Teacher Talk: Immersive Tech Vocabulary

January 6, 2020

Happy New Year! 2020 is the year to explore a “multimodal system that fuses symbolic and statistical information from a set of 3D gesture, spoken language, and referential agents.”

Wait...What?

Trials and Tribulations of Tech Terms

Technology, as a broad topic, brings a multitude of new words for us to use seemingly daily. No one can possibly keep up, but as our need and familiarity with the tech increases, we somehow manage to add them to our repertoire. Throw in a few hundred acronyms and we sound like we know what we are talking about, right?

Terms related to emergent technologies, such as augmented, virtual, and mixed realities, pose an even more difficult problem as they are not yet part of our mainstreamed culture. As immersive tech business is literally at its earliest stages of what is widely predicted to be ubiquitous and transformative, educators should consider learning and using a few of these terms in their classrooms. Why?

Better understanding can bring comfort to using these technologies.
Engage on social media.
Integrate immersive tech skills and concepts into content area lessons.
Sets the stage for future learning and experiences.

Language of the Discipline

For a majority of my career, I taught using Sandra Kaplan’s Depth and Complexity Icons. To this day, I believe these icons are the best instructional tools for multiple pathways to true understanding. One of the icons is Language of the Discipline. At first glance, you’d think “vocabulary,” however, as I explained to students, it is simply the words you need to communicate about a certain subject/topic. Using disciplinary language brings specificity to the message you are trying to convey and brings clarity to communications. Imagine talking about baseball using vagaries such as “squares that each player must touch” or the “guy wearing the creepy mask” instead of “base” and “umpire.”

When a topic is “new” to us, we have a limited number of words at our disposal. It takes repeated use over time to cement those terms into our everyday vernacular. In fact, it takes approximately 17 exposures!

The language of this immersive technology discipline is the surest, most natural way to introduce students to words and concepts they are sure to use in the near future, if they haven’t already. (Of course, there is always the flashcard-memorize-and-forget-after-the-test method…) Additionally, the concepts and terms will prove invaluable to teachers as they review and use experiences and hardware to make instructional decisions.

Immersive Tech Glossary: A New Resource by Perspectives XR

The Institute for Learning Perspectives has gathered from multiple resources terms related to immersive technology. We’ve tried to simplify and make them applicable to education when necessary. You’ll see they have been color-coded based on level of need/use:

Green - Should know basics

Blue - Nice to know

Black - Advanced terms, mostly used by industry

This live document includes a link with which to submit new words, pictures, videos, even corrections (we don’t claim to be the experts)...anything to help with understanding. Perspectives XR will update this list periodically to keep our valued educator audience abreast of what’s new. Bookmark this, search for words using Ctrl + F, use the words in your lesson plans and instruction, and encourage your students to do so both orally and in writing.

Happy immersive word-smithing!

Resources

Advrtas Immersive Media Vocabulary

Edmentum’s Blog: The Immersive Future of Education Technology: Exploring Augmented

Medium’s Blog: Dataseries

Proscenium Glossary

Tech Republic Mini-Glossary of Virtual Reality Terms

Unity’s What is XR Glossary

Virtual, and Mixed Reality in the Classroom

The Institute for Learning Perspectives, or Perspectives XR, is an educational non-profit dedicated to helping educators use immersive technologies to teach the humanities.

Date

Mon, 01/06/2020 - 11:00

Teacher Talk: Immersive Tech Vocabulary

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