Creating a Dialogue Between Innovators and Educators, with VirtualiTeach’s Steve Bambury

XR for Business

English - February 25, 2020 10:00 - 50 minutes - 46.6 MB - ★★★★★ - 12 ratings
Technology Business Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed

Previous Episode: Finding the Tangible Value of XR in Business, with Nestlé’s Richard Hess

Next Episode: IAAPA Update from Location-Based VR Expert, Bob Cooney

Using VR in the classroom is a no-brainer. It’s immersive tech, and can teach kids in new, innovative ways. But if the people developing the technology don’t understand how kids’ brains learn, it’s not going to take, no matter how innovative. VirtualiTeach’s Steve Bambury drops by to explain how he’s trying to bridge that gap.

Alan: Hey, everyone, my name's
Alan Smithson. Coming up next on the XR for Business podcast, we have
Steve Bambury, founder of VirtualiTeach. We're gonna be talking about
digital literacy, the virtual/augmented reality platforms, and the
question on everybody's mind: What are the key barriers to adopting
VR and AR in schools and how to overcome them? All this and more,
coming up next on the XR for Business Podcast. Welcome to the show,
Steve. How are you?

Steve: I'm good, man. It's good
to speak to you.

Alan: It's really great. The
last time we saw each other, we were in Dubai -- where you live --
and you took me to the Dubai Mall, and we went in and we went to the
VR Park, the giant VR Park. And I was just blown away by how big and
ostentatious everything was. And it was a really great experience. I
can't thank you enough for your warm hospitality in Dubai. But today
it's all about you. So let's talk about what you're doing, and how
did you get into this? And what are you doing now?

Steve: I'm good, man. It's good
to speak to you.

Steve: I've been in Dubai for 11
years. And for those 11 years, I've always worked at the same school.
I was working a school group here known as GESS -- which is the
acronym for Jumeirah English Speaking School -- also broadly referred
to as GESS Dubai now. GESS is one of the leading schools in the
Middle East. It's a very old school, at least in terms of
international schools in this region. It's only, I think four years
or three years younger than the UAE as a country. So it is very well
established. And yeah, so I worked there for 11 years. I worked as a
class teacher in one of the primary schools, and curriculum leader.
Eventually become head of computing at the primary school. So I was
teaching digital literacy and computer science content to four year
olds, 3 to 11 year olds. And I ended up in that role primarily
because of all the work I've been doing to integrate the iPads in the
classroom. From 2011, we were one of the first schools in the Middle
East to to roll out iPads in the classroom. And then three years ago,
I moved into a role that was created for me, which was the head of
digital learning and innovation, working underneath the new director,
Mark Steed, who'd just come in from the UK. Mark had the pedigree in
terms of digital learning from what he'd done at this very, very
prestigious school in the UK called Berkhamsted. He'd also chaired
the Independent Digital Strategy Group for eight years there. And so
Mark created this role and this role took me out of the classroom
most of the time. A lot of it involved training with staff. It also
involved going back into departments and helping them with enrichment
projects. And it was kind of in parallel to that. I mean, part of the
reason that my work with virtual reality really took off is because I
moved into this new role, and had this freedom to innovate and to
explore new technologies. My first VR headset was just a [garbled]
headset I imported from the States in 2014. But it was not long after
I started this new role as head of digital learning at GESS that I
got my first Vive. I took that Vive into the school and started
looking for ways to integrate it into different curriculum areas. In
actual fact, I've just recently started writing a series of guest
posts for Vive on the Vive blog. You can go into Google, like "HTC
Vive blog Steve Bambury" or something, you'll probably find
them. But I've been writing a series of blogs about my journey using
and integrating the HTC Vive headsets at GESS. The first one focused
on all those initial trials that we've run. My background is in film.
So before I was a teacher, I worked in the film industry. So I've
always done a lot of film projects with kids. So one of things that I
was doing throughout our journey with virtual reality was documenting
all of the projects that we were carrying out. I was capturing
student voice. I was capturing staff feedback. And I think that was
invaluable in terms of the success of our deployment of higher end VR
at GESS, because it enabled me to then use these -- not only
internally but also externally -- to promote what we were doing at
the school. But internally it meant that I had this evidence that
there was definite impact in terms of the integration of this
technology, and the results that were tangible when you were using
the Vives in the classroom. And then from there, we ended up
investing in more Vives. We brought in Acer mixed reality headsets,
as well. I ended up doing trials with the Vive Focus and other
hardware. The one thing obviously that is already clearly missing
from this mix, is the word Oculus. For those that are outside of the
Middle East region, just for context, Oculus has next to no presence
in the Middle East at all. The Rift never launched here. The Go never
launched here. The Quest has launched here, but only in shops. 100
percent markup price from the Europe and US price.

Alan: Oh wow.

Steve: So it's been-- yeah. I
mean, Facebook are here, but they don't seem to value the region, so
everything tends to be Vive, with the WMI headsets sort of in the
wings somewhat. So yeah. So I did a lot of cool stuff with VR and
started becoming kind of known for the work I was doing with VR.
Couple of years ago I set up VirtualiTeach as a platform to share
best practice and share my ideas, my theory, my projects. And...
yeah. Broadly that became all I ended up speaking about at
conferences around the region and internationally. I was becoming
"the VR guy". So--

Alan: You are the VR-- You're
the VR education guy!

Steve: So yeah. And it is
something that I'm really passionate about, and it's something that I
see the future of education, in terms of where spatial computing will
take us. It isn't just another gadget that schools need to consider
weighing up buying into or not. This is the evolution of computing in
general. So yeah, so I did that role -- the head a digital learning
-- for three years. And at this point I'd worked for the company for
11 years, and I was looking for the next step. And Mark -- the
director -- he was headhunted to go off to Hong Kong and work in Hong
Kong, which he now has. And so in parallel to that, I decided to
strike out on my own and set up my consultancy, which is broadly how
I've spent my summer. Normally in the summer, everybody leaves Dubai,
because it's so ridiculously hot. And there's so many expats here --
80 percent of the country is expats -- so everybody leaves and
Dubai's a ghost town in the summer. Very hot ghost town.

Alan: Oh, it's so hot. Oh my
God. I was there this summer and oh my God...

Steve: So I was stuck here this
summer, because I had to deal with all the logistics and the
paperwork of getting my company license, my new visa, and everything
like that. And yeah, and this is me now, a couple of months in,
working for myself the first time in my life. I set up my consultancy
called Digital Inception. Anecdotally, the name refers to-- it was
actually the name of a remote keynote presentation that myself and my
friend Luke Reece delivered in 2013, I believe, to the University of
Southern California from here in Dubai using the Nearpod platform.
And the presentation kind of riffed on the movie Inception and the
ideas from the movie Inception, and the idea that if professional
development is good enough that you walk away, and you feel like the
idea was there all along, that you already knew it, it isn't
something you've been preached, you've had something unlocked that
was already within you. And I always kind of liked that title, I
thought it was cool. And it was fitting that I could use it to
encompass the work that I was going to be doing with immersive
technologies, but also broad enough to encompass some of the other
areas that I work with. I mean, I was a distinguished educator. I do
a lot with Apple technology. I'm a Microsoft master trainer, so I do
a lot of work with Microsoft technology. So I needed something that
was kind of broader to encompass all of those things. So yeah, that's
where I'm at.

Alan: [chuckles] So you've done
all of these things. You've been a pioneer. You also do the CPD talks
where you interview people. So by all intents and purposes, you are
an expert. Well, I would say the world's leading expert on VR and AR
in education. And you also have VirtualiTeach. What is that platform
all about? Was that just a repository, a place for you to kind of
store everything that you saw? And then it became a website. How did
that happen?

Steve: Yeah, kind of. So in
2012, when I was doing a lot of work with iPads in the classroom.
Myself and my friend Luke -- who I mentioned just now -- who also
works at JESS with me. And he's still at GESS, he's one of the deputy
heads there. We were speaking at events, and we were getting loads of
people asking us questions and stuff. So we figured it would be a
good idea to tackle a website where we could share our ideas and
direct people to. So we set up a website called iPadEducators.com,
which went on to win an award, and it led to both of us becoming
Apple distinguished educators. And VirtualiTeach is-- the approach is
broadly the same, both of these websites are completely not for
profit. I turn down advertising offers on a weekly basis. It's never
been about making money. It's just about sharing best practice, which
outside of the education industry, some people see it's kind of
weird. If you've got ideas why you're not charging for them? But
educators as a community, we've always been very, very much of the
kind of pay-it-forward mentality, that you share what you're doing,
and we grow together. To be honest, it was 2017. And my youngest
daughter had been sick. And so the summer plans were canceled that
year as well. And I-- essentially I was considering writing a book.
Ironically, the book was going be called Digital Inception. I was
going to write a book about all this stuff I was doing with virtual
reality, but the more I considered the time that I would need to
spend writing a book, and the delay in this kind of gratification of
sharing the content with other people. In the end, I just thought,
you know what? Let's just put another website together, because I can
start putting content out quickly. And I like to produce content.

Alan: Writing a book. By the
time I read the book, first of all, it's obsolete. Second of all, you
can't keep it up to date. So we're struggling right now. We're
writing a book and-- two books, "XR for Business" and "XR
for Education". And by the time they're finished, they'll be 100
percent obsolete.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah. You know why?
In fact, last year in the end, I did put a book proposal together and
submitted it through a colleague to a publishing house. And that's
basically what they come back to me and said. They said, "Look,
we like your idea. But by the time when you actually write this and
we publish it, we're conscious of the fact that it will be out of
date." And to a degree that's true of all books based on
technology, because everything's moving forwards.

Alan: Yeah.

Steve: So, yeah. So that's
basically why the website became about. Now, I will give a little
caveat to anyone that's listening, around about the time that we're
recording this, back end of October 2019. So with everything that was
going on, with me setting up the company and various other bits and
pieces, I took a couple of months break from the website, and
unfortunately what's happened is the website's designed through Wix,
and over the summer Wix have launched a new blog feature. And
essentially my website is entirely built-- the entire structure of it
is built around the old blog feature. And then I use custom feeds to
pull theory content onto a page, and Vive related content onto a
page, and guest articles onto a page. And it was all done with a
tagging system, which has been made redundant with the change to
their site. And essentially, I'm now in a position where I've got a
load of new content ready to publish. But at the moment, I've got to
find the time to go back and essentially re-label everything that
I've ever posted, which is like 150 articles. I've got to manually go
into all of them and and re-tag them. So my site's kind of sitting
dormant at the moment, but hopefully we'll be back on its feet before
the end of the year. Because I do have a lot of new content ready to
go on. But I have to say, sadly, the old content needs to be
re-tasked first, and I need to do some some layout adjustments as
well, to fit the new style that Wix have deployed.

Alan: I'm on your site now and
you've got-- this is like the compendium for anybody looking to do.
And it's VirtualiTeach, but "Virtual I teach", it could
also be.

Steve: Yeah, that tends to be
what people say to me. You know what? When I was trying to come up
with a name, I'm going backwards and forwards with different ideas.
And I'd been reading a lot around the theory of the virtuality
continuum. And I had obviously the Curiscope Virtuali-Tee, you know,
the augmented reality t-shirts where you can look inside the human
body. And I was like "Oh, VirtualiTeach! That's a really good
play on words!" And a couple of people I said it to was like,
"No, don't use that. It's too confusing." And I was
stubborn and decided to stick with it.

Alan: I like it. So Steve, on
the VirtualiTeach site at the very top, there's an image of you
sitting with a bunch of people, but you're in avatars. What's that
all about? What platform is that?

Steve: So that's one of the
images from the CBD and VR events that I host. It's ENGAGE, by
Immersive VR Education They're the guys that made Apollo 11 and
Titanic VR. The funny thing is people tend to think that I work for
Immersive, which I totally don't. I've never worked for Immersive.
I've got a lot of love for these guys, they're great guys, and I work
closely with them. But ENGAGE, it just is the platform that I chose
and continue to choose to use for my professional development events
inside VR. So I kick them off. Just before I launched the website in
mid-2017, when I first got my Vive, I'd been lucky enough to have a
sort of guided tour of the ENGAGE platform from Dave Wiehl and the
CEO of Immersive VR Education, and was blown away. It was the first
multi-user VR platform that I'd ever been inside and obviously --
especially back then -- it was the only one that was dedicated to
education, and it was just stunning. And I was conscious of the fact
that schools weren't necessarily in a position to be harnessing this
technology with a whole class full of students at that point -- and
to a degree, most schools are still not right now -- but a lot of
schools had begun to invest in maybe one or two Vives or Rifts or you
know, educators like me, who is a bit techie, had gone out and bought
their own one. So I decided in June 2017 to test the waters and offer
out this free professional development event inside virtual reality.
For clarity, one thing I hear quite often -- just like I hear the
confusion with the VirtualiTeach name of the website -- in Europe and
in the UK in particular, it tends to be referred to as CPD, for
Continuing Professional Development. And quite often I get American
educators asking me, like, what CPD stand for? Because in the States
you tend to just refer to it as Professional Development or PD. And
you know what?

Alan: Not cardiopulmonary
disease?

Steve: [chuckles] Exactly. Or
some sort of medical procedure. But at the end of the first year, I
considered rebranding it to "PD in VR". And at that point,
even American educators like Steven Satter were saying to me "No,
don't change it, man. Don't change it. It's got a legacy now."
And it-- something about it, it just didn't sound right to change it.
So we ended up just leaving it the same. But yeah, so I did that
first session in June 2017. I actually delivered it three times in 24
hours, to three different groups of educators, some of whom accessed
via PC, and some of whom were in headsets. Obviously, there's a
limit, and even more so back then, there were limits to the number of
avatars that we could have inside the same virtual space. And it was
tons of fun, despite all the obvious technical glitches that you face
when you're at the tip of the spear. So I decided to start hosting it
monthly, and decided as well to start bearing them up. So I started
doing some where I would deliver presentations, normally virtual
re-enactments of presentations that I was doing locally here in the
UAE or across the Middle East region events. But I also started
hosting panel discussions and fireside chats and had some truly
phenomenal guests on, building up to the one year anniversary show we
did six hours straight last July.

Alan: Wow.

Steve: Opening with Alvin
Graylin from Vive. You know, Charlie Fink was on, and Bob Fine. And
we had the whole virtual reality podcast crew were on there.

Alan: It's so funny you say
that. We've had Alvin, Charlie and Bob as guests.

Steve: Yeah.

Alan: They get around, these
guys.

Steve: They do, yeah. So, yeah.
I mean, beyond that, I've had guest from the BBC, I've had from HTC
and ClassVR, and all kinds of speakers as well -- obviously -- as
educators. And then after that first year, we were trying to come up
with a new idea for another kind of variation on it. So I kind of had
this idea to host a chat show. So I do this live from Dubai chat show
format under the CPD in VR banner, which I've hosted about half a
dozen of those. And actually, I'm in parallel to taking a little
break with the website, I also took a little break from the CBD in VR
events, but just did the kind of comeback show about two weeks ago,
which was kind of laughingly jokingly dubbed the Season 3 premiere,
because this is the start of the third year of me doing them now. And
that was the live from Dubai format. I had Steve Grubbs from Victory
XR on and--

Alan: Grubbs' been on my show,
too.

Steve: Yeah, he's a great guy.
Yeah. Dr. Angelina Dayton, The VR Lady, who does a lot of amazing
work with the Cherokee Nation, and now the Navajo Nation as well. And
Suzanne Lee from Pivotal Reality up in Scotland, too, who does some
stunning work with elderly people with dementia. And that kind of
encapsulates my approach when I'm doing the panels -- or now the chat
show format, as well -- is try and get a broad spectrum. Somebody
said to me once, "Why are you not just getting educators on?"
And to me, there needs to be a lot more dialogue between developers
and educators, and there needs to be a more open door approach to
helping developers understand what it takes to make something that's
effective in the classroom, which is something I wrote about last
year for VR Focus. You know, my advice to to developers, if you're
creating an educational app, how is this actually going to work in a
classroom setting? You might make the most beautiful experience of
all time, but if I can't harness that effectively with a classroom
full of kids, then it is not something I'm going to go back to. It's
not something I'm going to be able to integrate successfully in the
classroom.

Alan: Absolutely. It's almost
like you have two camps, you have educators, and then you have
technologists or technology providers. And you need both to deliver
content in a way that makes sense in schools. What are you seeing, as
far as adoption of this on a broader scale. Is this something like--
if you looked at-- are we're gonna have VR in every school? Is that
in five years? Is that ten years? Is that ever?

Steve: Obviously, my viewpoint
is somewhat skewed, because I'm based in Dubai. I would underwrite
that with just because I'm in Dubai doesn't mean everyone's
absolutely minted. You know, schools here don't necessarily have
endless piles of cash just because we're based here in Dubai, like
the GESS group I worked for, was not a for-profit organization, as a
lot of the older schools are. So there are obviously somewhat limited
resources. Schools in general are very cash poor organizations and
they're also reticent to jump on to what can be perceived as
bandwagons. That being said, I mean, at least here in the UAE, what
I'm seeing is more and more schools dipping their toes in the water.
A friend of mine works in a kind of technology director role across a
large school group in Abu Dhabi here in the UAE. And they've just
rolled out the ClassVR solution across all of their campuses. Two of
the schools that I'm currently working with through my consultancy
that have already deployed ClassVR as a solution as well. Obviously,
some of the schools have looked already into the higher end solutions
like Vives, and they may be invested in two or three. And another
school that I'm working in, they've already marked out a space
specifically to be a VR lab, painted big murals of VR headsets and
stuff on the wall, but they were conscious of the fact that they
needed to make sure that their Office365 deployment and their day to
day technology integration was firmly deployed and all accounted for,
before they then look at how they're going to deploy, and what type
of VR they're going to deploy. And a lot of it comes down to the
various frictions, as Alvin Graylin refers to them, frictions of VR
in education, whether it be the costs or the fear of adopting
something that is outdated within a year, or the health and safety
concerns, and various things like that are potentially holding
schools back right now. I think cost is a huge one, especially when
you know that the PCVR solutions rely on--

Alan: See, let's lay out the
factors here, and how -- in order to be kind of useful to people
listening -- what are some of the major factors hindering the
adoption, and what are some of the steps that schools and school
groups can do to overcome that?

Steve: Ok. I'm going to cheat
here, and I'm going to open my website in front of me [chuckles]
Because one of the presentations that I did at the biggest education
event in the region. So the biggest education event in the Middle
East is an event called GESS Dubai, which -- as you can guess -- is a
global brand now, they've got events in South America, in Indonesia.
And I've got a great relationship with these guys, I've presented
there for probably about seven, eight years now. And this year
actually hosted a whole VR stage for three days straight. We did a
lot to Tilt Brush demos and hands-on workshops and stuff.

Alan: Cool!

Steve: But my keynote
presentation, my prestige presentation -- I always try and give them
something brand new, some sort of theory content -- was this session
around the five key barriers to VR adoption in schools, and how to
start breaking them down. And I've since published this on my site
back in March. So if you go on VirtualiTeach, you can access this.

Alan: It's virtualiteach.com.
Scroll down about halfway the page. "The five key barriers to VR
adoption in schools, and how to start breaking them down." Go,
Steve.

Steve: You like my wrecking ball
graphic?

Alan: I love it. It's amazing.

Steve: So. Right. So number one,
lack of understanding, OK? The simple fact that people just don't
really understand what virtual reality is and what it can do. And I
think paired with that, there was a... I can't remember who published
it, but it was a really interesting article earlier in the year. I'm
sure you read it, Alan, about whether or not in the long run the
Google Cardboard did more harm to the VR industry than good. Because
it was brilliant entry-level device, but it then contained what
people's perceptions of what virtual reality was capable of. And I've
had so many people that, you know, you put a VIVE on them for the
first time and the words that come out of the mouth, I've heard the
same sentence multiple times, "I didn't even know this was
possible." And that's partly because people's understanding of
VR is, "I can look around to 360 image. I can potentially look
around a 360 video." And that misconception that's been built
through the use of mobile VR, it kind of needs to be unpicked. You
cannot explain virtual reality. It's experiential technology. You've
got to put people in the headsets, and particularly in schools,
you've got to put people in headsets who are the game-changers,
they're the people that have the sway to actually implement change.
One of the first people that I stuck the headset on was was Mark
Steed, who I met before he was the director of the school. I mean, we
were blessed in that Mark was the director. And he's a very, very,
very tech-savvy guy. And he's open to new technologies. But I stuck
Mark on the plank -- as I want to do for most people that come to me
who want to try VR for the first time -- stuck him on the plank. This
is a guy with three master's degrees and he couldn't walk out on it.
Two years later, he wrote a blog article for the Tez in the U.K.
about that experience. How much that affected him and how that moment
made him realize the power of the medium in general, because he had
that visceral, emotive reaction to it, which is not something he'd
ever experienced from a different form of technology before.

Alan: It's interesting that you
talk about that particular one, because we actually built a training
scenario where you're in a warehouse and you have to go across a beam
and turn off a power supply. And when we built it originally, the
beam was three feet across and you were maybe 20 feet off the ground.
And it wasn't scary at all. We decreased the beam to one foot and
increased the height to 30 feet, aAnd wow. It is terrifying. And
everybody who goes across it is just tiptoeing across. And it's this
mind melt because you're walking across something -- you know you're
safe because you're in a room -- your brain can't comprehend the fact
that you're 30 feet in the air; you can't decipher between reality
and not. And at that point when, in our particular instance, you
actually fall -- you don't fall, you just kind of fall and then it
goes black and you start over again -- and it says, "don't
forget to put your safety gear on." And it's in that moment
where you're like, "man, I will never, ever forget to put my
safety gear on again." Terrifying people, it turns out, is very
good education!

Steve: From the psychology point
of view, the one thing that I've seen again and again and again as
well, which -- I remember reading Jeremy Violence's book Experience
On Demand -- and in that first chapter where he's talking about
putting Zuckerberg on the plank experience at Stanford, and he refers
to something that I'd seen in person myself; the fact that you can
have a group of people standing there watching someone doing the
plank experience and laughing at them and going like, "oh,
what's wrong with you? You know it's not real," blah, blah,
blah. And then they put the headset on themself, and even though
they've seen it from a third-person perspective, once they are in it
from a first-person perspective, the subconscious takes over and have
their reaction to it is completely their own. It doesn't matter that
they've already seen somebody else do it. One of them, in fact, one
of the early sessions that we did with the first five I got -- which
if you go in, you can find it on my site. If you scroll right, right,
right back to that to the earliest articles, it's one of the first
ones on there. But also the video is linked on that five blog that I
mentioned earlier on -- so I took the plank experience into the sixth
form psychology department at GESS and along with my friend Dr.
Joseph Bell, who is one of the psychology professors there. We pull
out of 16-, 17-, 18-year-old students through the plank experience.
And we captured footage of them going through the experience as well
as their reflections afterwards, and Joe provided some commentary in
terms of what was happening from a psychology perspective. It was
absolutely fascinating. The other thing, in terms of that that I find
fascinating, is that -- and I wish I was talking to Dr. Sara Jones
the other day because she's actually writing a book about VR, and
somebody I've known for a number of years -- I was saying to her, "I
wish I had carried through with this idea that Joe and I had to do
this study, because I probably find that more adults can't do the
plank thing." Kids will walk out on that plank generally with
not a fear in the world, whereas adults, there's a good proportion of
adults that just cannot do it. You know, my dad is a builder. He does
loft conversions, so he takes people's loft -- or attics, whatever
you want to call them -- and he turns them into additional rooms. He
spent his life on roofs. He's been spending his life climbing up
ladders and walking across roofs, and he couldn't do that plank
experience at all. Couldn't do it.

Alan: Wow.

Steve: Which I found
fascinating.

Alan: That's weird.

Steve: Yeah.

Alan: Makes no sense.

Steve: You'd think so. Steering
back towards what we were saying about the kind of barriers; the
second one that I covered was the cost and the ROI -- the return on
investment. And we kind of touched on this already. The idea that,
you know, schools are reticent to invest in technology that they
potentially see as just another thing. And you've got lots of
different vendors and companies trying to hawk their wares, so to
speak. You know, STEM is massive. Now, you know that everybody's
like, "do we need to buy robots?" Do we need to buy 3D
printers? Do we need to buy VR content?" And I think the
difference is -- I kind of touched on before -- is that we're not
talking about just another gadget when we're talking about augmented
and virtual reality. We're talking about the evolution of computing.
We're talking about the change in the way the technology is
interacted with, full stop. And if you look at that article, you'll
see an image that I painstakingly sourced from Google for the
original presentation, which is a group of students from the... I
think, from the 80s. At this single PC, which, you know, this was the
experience that I had initially when I was in primary school. That
there was one computer in the school, and it was on a cart and it was
wheeled into "oooohs" and "aaaaaaahs", because
the magical computer's here and--

Alan: I'm not going to ask how
old you are, but I still remember the first time I went to the
library and there was three Mac computers. It was like, "Whoa!"

[laughs]

"So awesome!"

Steve: Ataris and stuff. But I
specifically chose this image because I think this is the fear of a
lot of schools, is that, "well, we're gonna buy-- we can only
afford one, we'll buy one. And then we'll end up with the whole class
sitting round, watching one person interact with it." My counter
to that is, no, you won't. Because as educators, we now understand
better. Pedagogy has evolved and we understand that that isn't what
you should be doing with technology. You shouldn't have a group of
kids all sitting around watching one person interact with the
technology. There are so many more ways. We have evolved in terms of
our use of technology in the classroom and our understanding of
digital learning has evolved so much, especially since the advent of
tablets and the first deployments of iPads in the classroom. We've
learnt new ways to integrate limited amounts of technology and
explored bunches of different ways where, I've maybe had half a dozen
mobile VR headsets deployed for an activity in parallel to a VIVE or
mixed reality headset. I've had work where students are not just
taking turns, but they are specifically paired for a reason; so that
one person's the hands in the physical space, and the other person,
they're immersed in the virtual experience. That was kind of my
counter to that. Paired with that is the other one that we mentioned
before, which was this rate-of-change fear, and the graphic that you
see on the site there, which I always give a shout out to my -- sadly
-- dearly departed friend Chris Long, who died earlier this year.
Chris originally showed me this graphic of Martec's law. It was
during the one-year anniversary event for the CBD and VR. He
delivered a presentation and this was part of it. And it was one of
those graphics, where I saw it and I was like, "this makes
perfect sense. How have I never seen this before?" And I've
started using it in a lot of presentations--

Alan: I'm actually stealing this
for my presentations. Thank you, Chris!

Steve: Essentially the premise
is that, because technology changes at this rapid pace, this
exponential rate, but organizational change tends to be slower. What
happens is that the gap between the two increases over time. And
ultimately, if a company sits and procrastinates for too long, the
gap between the state of technology and the organization and their
use of technology becomes so large that an organization can actually
need a full reset. And you've seen this. You see it in organizations
all the time. It might mean that they have to lay off a whole bunch
of staff. It might mean that they need to source a huge chunk of
investment to catch up. And this was something that I really
learned-- I mean, I learned so much working for Mark Stevens, in
terms of digital strategy and vision. He came into GESS, which was
incredibly ahead of the time in terms of technology you use in the
classroom. But he came in and was like, "well, look, you've got
no refresh cycles built in for your tablet or your whiteboards or
this. There's no standardization." That was what he ended up
bringing to GESS, was a much better strategy, and a much better
plotted roadmap in terms of technology integration at the school, and
where the school was at and where the school was going. So then the
fourth one -- the fourth barrier to the VR adoption, the fourth
common thing -- because just for context, again, this article, this
presentation was based on the conversations that I'd had both at GESS
and with other educators worldwide, and with people that I've been
using VR and their feedback, in terms of the barriers that they were
hitting. So this wasn't me just plucking these out of thin air. This
was based on common concerns that were being thrown at educators.
People will come to me and say, "I'm being asked about this.
What do I say?" And health and safety concerns is obviously
something that was coming up quite a lot. "Is VR say for kids?
How long should they use it for? Will it hurt their eyes? What age
should kids start to interact with VR?" I wrote a piece off the
back of the Commonsense Media Report contesting some of the data that
they used, and not because they were talking about content concerns,
saying that parents had concerns about sexual content or violent
content in VR. OK, I can understand that concern.

Alan: Yeah.

Steve: Yeah. You've got an
infinitely higher probability of finding that type content on
YouTube, which, these same parents have got their kids sitting on
their phones with unrestricted access to YouTube because they have
got parental restrictions set up. So I thought that was somewhat
ironic. "You know, too much time with VR is bad for you."
Well, too much time with anything is bad for you. You know? It's like
me saying eat too many cakes is bad for you. If I read a book for six
hours straight, I'm gonna get eyestrain. Too much of anything new, an
educated person will tell you that too much of anything is bad for
you. Social isolation is another one that was coming up. And, you
know, until we get into that place where the social multi-user VR
experiences are more common, I think that, you know, there is some
credence to that. It's just a very insular thing when you've got a
headset on and you know, if you've got a room full of people.

Alan: To be honest, my kids have
unlimited access to VR and they -- I mean, we've got a quest, we've
got Vives, we've got Hololens, Magic Leap, we have all the toys --
and they don't want to go in it. And when they go in it, they want to
go in with other people. They want to be in social VR, which makes
sense if you're playing Beat Saber or something, but it's really
great when you're with other people and then engage the platform, or
these types of things. So I think socialize-- So-- that's really hard
to say! Social isolation.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah. I mean--

Alan: Say that five times fast.

Steve: These are things that I
pulled out from there, from the Common Sense Media Report.

Alan: Now, the next one is the
health concerns of bumping into something, that is actually probably
one of the ones that I think actually could be a problem; if your dog
walks in the room when you're in VR and you trip on the dog or hit a
table. I've seen people get punched in the face.

Steve: Yeah. I mean, devil's
advocate: I approach this from an educator's perspective. And if you
want my take on the Common Sense Media Report, that article is an
in-depth breakdown of the whole report and my response to it is there
on the site. And if you look at the theory section, you find out,
yeah, 13 percent have bumped into something. My response is, of
course they have. If you're not watching kids and they've got a VR
headset on, of course they're going to bump into stuff. I've had kids
using mobile VR headsets where there was no, you know, the three
degrees of freedom headsets where they can't move anyway, and they
still stand up and start walking. You have to monitor kids using this
kind of technology. If you don't monitor them, again, yeah, of course
they're going to bump into things. But I've used VR headsets with
hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of kids. And I've never had a kid
bump into anything because I control the situation. You don't just
stick them in a Vive and then walk off and make a cup of tea.

Alan: It's interesting. We had
an event a couple of days ago, we just got -- this is two months ago
-- we had just got the Oculus Quest and we had an event and people
were playing the sword fighting and... it was our fault, we didn't
put a barrier around them, but somebody walked by as they were
swinging. Got punched right in the face. And I was like, oh, jeez,
that happened. But that was our fault for not putting a personal
physical barrier around the person, even though they have a digital
one. So when the person inside didn't know... it just was our fault
and it was only... because we use the Vives, we normally set up an
extension so that people can't get in to the person. But because the
Quest was so new and we didn't know, we just put them in a room and
assumed that nobody would walk near them. Somebody swinging their
arms around like an idiot. You would think people wouldn't walk near
them. But that happened.

Steve: Yeah. I mean, one very
low-cost solution I've seen people start to implement is they bring
in -- and you can actually point ones that are marketed as
specifically for virtual reality now -- but they essentially put mats
of some kind on the floor. You get students to take the shoes off.
You've got very simple haptics; I can feel that I've stepped off of
the mat, so therefore, I need to stop. And obviously making sure that
you've got, whether you call it your guardian or a chaperone, you've
got that that set up properly. I really like the Quest, obviously,
the way that the passthrough camera kicks on once you step outside
the guardian, because it draws that full stop. I'm outside of my
space. But again, little things like if you're marking your
chaperone, don't take it right to the very, very limits of the space
that you've got. So there it goes right next to a pane of glass or
right next to a solid brick wall. Give yourself a kind of a border so
that if somebody does get lost in the moment and you happen to not be
watching them, that they've got that kind of leeway, that little bit
extra more... I mean, we could do a whole podcast just around this
kind of VR and health and safety and stuff with kids. But a lot of it
comes down to common sense, ironically, considering this was a
response to the Common Sense Media. It comes down to limiting the
lengths of experiences and limiting, obviously, moderating the types
of experiences that you're using with students. One of the things
that Mark and I started to put before we both left GESS, and once the
dust settled in both moves, we do hope to pick up was we were trying
to put together a kind of white paper and look at sort of creating an
actual formal approach to this. What age would you potentially start
using a Google Cardboard with a student? And how long would that
experience maximum last? What about a Windows mixed reality headset?
Vive? If I'm working with a 13 year old, what would be the
recommended maximum length of an experience? Especially with
something like Tilt Brush, I've seen it happen. You stick a kid in
and they get lost in that world. Well, do you pull it out and say,
how long do you think you been in? And then say "about five
minutes" and you say, "oh, you've actually been in there
20."

Alan: Time dilation is a proven
fact in VR, actually. I was reading a study on this early on and the
time dilation can be as much as 25 percent that people think they're
in VR a lot shorter than they actually are. And one of the things
that you can actually do to completely mess with people is you can
put a virtual clock inside VR that moves slower than real time and
you can actually increase that to about 50 percent. So people think
they're in for an hour and they're in for two.

Steve: I've never heard of that
done before. I like that. That's nice. So then the last one is, it's
kind of the biggie, from my point of view, is that the benefits alone
and ultimately, as somebody who's worked for a long time now with
various forms of education technology, there's gotta be benefits to
learning. There's gotta be some point to deploy in this technology.
When I when I first started doing this stuff, I was doing with with
the high end VR in early 2017, the kind of party line for myself and
other pioneers like Jamie Donnelly and Steven Sarto, it was like
"there hasn't been enough studies yet. The jury's out,"
kind of. But we're two years on and the jury is starting to come in
now and we're starting to see more and more evidence come in from all
corners of the world. There's all kinds of data that you see there on
the site. From Beijing University and Warwick University and Cornell
and Stanford, there's all these studies taking place showing that no,
VR is more engaging than than other traditional forms of media, that
it leads to significant retention of learning. The one that came out,
Alvin Graylin tagged me in a tweet last week. There was a new study
from another university in China looking at--

Alan: Yes, I saw that, too. I
asked him for the study. I didn't get it yet.

Steve: Now, I haven't seen the
actual study, but with statistics looking at language learning in VR,
and then from a theoretical point of view, I then start thinking
about some of the big theoretical educational models, and the one for
me over the last decade that has become very prevalent is the SAMR
model from Ruben Puentedura. This is going to become like, if you're
playing ed-tech bingo at conferences, the first thing that you would
put down on your bingo card would be the SAMR model on a slide
because you can't get through any sort of ed-tech presentation these
days without somebody going into the SAMR model, one talking about
the different levels of SAMR. When I was putting this presentation
together, this is the first time I'd actually looked at SAMR for a
while and the first time I ever looked at it with specifically my VR
head on. And for those that maybe don't work in the education
industry, this is a two-phase, four-step model created by Dr. Ruben
Puentedura specifically about technology integration in the
classroom. The lower phase, the enhancement phase, has the two steps,
the lowest step is substitution, where technology acts as a direct
substitute; type something on Word rather than you hand-write it.
Then it goes augmentation, so your technology's still a substitute,
but, you know there'll be an additional functional improvement. So
you're using a digital thesaurus, or you're adding in a clipart image
or something simple. And then the second higher phase is the
transformation phase, which has the modification and ultimately
redefinition. And the idea being that you're moving towards using
technology to create new tasks and access content in ways that was
previously impossible. You take the lowest level, use that analogy of
having to write something; the lowest level would be just, I type on
word instead of handwriting it. And highest-level might be that I
collaboratively write something on a Google doc and then we post it
to a blog or a wiki, and then we take live feedback from people from
around the world. That's me redefining that task, using technology.
And when I looked at this through the VR goggles -- pun intended --
when I looked at it with my VR kind of mindset, what I found
interesting was that it's like a leap frog, because I can't see any
instance where VR is being used for things like substitution, because
by its very nature, because of the experience or nature of VR
applications, you're automatically giving students the ability to do
things that they had previously never been able to do before. Whether
that's painting with light or defying gravity with the way that you
build a sculpture and tilt brush, or flying around the world in
Google Earth, or stepping back in time in the Titanic experience.
It's a transcendent technology in a way that other technologies have
not offered before. And I thought that was quite telling. I'm
actually at the moment working towards finishing something I started
in early 2018. So nearly two years ago, I started looking at VR and
another very famous education theory, which is Bloom's taxonomy and
Chris Long, who sadly no longer with us. I, myself and my friend Alex
Johnson in India and Stephen. So we were kind of informally looking
at this on a shared document and we were going backwards and forwards
with it and it kind of got put on the backburner a few times. And
then Chris Long and I dive back into it maybe six months later and we
really thought that we had something there, something interesting --
something somewhat controversial -- but interesting nonetheless. And
then it went back on the backburner. But now I kind of feel like I
need to finish that. I need to get that published, not least because
it was kind of the last project that I was working on with Chris. And
I'd like to see that through to completion. So 2020, I think at this
point, will be when I'm looking to publish that, because as I
mentioned earlier, I've got to rebuild my entire website before I can
publish anything.

Alan: Well, Steve, I mean,
there's so much we can talk about. It's been really amazing to listen
to these. You are one of the world leaders in this. So thank you so
much for joining us today.

Steve: Thank you, Alan. It's
always a pleasure.