iLRN2021 7th International Conference of the Immersive Learning Research Network

We are on the cusp of the spatial computing revolution, with Virtual Reality now a mainstream term, and Augmented & Mixed Reality quickly becoming popular. These immersive media are transforming users: from explicit learning of curriculum topics and career skills, to implicit changes in behaviors, perceptions, and attitudes. As researchers, designers and practitioners of immersive learning experiences, each of us actively contributes to creating the future where these technologies deeply influence how humanity learns, collaborates and transforms. What lessons should we remember from pioneer explorers of these fields, and what should be our focus as we move the field forward?    

Join us for this panel discussion involving Jeremy Bailenson (Stanford University), Mina Johnson-Glenberg (Arizona State University), Chris Dede (Harvard University), and Mel Slater (University of Barcelona) as we explore the past and future of immersive experiences, covering questions such as: How can we look at our field with a fresh pair of eyes, to positively harness the transformative power of these technologies? How do we design and study experiences that cannot be created with more traditional media? What are ethical implications of creating deeply transformational experiences? How do we take these technologies to scale? What are the long term effects on adults and children?

This past year, schools were asked to either close their doors or move to remote solutions indefinitely. In the haste to quickly transition to virtual environments due to COVID, no one stopped to ask about the psychological impact of suddenly learning and training remotely. This new way of working and learning quickly begged the questions—how do you foster teamwork and collaboration in a virtual environment? Is true collaboration only possible in a virtual world? And how does learning remotely full time affect one's psyche? Dr. Alex Howland, PhD, president of Virbela, will discuss all of this and more.

In this session, you will learn how the transition to virtual learning has affected the psyche of those who do it daily. Whether you are a student, teacher, or learning professional, we should all have at least a basic understanding of how virtual learning can affect the human brain. In this session, you will learn why psychological safety is so important to virtual collaboration and how you can foster that remotely. You will also learn how and why different platforms affect and augment the way that we work, collaborate, and socialize on them. Alex will discuss the hurdles that many people face when transitioning to virtual learning, including burnout, and how to avoid the common pitfalls. He'll discuss the benefits of learning in a virtual world and the long-term effects on culture, trust, and work-life interaction. You will leave this session with a new appreciation for the human brain, and tangible tips to best prepare yourselves and your organization for long-term virtual success.‬‬

Join the chat to learn more about:

• Why psychological safety is so important to collaboration and how you can foster that remotely
• How and why different platforms affect and augment the way that we collaborate and socialize on them
• The hurdles that many people face when transitioning to virtual learning, including burnout
• The long-term psychological effects of remote collaboration in a virtual world and their impact at an individual, team, and organizational level

What do a Mars mission, doctoring in the Antarctic and life as a med student during COVID-19 have in common when it comes to medical education? More than you'd think, as it turns out! In this talk, Dr. Shawna Pandya, physician, VP of Immersive Medicine at Luxsonic Technologies and scientist-astronaut candidate, will draw on her experiences developing immersive technologies for medical education for space and for Earth to talk about the promise and potential for immersive medical technologies to improve medical education and training in the usual—and not so usual—places on Earth, and beyond.

Part 2 of 2

Several clients from different business categories all had very different learning objectives. What do they have in common? They all used immersive learning to achieve jaw-dropping results. From a 400% ROI from training to up to $3,000 saved per employee and customer, the myth of VR being too expensive, too complicated, and too time-consuming ends right here. John Blackmon, the CTO of eLearning Brothers, will share examples from Transition Associates for Fendi, Illumina Interactive for a nonprofit, and Komatsu Mining, which will blow you away!

During this talk I intend to do a preliminary assessment of the ways in which XR has impacted research and education on the continent. I will highlight a number of case studies, and consider the future.

Judith Okonkwo is a Technology Evangelist, Business Psychologist and Organisation Development Consultant with experience working in Africa, Asia and Europe.  She sits on the Board of the European Organisation Design Forum, advises Startups, not-for-profits and SMEs on emerging technologies and is a guest lecturer at several HEIs. She is also the creator of the Oriki Coaching Model™ and a co-founder of We Will Lead Africa. Judith is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society. 

In 2016 Judith set up Imisi 3D a creation lab in Lagos focused on building the African ecosystem for extended reality technologies (AR/VR/MR), and connecting XR communities across the continent. The lab provides learning opportunities and access to XR resources for creators and enthusiasts, while supporting engagement and adoption by the wider community, and consulting and content creation for clients. In 2018 she set up AR/VR Africa which holds large XR events on the continent, the most recent - the 2020  AR/VR Africa hackathon - had participants from 27 African countries. Judith is especially passionate about the adaptation of immersive technologies to create solutions on the continent, particularly low/mid cost virtual reality, for education, healthcare and storytelling.  Imisi 3D’s most recent VR film production Lagos At Large made the Forbes list of the Top 50 XR Experiences of 2019.

Judith is a current member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council for Augmented and Virtual Reality.

Social good innovation builds strong communities and economies. Yet, a major question driving our work is how does innovation happen and who becomes an innovator? There are estimated millions of "lost Einsteins," those students who have the potential to become innovators, yet don't have access to innovation culture. Access to innovation culture can be influenced by gender, geographic location, socio-economic status, and race. We'll share our work to break down the access barriers and develop thousands of teen and teacher changemakers around the globe. Implications for XR virtual exchanges will be shared.

LISA DAWLEY, PH.D.
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, THE JACOBS INSTITUTE FOR INNOVATION IN EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY OF SAN DIEGO
With over 25 years of experience in educational technology and innovation, Dr. Lisa Dawley provides leadership in the award-winning research, design and entrepreneurship of innovative learning technologies and organizations. Dr. Dawley is Executive Director of the Jacobs Institute for Innovation in Education at the University of San Diego and co-inventor of Pactful, an app to support social good innovation with teens. Dr. Dawley created the Rezzly quest-based learning platform, Teen GameLab, and EDTECH Island, an immersive simulation supporting international teacher education. Dr. Dawley was co-author of the Going Virtual! research series studying professional development for K-12 online teachers. She received a Top 20 Bestselling Books Award for her text, The Tools for Successful Online Teaching, and she was an invited research fellow at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Kurt Squire with Max Collins and Haizhou Liu

This project builds on a presentation last year, which defined key trends emerging from games in the pandemic, including an affluent schooling infrastructure, a need for co-presence, and the need for emotional security. The presentation presents 3 prototypes of projects designed to address these needs and reports preliminary results.

Virtual reality is not a technology that should replace other teaching resources; instead, it should serve as a complementary tool that can enhance learning across disciplines. As with any new technology being introduced into the classroom, success depends on expectations, an effective strategy and the practical details of how it is being used.

The inaugural State of XR & Immersive Learning Report is now available to the public! Come to this special occasion where members of the 100+ Expert Panel and the report authors will be present to highlight the content & aims of the report, laying out Next Steps for engaging administrators, educators, researchers, designers, and students around the world in making XR-for-Learning accessible and engaging for all learners, everywhere!  

John Falk, Institute for Learning Innovation

Every year some new exciting technology is invented that pushes the boundaries of how, when, where and what can be communicated; each with its own unique operating affordances.  However, the basic operating system of those who use these new systems, us humans, has not fundamentally changed in hundreds of thousands of years. Yes, we are always culturally adapting to new technologies and there is some evidence that our minds are structurally modified in response to these new modes of operating, but the fundamental underlying capabilities of the human mind, how we learn and why we learn has remained remarkably constant. This talk will discuss what we know about some of these fundamentals of human learning with particular reference to how to apply these understandings to users within free-choice settings such as galleries, libraries, archives and museums.
 

Join Kavya Pearlman to learn HOW @XRSIdotorg & orgs around the world are playing their part in “Safeguarding eXtended Realities”

#XRSafety #VR #AR #XR #XRSI

Presenters: Nandini Chatterjee, Vignesh Mukund and Anurati Srivastava

Social emotional skills and global citizenship have been recognized as fundamental competencies required in individuals to build peaceful and sustainable societies. However, the current mode of education, that is largely one-dimensional and lacks an experiential, agency-driven approach does not work effectively for SEL. Play is an evolutionary feature that enables mammals to acquire knowledge by exploration and experimentation. Games for Learning at UNESCO MGIEP believes in the potential of games to teach SEL to adolescents. This session will explore in depth the process of designing game-based courses that leverage the inherent qualities of video-games to create the ideal learning environment.

Dylan Paré (they/them) is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Learning Sciences at the University of Calgary, Werklund School of Education, and the Director of the Queer Code Collective (queercode.org), a design and research-based collective that designs, develops, and researches digital technologies and interactive art and storytelling with queer and trans experiences at the forefront. 
 
Dylan co-designs virtual, immersive, and interactive computational environments for learning about complex systems, computational thinking, and technology design. Their primary research project reimagines computational and technoscientific literacies by interweaving complexity studies, scholarship on embodiment, and queer and trans phenomenology. Within this overarching research project, Dylan researches multi-agent systems’ design to demonstrate how interacting and reasoning with multi-agent simulations of gender and sexuality-based marginalization can help us understand gender and sexuality experiences as complex, emergent, multi-level phenomena that involve dynamic interactions between individuals, groups, and institutions. This research also investigates how innovations in STEM, such as virtual reality and 3D sculpting, can be leveraged to queer learning environments and can offer emancipatory spaces and opportunities for supporting complex reasoning about social, scientific, and technological problems in society. The Queer Code Collective’s recently completed virtual reality project, Mementorium, extended previous research and design work on complex systems and embodied learning to the medium of interactive narrative and immersive, spatial exploration of objects in VR. Mementorium is designed to support learning about how STEM identity is shaped by moments of social biases and injustices that have cumulative effects and emphasizes our agency to recognize past harms and decide future actions.
 
Dylan’s collaborative work has been exhibited at ACM SIGGRAPH’s Immersive Pavilion (upcoming August 2021), the National Music Centre of Canada, Beakerhead science and technology festival, TEDx Calgary, the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and Calgary’s Spark Science Centre. Their work has been recognized through prestigious scholarships and project funding in Canada and the US, such as Alberta Innovates (Technology), a Paul D. Fleck Fellowship from the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Oculus Launch Pad, and TELUS Storyhive.
 
Dylan also runs a weekly live stream from VRChat with the Better Together VR crew, who explore virtual worlds and comment on artistic, technological, and societal aspects of design in social VR. The team also released an interactive, experiential learning, VRChat world called NASA Perseverance Rover on Mars, where visitors journey to Mars, the fourth planet from the sun, and experience its otherworldly, red terrain as they drive an accurate model of the NASA Perseverance Rover and discover information about the NASA Perseverance mission.

Join us in discussion on Indigenous Language and Culture Revitalization and Preservation principles and techniques using VR.  Elder Ernestine Baldwin will do opening prayer in Anishnaabemowin. Viewpoints of traditional and innovative methods of revitalization and preservation will be discussed and how the next generation of learners will be inspired.

Democratizing Data with Immersion
Justin Chow
BadVR

As we enter a time of exciting emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, and quantum computing, “Big Data” is becoming more important. However, accessing, working with, and gleaning meaningful insights from Big Data, is an ability that is relegated to a limited population of society who have proper technical training. What about the myriad people who don’t have a data science background? How can we enable them to also participate? In his presentation, Justin will discuss how complex datasets can be understood by anyone with immersive tech. His company, BadVR, works with organizations such as the UNDP, NOAA, and NSF to enable you to literally “step inside your data”. He’ll discuss the reasons how and why BadVR’s innovative platforms work and the macro implications of data democratization. Listeners will walk away knowing immersive tech will allow anyone the ability to unlock the power of data, the benefits of which extend well beyond the office place and into the global narrative of the most pressing issues of our time.

Teaching Students to Create Their Own Immersive Experiences: Best Practices
Emilie Joly
Zoe, United States / Switzerland

Discover how educators, students and institutions are creating they own immersive experiences easily using Zoe. Zoe is a hands-on learning platform allowing students & faculty to create their own 3D interactive experience without needing to code for Virtual Reality, mobile devices & the unity game engine. During this session we will go over the latest hardware logistics, best practices and curriculum to deliver a successful class catering to learners who have never coded or used 3D software before. We will look at concrete use-cases in both Higher Education & K12 contexts in a wide variety of disciplines.

Judith Okonkwo is a Technology Evangelist, Business Psychologist and Organisation Development Consultant with experience working in Africa, Asia and Europe.  She sits on the Board of the European Organisation Design Forum, advises Startups, not-for-profits and SMEs on emerging technologies and is a guest lecturer at several HEIs. She is also the creator of the Oriki Coaching Model™ and a co-founder of We Will Lead Africa. Judith is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society. 

In 2016 Judith set up Imisi 3D a creation lab in Lagos focused on building the African ecosystem for extended reality technologies (AR/VR/MR), and connecting XR communities across the continent. The lab provides learning opportunities and access to XR resources for creators and enthusiasts, while supporting engagement and adoption by the wider community, and consulting and content creation for clients. In 2018 she set up AR/VR Africa which holds large XR events on the continent, the most recent - the 2020  AR/VR Africa hackathon - had participants from 27 African countries. Judith is especially passionate about the adaptation of immersive technologies to create solutions on the continent, particularly low/mid cost virtual reality, for education, healthcare and storytelling.  Imisi 3D’s most recent VR film production Lagos At Large made the Forbes list of the Top 50 XR Experiences of 2019.

Judith is a current member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council for Augmented and Virtual Reality.

Come to the 7th Annual iLRN Awards Ceremony! 
This year, we are excited to award many new meaningful awards, stemming from the growth and capacity of the network! Help us celebrate achievements in the following categories: 

1. iLRN Initiatives: iLRN Houses, Chapters, XR Women, CHEX, State of XR Awards
2. Practitioners Stream Awards: Innovation in K12 Education, Innovation in Higher Education, & Immersive Learning Pedagogy Awards
3. Student Network Awards: Games Immersion Conference, iLRNFuser, and Doc Colloquium Awards
4. Research Stream Awards: SCILE Special Track, Paper Reviewers, Work-in-Progress, Student Paper, Short Paper, & Full Paper Awards
5. Volunteers & iLRN Special Recognition: Rookie of the Year, Herculean Hauler, & Social Media Maverick
6. iLRN Service Award

Come to the iLRN Main Stage for a fireside chat between iLRN President Jonathon Richter and Rep. Suzan DelBene (WA-01), Co-chair of the Congressional Caucus on Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality Technologies to discuss the Reality Caucus and issues Representative DeBene has encountered in trying to educate her fellow lawmakers and their staff on emerging tech; as well as how the immersive learning community can better inform our policymakers about XR technologies. We hope to also discuss her proposed Information Transparency and Personal Data Control Act legislation--and the many intersections between these emerging XR technologies and, with their use, new threats to privacy and data security. Join us! 

One could argue that policing in the United States of America, is an endeavor undergoing an existential crisis.  The country is currently hooked on a news cycle that seeks to demonize or indemnify, a group of men and women, trained and ratified by their communities to uphold mutually agreed upon rules to maintain order of all kinds.  In the last decade the rate in which social movements gather traction from fringe thought, to active conversation, to media and political attention, to legislation and policy change is arguably the fastest in the history of the profession.  So how are law enforcement professionals to react to such rapidly evolving change during simultaneous calls for defunding?  How should they be anticipating and proactively addressing change?

Most police reform conversations, both casual and formal, end their journey in the realm of training. The logic goes from most pundits commenting on almost any police news story that gains national attention, “If they were just trained better, these things could be avoided.” Most critical thinkers would probably go one step further in asking themselves, “Why don’t they train themselves right in the first place?” If you are an extra deep thinker, you might go on to ponder, “What police training to they get already? Is it the right training? Is it contemporary? Does the training and education of a police officer account for all of the modern challenges and expectations of society for policing?” As a citizen of any nation, I would commend you for asking these fundamental questions to those that are selected to be society’s standards bearers and hold the legal power to take life or liberty to do so.

This presentation will answer those questions from one of the most modern and progressive police departments in the United States. Hear directly from Lieutenant Zachary Bales, a current law enforcement leader from the Sacramento Police Department, as he and his department navigate these questions and seek training and learning in a variety of modalities to create some of the best trained and educated police officers that the United States has to offer.  Take this opportunity to understand where police training is today, and where it is going tomorrow and beyond.

Our devices have become an external limb - we carry them everywhere. Now that portable PCs and smartphones are within reach, for billions. What’s next? Perhaps a world where hardware devices will disappear, and we will have access to all the information we need in thin air. Sriya will discuss her vision for the future of our interface evolution, breaking down the technologies required: brain computer interfaces and extended reality. She’ll also share her projects leveraging both, from building a brain-controlled AR Web Browser to building personalized VR environments using non-invasive brain signal analysis. Game design can become tricky when you have many moving parts like the detection of brain signals, interpretation using machine learning, and then adaption of VR games according to the analysis, so we’ll discuss challenges, possible solutions, and the greater potential for this too. Progress is being made to make the next ubiquitous interface a reality - here you’ll learn where we’re at and what it takes to get to where we want to be.

This presentation advances a moral foundation to XR design which takes into account the expanded digital worlds in which people operate, the need to retain aspects of the physical world that underpin social experiences, and the prioritisation of a deep connection with the natural world that is crucial to humanity’s future. It examines examples of such design principles within a variety of contexts, from theatre to sport, and proposes that Ethical XR should be central to the development of immersive worlds.  

Wrapping up this month-long conference, iLRN President & CEO Jon Richter and key members of the iLRN Organizing Committee will lead a short presentation highlighting some of the key events and moments and invite the iLRN Community to join in preparations for next two years (2022 & 2023).  Help shape the future of our growing community! 

Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality are two related technologies that are poised to become revolutionary educational platforms. This talk will address the many questions that surround this idea.

Questions like…
- When will VR and AR be ready to use in education?
- Which is better? VR or AR?
- What form will VR and AR platforms take?
- What students and topics will VR and AR serve most effectively?
- How can educators make the best use of these technologies?

Expect to come away with a clear picture of the present state and future promise of XR for Education.