I remember a few courses back I chose to look into the history of technology through the lens of early criticisms. In my blog post, I pointed out that “Wartella and Jennings (2000) propose, concerns about the introduction of media in years past, mirror concerns resurfacing today. “ (Fahrenbruch, 2018, para. 1). In light of my new research into Virtual Reality (VR) use with young children, I went back to read over the article again. What I found was very interesting. Today’s concerns about the impact of technology on child development date back as far as the 1920”s when radio was introduced into families’ living rooms (Wartella & Jennings, 2000). Radio, movies, television and computers all elicited similar reactions and concerns. Appropriate content being a thread that wove through all of them, closely followed by each technology’s effect on socialization. What was of greater interest to me though, was the mention that each “new media might be used to substitute for real life in learning ethical principles” (Wartella & Jennings, p. 32, 2000). Wartella and Jennings don’t go into a further explanation as to what ethical principles they are referring to. However, let’s take a leap and assume they are talking about ethical life principles that each new media would be able to corrupt. I came across a similar concern when looking into the use of VR with young children. Today we are concerned about VR experiences being too real for comfort, creating a make belief life that will be difficult to keep apart from the real life lived by its young users (Segovia & Bailenson, 2009). Not only does this raise an ethical question for parents and educators who may use VR as a teaching tool, it also deconstructs the understanding of appropriate content. Choosing appropriate content suddenly is not enough anymore when we need to consider if it is ethical to impart virtual memories on children that will be undiscernable from real life experiences. Is it still okay to have children interact with fun, educational and harmless content when these children later recall their virtual experiences as real? Children do acts in VR they would or could never do in the real world, but still believe it actually happened. A child’s sense of self, therefore, is changed (Bailey & Bailenson, 2017). Should we change a person’s sense of self, even if it is positive? Do we have the right to impact a person’s life in such a way that their perceived lived life will become a lie?
References
Bailey, J. O., & Bailenson, J. N. (2017). Immersive Virtual Reality and the Developing Child. Cognitive Development in Digital Contexts. Elsevier Inc. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-809481-5.00009-2
Fahrenbruch, A. (October 19, 2018). Early Criticisms on Technology Use with Pre School Age Children [blog post]. Retrieved from https://malat-webspace.royalroads.ca/rru0053/early-criticisms-of-technology-use-for-pre-school-age-children/
Wartella, E. A., & Jennings, N. (2000). Children and computers: New technology – Old concerns. Future of Children, 10(2), 31–43. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.2307/1602688
Segovia, K. Y., & Bailenson, J. N. (2009). Virtually True : Children ’ s Acquisition of False Memories in Virtual Reality, 371–393. https://doi.org/10.1080/15213260903287267
Hello Anita,
As always, I enjoy reading your posts. You are very reflective and bring up some very relevant concerns. In this post, you bring up the concern of VR and how it would impact a child’s development and perception of oneself and their experiences. Was it real or make belief? I know that research has said that VR has been proven helpful with practicing communication skills prior to learners working with real patients (Maicher, Danforth, Price, Zimmerman, Wilcox, Liston, Cronau, Belknap, Ledford, Way, Post, Marcerollo, & Rizer, 2017) and assisting in teaching life skills to students with hearing impediments (Vogel, Bowers, Meehan, Hoeft, & Bradley, 2004). Vogel, Bowers, Meehan, Hoeft and Bradley (2004) observed that although children completed the VR tasks for each of the life skills like “not talking to strangers”, “crossing the street safely”, “fire drill” and “gun safety”, some may have completed the tasks because they were lucky or that because they were getting familiar with the task and the VR system. For example, the researchers found that when crossing the street, the students crossed by luck and did not look both ways. How did this transfer to real life? Teachers and parents found that for some children, they did demonstrate more caution, but still needed guidance. In this study, teachers were very involved with the VR activity and discussed the different scenarios in class which demonstrates a blended learning environment for the children.
Bottom line, educators have a responsibility to fully inform parents and students of the benefits and challenges (i.e. getting dizzy, getting headaches) involved with the VR learning environment. Educators, content experts and parents should be involved in the design of VR environments/scenarios to ensure that age appropriate content is being used effectively.
Cheers!
References:
Maicher, K., Danforth, D., Price, A., Zimmerman, L., Wilcox, B., Liston, B., Cronau, H., Belknap, L., Ledford, C., Way, D., Post, D., Macerollo, A., & Rizer, M. (2017). Developing a conversational virtual standardized patient to enable students to practice history-taking skills. Simulation in Healthcare : Journal of the Society for Simulation in Healthcare,12(2), 124-131.
Vogel, J., Bowers, C., Meehan, C., Hoeft, R., & Bradley, K. (2004). Virtual reality for life skills education: Program evaluation, Deafness & Education International, 6:1, 39-50, DOI: 10.1179/146431504790560636
Hi Joyce, thank you for your reply and thoughtful feedback. I came across some of the same research you quoted and found it interesting that children did not learn more from the VR games as they would have in real life. As with any teaching of young children, we always need to repeat and reinforce. What I did find useful to consider was the use of VR with children who are not developing typically. The affordances of VR use with children with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Disorder (FASD) and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are intriguing. To be able to lower the cognitive load and tone down environmental stimuli makes VR a safe and controllable environment to teach children with disabilities. I fully agree with you about educator responsibility towards parents and educating parents about the shortcomings and challenges of VR.
References
Eden, S. (2014). Virtual intervention to improve storytelling ability among deaf and hard-of-hearing children. European Journal of Special Needs Education, 29(3), 369–385. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1080/08856257.2014.909177Rosenfield, N. S. et al. (2019). A Virtual
Reality System for Practicing Conversation Skills for Children with Autism. Multimodal Technologies and Interaction, 3(2), 28. MDPI AG. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/mti3020028
Thanks for that thought-provoking post Anita. As a mother of two young girls I will tread very carefully around virtual reality (VR). I already see examples of how the lines between reality and fiction blur when they watch television, so it makes sense that virtual reality experiences would blur these lines even further. I certainly will be very careful about the types of VR content I will let me daughters engage with; however, your question about allowing them to engage with appropriate content is interesting. I am swayed by the argument that the blur between VR and real life may lead to a loss of a sense of self (Bailey & Bailenson as cited in Fahrenbruch, 2019). However, your other point about various technologies such as radio and television all bringing up similar concerns in the past also makes me think (Fahrenbruch, 2019). I see my daughters constantly making sense of their world and they are amazingly resilient in their attempts to understand its complexity. Therefore, part of me thinks that if VR will be a part of the world they grow up in and live in, they need to make sense of that too, and as difficult as distinguishing between reality and VR may be, they may be better off for learning to make this distinction earlier in life.
References
Fahrenbruch, A. (2019, May 23). Is appropriate content enough? [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://malat-webspace.royalroads.ca/rru0053/is-appropriate-content-enough/
Hi Jessica, thank you for your feedback and thoughts on my post. I relate to your comment “if VR will be a part of the world they grow up in and live in, they need to make sense of that too, and as difficult as distinguishing between reality and VR may be, they may be better off for learning to make this distinction earlier in life.” Your comment resonates deeply with me. I have always looked at technology as just another tool children need to learn to live with, in a good way. Choosing appropriate content and restricting the length of use seemed to be good guidelines up till now. What has me concerned about immersive virtual reality (IVR) is the way it makes the brain believe what is happening is real. Because of the way our brain stores memories, it literally will have difficulties discerning which memory is real and which one is from an IVR experience. The selection of content will have to be examined with a different lens, as we don’t want to create a false sense of self in a child. Bailey and Bailenson (2017) state “users highly identify with their virtual doppelgangers even when they know that computer algorithms control them” (p. 191). Seeing their look-alike avatar, users alter their behaviour so much so, that they will prefer the same name brand their virtual self uses. The decision of when and how to expose children to IVR lies with parents and educators and the responsibility seems to weigh heavier than it did with former new technologies.
Hi Anita,
Really enjoyed reading your post and also listening to your groups discussion on virtual reality (VR). There were many key concerns that was raised throughout your teams discussion, which led me to do some digging of my own on the effects of VR on young children. In one study that I came across, they spoke about the advantages of VR tools in helping with autism. In this study by Herrera et al. (2008), VR tools were used with autistic children between the ages of seven to fifteen, in helping to teach pretend play. Though the study concluded that those autistic children involved in the study were able to advance in pretend play , they did not reveal any drawbacks of its use. One thing I noted in their analysis that these children became more engaged in the pretend play after repetitions of the game. Their main aim of the two case studies was to use VR tools “to enable individuals with ASD to improve their knowledge and autonomous management of real objects equivalent to those worked on in the virtual environment, and to improve their pretend play and their understanding of imagination” (Herrera et al., 2008, p. 148). It would have been nice to know if the participants were able to distinguish real from VR. As you mentioned along with Jessica and Joyce, about young children being able to distinguish real from VR, I think this is a major concern when introducing or thinking of using VR into our classrooms. This brings me to the question, what would you consider to be the appropriate age to introduce young users into VR? What guidelines do you think can be put in place to help young users of VR to distinguish the difference between real vs VR?
Reference
Herrera, G. Alcantud, F., Jordan, R., Blanquer, A., Labajo, G., & De Pablo, C (2008). Development of symbolic play through the use of virtual reality tools in children with autistic spectrum disorders. Autism, 12(2),143-157. Retrieved from https://journals-sagepub-com.ezproxy.royalroads.ca/doi/pdf/10.1177/1362361307086657
Hi Phyz, thank you for your reply and great questions. You ask: “what would you consider to be the appropriate age to introduce young users into VR? What guidelines do you think can be put in place to help young users of VR to distinguish the difference between real vs VR?” In answer to your first question I came across Southgate (2018), who published a report on IVR use in education. Her suggested age for IVR use with children is the age given by manufacturers of headgear for IVR experiences, which is 12-13. Considering brain development in children, I can go along with that recommendation. To address your second question I will need to consider brain development as well. We know today that the prefrontal cortex, responsible for executive functioning and self-regulation, is not fully developed until about the age of 25 (URMC, 2019). Because of this self-regulation, which is still developing in preschool and elementary aged children, I found the research by Baumgartner et al. (2008) very revealing. They state that their “findings highlight the relative susceptibility of children to the experience of presence in simulated environments and may have important consequences for pedagogical and educational interventions. One consequence might be that one should be more reluctant to expose children to emotional virtual stimuli as currently practiced” (p. 11). This cautionary note should be a guideline to parents and educators alike. There are certainly more questions than answers surrounding the use of IVR with young children.The only way I would entertain an IVR experience for a young child would be to have a shared IVR experience, one in which both players can see each other. That way the adult would be able to extract the child from the experience when the child would be too aroused and unable to do so themselves.
References
Baumgartner, T. et al. (2008). Feeling present in arousing virtual reality worlds: prefrontal brain regions differentially orchestrate presence experience in adults and children. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2, (8). Retrieved from
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2572200/
Southgate, A. E. (2018). Immersive virtual reality, children and school education : A literature review for teachers, (6).Retrieved from https://ericasouthgateonline.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/southgate_2018_immersive_vr_literature_review_for_teachers.pdf
Southgate, A. E. (February 28, 2018)Research & Provocations on Human Virtuality [Blog post]. Retrieved from
https://ericasouthgateonline.wordpress.com/2018/02/28/think-before-putting-kids-in-immersive-vr/
URMC (2019). Understanding the Teen Brain [website]. Retrieved from https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?ContentTypeID=1&ContentID=3051