VR Sets For Every School!!
I think it’s difficult for people to create & visualize their own timeline of history. A few zingers have to peak your individual spark of curiosity & fascination. These are what i call your “Anchors.” For a 21st century modern kid like myself, many of these anchors are pop culture references.. Blues Brothers movie dropped in 1980, Woodstock happened 1969, The last time that horse & buggies were the transportation majority on the road in New York City was around 1907.. after which your 4 wheeled horseless carriages took over the popular transport medium. These are all “Anchors” which help me to visualize an era, The style of the time & place can all be easily extrapolated inside your mind’s eye, which help you construct a mental timeline, from said anchors.
Why do we need an always operational floating historical timeline tab open in our mind’s eye?? Especially when we can look things up on google anytime we want, right?? No need to ever memorize boring dates again right?? Well, in simplistic day to day ritual routines, maybe it’s not essential.. But. If you’re goal is to program your brain to learn, then constructing these personalized custom timelines of your favorite topic is key.
Cutting edge “everything” lies in the lines between. It’s the same philosophy as learning the rules so that you know where to break them. In this case it’s: learning the evolution of tech & events so that you can reasonably predict what happens next.
The intersections of different topics are the hot spots of innovation, always. Between biology & materials science. Between, from the 15th century (or, the 1400s) European perspective, the “discovery” of domesticated foods in the Americas & the cultivated directions of cuisine on the Euro-Continent of that time period. Remember, tomatoes, potatoes, those things simply were unknown on 5 of the 7 major continents in any major way until the 16th century (or, the 1500s)← (took me a long time to figure out when in time those “Nth Century” expressions referred to. so there ya go!)
VR headsets in the classroom! The visual 3-Dimensional experience of VR landscapes have the power to impress upon young minds with a vivid immediacy that is lost in a simple picture in a text book. It excites an “anchor” to locate itself in you mind. Akin to a prologue setting the scene & providing the world building ideas which you need to accurately re-imagine the world upon your custom timeline as you’re living it.
Field Trips to ancient Egypt based on photographic evidence of the tombs & the pyramids is an easy way to teach of the agriculture, tech & culture of the 25th Century BC←(which in BC times everything is backwards, meaning this is the time period between 2500–2400 BC, it’s so confusing, but. Where there’s a system we can logic!)
AI NPCs can stand in as the pharaoh, or Socrates on VR field trips to Greek, or Nikola Tesla & Mark Twain on a sunny daytrip to the famous Boulder Colorado laboratory where the two legends speak only of gossip of the wealthy acolytes of the day.. or maybe even deep mind-bending conceptual collaborated projections of what their conversations might have been.
Ai today can take books of great thinkers & distill them down to a generated algorithmic “personality” to simulate conversations. Or even to mimic writing & speaking styles, for voice acting & audiobook reading, or even to read your directions on navigation maps on your phone.
More than just a sensory touchstone in time, VR headsets in the classroom can enable students to experience a program setup to emulate a homeless lady’s life struggles. This can increase empathy for the poor & optimistically create a sense of sympathy in future generations.
I speak little of the future here, as it seems that our perception of the future would be much better served by teaching the wisdom that lies between the worlds of historical significance. Learning these “anchors” in time are the responsibilities we are burdened with for the chance we carry our people forward. Because the toughest questions are the ones we don’t know where they exist yet. Earth as a school is a 360 degree room of mirrors. We stand on one side of the room we look around the room & see a reflection of ourselves on all sides of the issue. So it would seem that we are correct from every angle.. But this is always the most pervasive illusion in the thinking of man.
