Virtual 3-D Learning, with a But
A Maryland high school will be using a virtual 3-D learning environment to learn about the eruption of Mount St. Helens. The online environment was developed at Johns Hopkins. In the year to come, the developers at JH will create a comparable moon environment. eSchool News puts it like this:
A coalition that also included Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and the University of Baltimore is deploying the environment, which was modeled after a state-of-the-art, 3-D visualization facility at APL that was used for projects by the Department of Defense and NASA. The Virtual Learning Environment is the first of its kind in the nation, said Baltimore County Superintendent Joe Hairston.
I too was (and still am, albeit, less so now) enchanted by the idea of virtual learning environments. The idea that students could engage in video game-like online learning environments to better understand academic content is the kind of thing that gets ed-techys out of bed in the morning.
But,
I had a conversation with a friend about a month ago that rattled the spell. My friend has spend twenty years in the video game creation world. He’s intimately familiar with what it takes to get games made, especially in the world of online gaming. When I shared with him my infatuation with the future of video games in education–like the one mentioned above, I suppose, but mine was of Odysseus and having to solve literary riddles to get him home–he quickly squashed my hopes.
“The problem is that there’s no money in making high quality video games for schools. Take World of Warcraft. They had over $50 million dollars and seven years to develop it. Education can’t compete with those kinds of numbers. And because education can’t compete, it will forever get second-rate video games that kids won’t really buy in to.”
Ouch. I say ouch because I think he’s right. I still don’t have a defense of educational video games. While Mount St. Helens erupting in 3-D might be exciting for those students who experience it, I can’t imagine it as the norm. The norm, I’m afraid, will continue to look much more like Super Mario than World of Warcraft.
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