Jan Plass

Technology is said to revolutionize how we learn – but how? This talk will use a theoretical and empirical approach to describing how playful learning, personalized learning, and new technologies such as AR, VR, and MR are changing the way we learn in schools, colleges, at work, and at home.

Learning is often described as a cognitive process of information processing and meaning making. Based on recent research in affective neuroscience and the learning sciences, this talk will discuss how we can leverage learners’ emotions to enhance learning outcomes – and make the process of learning more enjoyable.

Personalized learning is often described as the game changer of learning. This talk will present a taxonomy of adaptivity that shows that most current systems are only using a small number of possible variables to personalize. It will discuss cognitive, affective, motivational, and socio-cultural variables future adaptive systems should incorporate to truly personalize learning.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is frequently heralded as a game-changer in education. This talk will describe four different ways in which AI can enhance learning. These include new ways of measuring key learner variables, new ways of measuring learning outcomes, new forms of personalized learning, and new approaches to choose career paths.

The concept of the metaverse, a public virtual world in which people gather to play, socialize, and work, has recently entered into the mainstream. Interest by companies such as Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Facebook, which even changed its name to Meta, has inspired much speculation about how the metaverse will change a broad range of sectors. Education, in particular, seems to be a prime application for this technology. What is the metaverse and what technologies are powering it? Will the metaverse create more equitable learning opportunities, foster diversity and inclusion, and facilitate learning of disciplinary knowledge in context? Or will it create new barriers to access, raise privacy issues, and widen knowledge gaps? We will explore how the metaverse should be designed to bring about positive change and help solve our problems in education, with a focus what each of us can do to contribute to future where the metaverse serves the common good.

The concept of the metaverse, a public virtual world in which people gather to play, socialize, and work, has recently entered into the mainstream. Interest by companies such as Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Facebook, which even changed its name to Meta, has inspired much speculation about how the metaverse will change a broad range of sectors. This talk will introduce the metaverse and the technologies powering it, and will consider possibilities of positive and negative effects of the metaverse. Positive effects include increased equity and accessibility, personalization, and enhanced communication. Negative effects include increased bias, a new digital divide, and privacy issues related to the data the metaverse will collect. We will explore conditions for metaverse development that would bring about positive change, and will discuss what may become of us after the metaverse.