Work / Domain
Immersive and extended reality
Immersion is a property of an experience, not an outcome of one. The question worth asking is never whether learners felt present, but whether being there let them do something they could not otherwise have done.
Why it matters
Extended reality arrives with an unusually strong feeling of self-evidence. Putting on a headset is genuinely striking, and people reliably report that it was memorable. The trouble is that memorability of the medium and durability of the learning are different things, and the first is much easier to produce than the second.
This matters because headsets are expensive, logistically demanding, and consume a share of curriculum time that has to come from somewhere. A technology that produces enthusiasm without producing understanding is not neutral. It has a cost, and the cost is paid in the thing it displaced.
What I have come to believe
There is a real and narrow set of cases where spatial media does something no other medium can. Scale is one — things too large, too small, too fast, or too slow to be perceived directly. Danger is another, where rehearsal in the real setting is unacceptable. Invisibility is a third: fields, flows, and forces that have no everyday appearance. Perspective is a fourth, where occupying a position other than your own is the actual learning objective. When a topic sits in one of those, the case is strong and I will argue for it.
Outside them, a well-made diagram, a physical model, or a good demonstration usually wins on cost, robustness, and the amount of thinking it demands of the learner. That last point is the one most often missed. Rich sensory input can reduce the amount of construction a learner has to do, and construction is where the learning lives. An experience that hands you everything can leave you with nothing.
I also think the field systematically underweights what happens after the headset comes off. The consolidating conversation — what did you notice, what surprised you, what does it mean — is doing an enormous share of the work, and it is the part most likely to be cut when time runs short.
How I approach it
I ask what learning action the experience is meant to enable, and then I ask what the cheapest medium is that would enable the same action. If the answer is a diagram, we make the diagram. Choosing the smaller intervention when it does the same job is not conservatism — it is the discipline that makes the case credible on the occasions when the expensive option really is the right one.
Unsettled
What I would still argue about
The honest list. These are open in my own head, not rhetorical.
- How much of the measured advantage in the literature is a novelty effect that would decay if the same learners used the medium 20 times rather than once.
- Whether perspective-taking experiences produce durable change in how someone reasons, or a strong short-lived emotional response that reads like it.
- Where the line actually falls between productive sensory richness and the kind that quietly removes the need to think.