t let myself get sick with half the trip still to go.
Luckily for me all my conferences and meetings have been in doors, and have also been really insightful. On Monday I headed out to Boston University for the XR in Edu conference. XR is short for “Extended Reality” and is a term covering virtual, augmented and mixed reality. The conference provided a platform for a range of speakers who, although from different areas of education, were specifically looking at XR in the education space. The general feeling I’ve noticed from all the speakers I’ve heard and chatted with is that the technology is very new. One speaker said this technology is incredibly useful for giving students experiences of places or theories that would otherwise be impossible to experience, but, at present, we are currently in the “horseless carriage” stage of development – relating to the initial development of the car by Henry Ford. And this is true of both the software and the hardware. That’s not to say that I haven’t seen and experienced some amazing things, however the technology is still in its infancy and as the technology improves and becomes more mainstream, it will become even more powerful and useful in the classroom.
At the conference there were speakers from secondary and higher education as well as speakers representing the big “players” in VR and education namely HTC Vive, Oculus, Microsoft and Google. Chris from HTC discussed the big impact that VR and AR can have with learning (testing has shown up to a 27% improvement on learning when compared to traditional teaching methods), however, he was also very forthcoming in recognising that there are lots of hurdles in relation to the uptake of XR, particularly in relation to access and cost. He mentioned a new product that is coming out, the HTC Focus, which has the benefit of being a standalone system but with a large amount of power. Chris thinks this has the potential to be a game changer but we will have to wait and see.
Courtney Hampson from Google discussed Google’s desire to get XR in schools in easy, tangible ways. Google Expeditions is a 360 photo and video app that users can annotate with text and other images. While initially designed for teachers to “take” students to places they may otherwise not be able to visit, Google has seen a shift towards students creating their own expeditions rather than just relying on already created content.
There were other speakers too including Helen Mitchell, a secondary teacher at a school south of Boston. I had a great talk with her during a break about her use of XR at her school. She found a tool called Thinglink incredibly useful as an engaging tool with her students. This is similar to Expeditions where you can annotate images and video, flat and 360, with text, images, other video and sound. She was able to create with her students, amongst other things, a detailed tour of her school, which new students could view before coming to the school the following year. A valuable point made by Helen, and others, is that it’s a tool and like anything, if it’s used too often it can lose its appeal.
There was also a room set up with a range of equipment and apps that you could play with and ask questions about. I think Thinkglink was one of the more useful applications I saw in that it’s free or very low cost, is very effective in its outcomes, and you can view it just on a regular computer screen, although when you view the 360 photos and video in a viewer, even a cheap one like Google cardboard, the immersive effect is heightened greatly.
On Tuesday I headed over to MIT, the famous technology university and met with Dan Roy and others in his team in the Education Arcade. Here teachers and students are designing a range of educational applications both for XR and also more traditional computer technology. I was able to see and experience one of the apps that they are developing at the moment called CLEVR. This VR app is a game for secondary biology students and gives them the chance of going inside a human cell and see all the goings on of RNA, protein development and all the interactions between parts of the cell. Although still in the development phase it was really engaging and easy to see the potential of this app for giving students a better understanding of this part of biology.
Another app that they have developed and can be used for FREE for teachers right now is called Taleblazer. This is an app that allows users to play and develop AR location-based games (think Pokemon Go). There is also some block coding involved in the game development (think scratch - another MIT-created application) which makes it very useful for the new Digital Technologies syllabus beginning next year.
My last visit was on Wednesday and was a visit to Brookline Interactive Group. This organisation is a community-focused group that provide equipment, venues and training for the community in a range of areas including sound and video production and VR development. The venue is linked with a local public high school and provides a venue for students to shoot and edit their own tv shows but also is open after school hours for members of the public. It’s linked with a public broadcast channel which allows people the opportunity to share their stories on TV too. However, VR is their most popular technology and about 50% of people who come through their doors come for a VR experience. They have a range of Oculus and HTC headsets, which people can book (like a library) to use in creating and telling their stories. They recently completed a series of videos recorded in 3D about local immigrants and their stories of how they came to live in America. It was great to listen to their story, all the while looking in full 360 degrees at the images, which were powerful additions to their narrative.
But it’s time to head south to NYC. If I thought there were distractions in Boston, I’m sure the sights, sounds and smells of the Big Apple will present their own distracting opportunities. Boston has been a very worthwhile stop on my tour. It’s given me the opportunity to reflect on where the technology is currently, but also to think about the future directions of XR in education. The developers of the software and hardware are totally committed to having XR be used effectively in schools everywhere, so it’s only a matter of ...squirrel...
time.
