Reimagining education through the Eduverse

For the last 2 years due to the pandemic, we have been readjusting to life on video calls, and one of the most striking things for me, even though I have been teaching and learning through the medium for an extended amount of time is that it is still really awkward—all my students are in boxes, like a strange version of the Brady bunch and everyone is looking off in random directions. Technology companies like Microsoft have tried to fix this sense of strangeness with their “Together” mode for in Teams. The approach removes the boxes and puts everyone in a shared virtual space such as under the sea. Everyone sees the whole group at once. The idea is that social and spatial awareness functions in the brain work more naturally in this environment and makes it harder to notice irregularities in eye contact, allowing are more authentic experience. So this is an example of an attempt to connect people online which is more effective and authentic. 

So one way to approach this problem has been taken from science fiction and is known as the metaverse. In Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, the metaverse is a 3D virtual reality world where people can go to escape a dystopian reality: a vast online world in which digital avatars interact with one another, accessing online services and going to virtual sports games. At its most basic the term refers to virtual spaces where you can collaborate and socialize with other people who aren’t in the same physical space. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, describes the metaverse as:

                                        “an internet you’re inside of, rather than just looking at”.

As an example of this Facebook is developing Horizon Workrooms: these are virtual meeting rooms, using Oculus headsets, you and your colleagues’ avatars can gather, talk and gesticulate. More ambitious still is Horizon Worlds, a virtual world that is a part social network and part gaming platform, inside which users can meet, play games and also create new game worlds. 

So, in theory, the metaverse offers massive improvements to those clunky Zooms. Throw in a fully functioning digital economy with cryptocurrency in which everyone can purchase – and be rewarded for creating inside the metaverse, and it’s a technological dream or nightmare, depending on what it is used for. So what then is the opportunity for education?

One innovative thinker Vriti Saraf is attempting to build a metaverse for educators - an Eduverse through her organization k20 educators. She is creating the first free immersive virtual social learning community for educators and businesses to connect to access global knowledge and share their best innovative teaching strategies and collaborate with each other to improve global education. 

I have been fortunate enough to have been selected to be one of six community connectors. One of my roles is to develop collaboratives within the k20 Eduverse. Collaboratives are a place where educators can share their ideas and have other educators join and collaborate therefore developing those ideas and allowing communal learning - Nā tō rourou, nā taku rourouka ora ai te iwi - with your food basket and my food basket the people will thrive.

As part of this development of communities of practice through collaboration, myself and fellow global educator Stormy Daniels recently created an online event through Gather Town - an immersive virtual world to introduce leaders in global education SDG collaborations on the mission of the k20 Eduverse in supporting the global education community. The invitees shared projects which were curated and shared on the following Wakelet. It was amazing to see the authentic connections being made between this group of educators and the ideas generated to change the future of education. Their passion was self evident and it is clear that the metaverse is an exciting opportunity to develop sustained outcomes for today and tomorrow. I am looking forward to where this leads!

The Eduverse could be a technological leap in education of similar magnitude to the changes to the internet which occurred 30 years ago, when the web grew from just text and images on a web page to a place to first consume media, and then and then collaboratively design content. Over time the Eduverse will result in changes to how we perceive education as global and social and expect portability and access in our virtual life - think non-fungible tokens (NFTs) for qualifications. But a key challenge will be ensuring big Edtech companies don’t build proprietary silos. This is why the Eduverse needs to be for educators, by educators - come join the revolution.