Virtual Reality and Education

Abstract

One of the challenges in working with instructional media is that developers and educators are confronted with a rapidly moving target in terms of information technology’s capabilities. The business and entertainment sectors are driving a fast- paced evolution of the devices people have in their workplaces and homes. Researchers and educators are scrambling to assess the potential, develop pedagogical strategies, create instructional materials, and implement a school- based infrastructure for today’s technologies— only to find that computers and communications are “morphing” into new media of even greater power. Students of today experience a society and a workplace that is entirely different from those that their parents faced. To allow educational tools to fall behind the pace of technological advance is to sell out a generation of learners.