Virtual Reality in Education: Rooting Learning in Experience

There has been a general tendency for learning to get further removed from experience as students progress from primary education, through secondary education, and to tertiary education. Learning becomes more language-based, conceptual, and abstract. There are important side effects. In the domain of physics, for example, it is well known that many students can readily solve physics problems drawn from textbooks. However, they have little "feel" and understanding of the qualitative dimensions of the phenomena they study. In this talk, I shall argue for the need to root learning in experience. I shall discuss how the technology of virtual reality can be used to achieve this goal, thereby providing a foundation for students' conceptual and higher-order learning. I shall illustrate the ideas using C–VISions, a networked collaborative virtual learning environment developed for this purpose.