Australia's School of the Air programs have been among the most lauded distance education schemes for more than 50 years. In response to a scattered population in a less than hospitable environment and with a lack of nearby population centers and facilities, the School of the Air provided education for isolated children. The original School of the Air was opened in 1951, but had been broadcasting school lessons from the Royal Flying Doctor Service for some years prior to that. The School of the Air programs still operate today, as there are students living more than 800 kilometres (more than 500 miles) away from the nearest school.
Originally the system used pedal-powered radios, but more recently bi-directional broadband satellite communications, video conferencing and electronic whiteboards have brought students closer. The system has been an unqualified success for more than half a century.
Why is it then, that as soon as the notion of avatars and collaborative virtual environments is brought up for education, that the educational establishments seem to shy away? Does virtual learning have to be dreadful before anyone is willing to seriously fund it?
From the School of the Air perspective, learning in virtual environments (such as Linden Lab's Second Life) is a logical extension. Such an environment brings students closer together, and allows them to more easily collaborate on classwork and coursework, but otherwise is not so different notionally to what students experience already.
The students might even enjoy it under the right circumstances.
And there's the rub, really. Games try, within modern technical limitations, to look like the real world, and virtual environments do too. To the casual observer, therefore, virtual environments look like games, and it seems rather alien to many that our children and students should have access to learning tools that might also have enjoyable aspects that are not a part of a rigid curriculum. Or indeed, enjoyable aspects at all.
Sure, educational bodies and committees talk about enjoyable learning experiences and that students should, if possible, enjoy learning. Yet when it comes to allocating budgets, anything that seems in the least bit game-like seems to wind up at the bottom of the list, as if enjoyment was the antithesis of learning.
Despite all this, and despite the projects being near the bottom of the funding totem-pole, universities and colleges are still managing to establish presences in collaborative virtual environments, and investigate their usefulness for education. Some few even manage effective distance education, much like Australia's School of the Air. Ultimately, it is something we expect to see a lot more of, though we also expect to see it opposed and questioned at every turn before finally struggling into the mainstream at some uncertain point in the future.
Have our views on the beneficial uses of technology and its social implications stagnated so much over the last half century?
