Our third speaker is Paul Unsworth so
Paul is at the University of South
Australia in the School of
Education
and will be providing us wi th an
overview of video analytics and virtual
reality projects that he is running with
pre-service teachers at the school this
includes work that's done recently with
our Samsung Smart School
regarding the national excellence and
Equity in Mathematics Research project for Aboriginal students
Paul is an educator and early career researcher who
has a background in Indigenous education
and STEM. He's lived and worked
extensively across remote and rural
communities and again will give us an
insight into how these technologies
might serve areas and people that we've
not previously thought about so welcome
Paul thank you.
It's great to be here. Thanks very much.
first of all as Kristin said I work
at the School of Education
providing mostly in science and maths
education which will probably scare the
pants off most people here having a maths
teacher or a science teacher just stand up
and talk about this kind of thing we
work in some of our projects in the
Smart School because it's a really
interesting place and we would very much
encourage you to visit the Smart School
at some stage to find out why it's smart
certainly there's lots of instruments
and equipment provided by Samsung but
essentially the school gives us
affordances to video record our sessions
and I want to touch on a couple of
points that came out of a previous
presentation where we saw the
bus stop and the augmented reality and
people sitting on the bus sitting go
"holy..." you know and thinking wow you know
that's that's just so different because
they are noticing things and I think that's
probably a key aspect in what might
drive this realities of the
education going further is how do we
actually get our students our teachers
to to notice things and more depth? I
think it's a really important thing to
to start from a learning point of
view. So what I'm going to be talking
about is just a few of the projects that
we've engaged in service teachers and
students as well as pre-service teachers
and other colleagues within
the School of Education
using virtual reality technology and
also in terms of video analytics
technology but I'm mainly only talking
about that the VR side of things. The
present tech is called VXR so one of
the sorts of things that we are
conscious of is that you can get great
technology a 3d printer you can perhaps
engage your students with something
that's new but really are you changing
the way that you teach? is the pedagogy
remaining the same? does the song remain
the same if we just provide a new tool
and we explore it and engage with it in
a very rudimentary way? there's certainly
a place for having artefacts that are
developed even in AR or mixed reality in
a way that you need to have a simulation
and learn as you go in terms of
procedures so if you're going to become
a surgeon and you've got an AR or a MR
platform and you can practice using that
that's that's an affordance that's
really great. But if we only provide
artefacts that do that in an educational
sense we're just reinventing the
textbook in many sorts of ways although
it's a new kind of way of engaging with
it one of the affordances in terms of
actually stimulating more divergent
thinking and so it's really kind of
interesting that in the courses that I
have done I'm involved in it in science
and maths education that I don't start
with that kind of textbook analysis that
diadactic approach, I try to and we try
to engage students in thinking about
what they notice, first and foremost, what
they think about the things that they
notice, and then how they explain that
and that conceptual hierarchy is I think
really important an important message
for teachers to go out in the workforce
and to engage their students in very
much Martin Westwall sort of philosophy
about how the brain takes on new
concepts and learning.
so in this project we're calling the VRX
the 'X' kind of stands for the extra
bits and we're hoping to in build into
those extra bits the things that
students might notice that they don't
notice beforehand that sort of thing
that you see, the bus stop moments. and
while virtual reality, and I'm not going
to talk about the tool because
you know about that you've actually
experienced out there. Virtual reality
actually provides a fairly passive
platform you can look into it you can
look around with the industry provider
that I'm working with
we're actually embedding content and
hotspots and sorts of banners into that
kind of landscape that's driven by
students and it's driven by students
from very much a design perspective. It's
not about just using the gear for the
sake of it it's very much about going
out into the environment or the
classroom or even in an event and
finding ways to say "well how do we study
that? how do we say that in a way that's
more powerful. Can we actually create a
canvas where we can have multiple rabbit
holes well we have particularly
something there as you can see with the
AR picture here which comes from
Corning 's "The Day Made of Glass' one and two.
suggest you have a good look at
that's actually quite a
stimulating and very powerful look into
the near future. But what we aim to do
with this particular technology is to
embed people's stories, people's identity
and the way of actually expressing
themselves through that VR canvas and
not only having the canvas there but
what's behind the canvas? What are the
other stories that we can inbuilt into
that? One other particular offshoots of
this particular project that we're
working with schools is called Geo Go
which is a kind of an
exploration into land, country and
people and we're using VR as the
means to capture the landscape the
spatial canvas and we can augment that
with a CAD model if you like but we're
centrally creating the kind of studies
of inquiry around that particular local
landscape and so that's
been pretty powerful and we're
using this technology in a way that
really visually stimulates the learners
and my background has been very much 25
years working in remote Australia
through communities and that the
messaging there probably
I've also worked other particular
places that are very highly privileged
schools as well but I get the main
message in in that particular sort of
context is that you have a rich
visual resources from which to work with.
The other photo that I've just put into
this is a recent kind of
exercise that we had in the Samsung
Smart School where we invited a group of
kids in as part of the project and we
asked them to gamify the actual
experience of VR and so they
created some hide-and-seek and finding
treasure, Where's Wally?, these sorts of
things in the spatial canvas to create their tour but then they came back
and we asked them to really tell us
about what they actually noticed that was
different. The way that they engage with
the particular technology was quite
powerful but what we really wanted to
get from them is it how do we actually
use this more effectively as a teaching
and learning device? As a tool? So
you know in some way that slide we can
see that while we're trying to use VR as
a platform to engage our students in
STEM based learning with all the
extras that go with that in terms of
embedding content through video, through
text, through stories, through music and
through the Arts we're also using VRX
as a driver for pushing
Geotourism in communities. Over the
last couple of years from I guess an
educational point of view what we've
aimed to do is actually do the
theorizing behind it and this is
probably the dry part of the
presentation in terms of talking about
well you know what other academics out
there were scholars or researchers doing
in this space? And it so happens that
this is a very active space of research
not just VR but actually more about the
actual design principles, the way that
other theorists are looking at the
way we build a learning design that
engages students with more purpose. This
slide is a summarises
the problem that the research
question tried to address but we know
that and this is probably a
slide that talks about scalability and
take-up of goodwill.
You can put STEM stuff up in schools in
South Australia or elsewhere, you can fit
it out with great equipment, you can put
in 3d printers, you can give it the works,
you can do the whole box and dice but the
the old STEM share is not whistling
until we have in there people who can
actually drive teaching and learning
design a part of what we're doing here
is trying to get a sense of how we might
engage with educators in a scalable
way, to drive VRX type programs in
ways that teachers can take the uptake
and we know that one of most difficult
things to do in schools, particularly
with those who are time poor and sometimes
resource poor is to give educators the
necessary tools and motivation to sort
of make this work. The other part of why
we're trying to do this is particularly
in remote which I guess most where I've
come from, is to provide remote and
regional communities with a sense of
there's a lot of really interesting
things that happen there. People who live
there and come to Adelaide perhaps go back
and live there too and add their
contribution. It's really kind of
important to realize that in many
regional communities we're seeing them
shrink, they're becoming less sustainable,
we have various problems faced by
weather climate and other sorts of
influences that are reducing I guess the
capacity of communities. We had a
situation in Whyalla which was in a very
dire situation before we had the uptake
of Gupta and provide some new impetus
into the communities. So the
particular group called Segra which is
a very active in the space to define
emerging sustainable, economic
growth in Australia, have realized that
capacity that Geotourism might bring
into these communities and VRX just kind
of slips nicely into that framework by
putting education and Industry and
business alongside each other.
So that sort of brought us to the idea
you know why are we doing it?
what's the affordances here? and so far
we've been across four
regional schools, two Metro schools. We've
done this in small steps because we
didn't want to sort of make ourselves
too thin across the educational
landscape. What we've found for sure in
the first couple of years of doing this
is that the technology has been used
in a way that certainly kids notice more
and the studies that they've created are
certainly more powerful. The next
affordance of it is because we can share
it so quickly and easily so the industry
provider we use is web-based so that
it's not an app, it's basically
subscribed to the to the platform and we
have multiple users that can use it
multiple people that can collaborate on
a project and it's sharable in a way
that it's got instantaneous download on
phones or other smart devices so that
people can actually have a look at the
the work that has been created in the
project, share the project, add comments
to it and you know you can download,
upload it, to various other sources so in
a world of connected technology in the
internet of everything and in a world
where young people find this common
place, it's really just a no-brainer to
suggest that we can use this kind of
technology and get that instantaneous
feedback which we know is very much part
of the 21st century learning and
learning environment. So you know just
summing up I guess it's a
technology that has rich potential. It's
a technology that can be used in a very
didactic way but it can be also used in
quite divergent and exciting ways. We
hope to see how we might gamify it,
introduce simulation, sure you can put
across into an AR sort of platform but
what we're really wanting to do is have
students and teachers as designers and
makers and sharers of this particular
technology and that's the kind of
projects that we're running at the
moment with our pre-service teachers in
the schools that we've been involved
with.
That's basically it, thank you
Thanks Paul. I really like that
instantaneous feedback in the way you're
describing that that last portion about
being able to do that and immediately
sort of see it in action because it kind
of relates to what you were saying Simon
about being able to sort of see things and
immediately respond and I think that is
that is really you know a good way of
getting learning right in the moment
when it's when it's when it's relevant. I
also love that idea about noticing
something unexpected or noticing
something that doesn't quite make sense
because I think that does set up a
really interesting learning question of
what the hell is going on? which is
more likely to prompt questions
and I liked how you're using that and
you know the question there is not
around how do you use the technology so
much but how do you use the technology
to prompt different pedagogy to prompt
different ways of teaching to prompt
different ways of learning and try and
get richer engagement to solve the
problem rather than yeah rather than
just that repeating so I think that's a
very powerful thing. And I also really
like the way that's at the
interface of business and schools and
real world applications that have
advantages for the whole community and I
think that you know that goes to
sort of some of the things that we're
seeing which is that learning is not
sort of stuck within schools when you
look at of the learning of the
future it's not stuck in schools. Its
intergenerational learning, it's lifetime
learning, it's learning to adapt to
new technologies as they come and I
think that's a useful thing for us to
all be thinking about. Your talk
mentioning about gamification leads
really really nicely into our final
speaker so that's a good
connection.