Reflecting on Online Education through Popular Science Fiction

What is this research about?

In this paper, the author reflects on virtual/online education by engaging in a personal reading of the science fiction novel, Ready Player One, published by Ernest Cline in 2011.

Ready Player One depicts a dystopian future with the ultimate virtual reality world: a massive multiplayer online game called OASIS. In OASIS, gamers compete in a 1980s world of pop culture to seek out hidden clues to become the heir to the game creator’s fame and fortune. The virtual OASIS represents a better reality for many in comparison to the dystopian ‘real world’. OASIS also offers an engaging learning experience for students through a formal public school system on the virtual planet, Ludus, as well as a public library and children’s programming. Learning on Ludus offers rich, immersive learning experiences, such as virtual field trips to Jupiter’s moons and the Louvre art gallery in Paris.

The author regards the reading of fiction as a way to “build, invent, or imagine solutions for current and relevant problems or challenges”. Their creative engagement with Ready Player One offers possibilities for envisioning the future of teaching and learning in postsecondary education.

What did the researchers do?

The author uses reading as a tool of inquiry and igniting change, via their engagement with Ready Player One. The act of reading can supply us with material for new creations. When we read, we not only acquire knowledge, but are also introduced to new ideas that can inspire epiphanies and personal change. These engagements can mobilize creative powers and help us understand how to live.

The author also approaches their work through the methodological tools of autoethnography, personal narrative, and creative writing. The paper includes (1) reflective, personal writing on the author’s experiences of teaching online as these contrast with Ready Player One; and (2) a creative, science fiction story of their imagined future of online learning.

What did the researchers find?

Two significant themes were developed throughout the paper.

1. History and remembering as tools for living:

• The author describes how reading Ready Player One transported them into their own childhood. This experience traversing time by reading science fiction and recollecting their own past helped ease their anxiety grading for an online course, inspired them, and increased their confidence engaging with students in the online learning environment.

• The process of reading helped them become aware of how their own memories could play a role in their search for answers about online education. Memories of our past and acts of remembering can empower us to avoid repeating mistakes, and provide new tools and methods for sustaining the search for present-day solutions, such as a better future for online education.

• Ready Player One reveals history as a tool for living and problem-solving: “We can create from the past through re-discovering what was abandoned, unfinished, discarded, ignored, or ridiculed. We can create from the past by finishing, repurposing, reexamining, and recharging what was left unfinished, broken, forgotten, or exhausted.”

2. Stories as tools for imagining new realities:

• Online teaching does not have to be “a dreaded, monotonous engagement with the digitized renderings of ideas, questions, and students’ complaints”. The author finds that engaging with Ready Player One instead inspires them to reimagine the world, create new possibilities, and advocate for change.

• By contrasting the OASIS of Ready Player One with some of their own uninspiring experiences of online education (e.g., instructions on how to use a new Learning Management System; static, linear, teacher-centered approaches to online learning), the author longs for “an oasis where virtual education is filled with adventures and excitement”.

• The author ends with a creative story of their desired future of online learning that inspires us to think and innovate beyond our current systems and structures. The story describes a 360-degree, full immersion virtual reality lecture that integrates opportunities for physical movement (e.g., cycling), game-based learning, and postcolonial critiques. The author imagines how the move to online learning allows for the transformation of physical classrooms into maker spaces, studios, and conversation hubs.

How can you use this research?

This paper encourages engagement with fiction, which can inspire us to imagine, desire, and create new education systems and teaching and learning practices. We are invited to consider how we might build fiction into our time and workflow: Which novel will we read next?

The author ends the paper with a short science fiction story about their imagined future of teaching and learning. We might similarly get our creative juices flowing by writing or otherwise envisioning a story of what we might like online and in-person teaching and learning to look like in 5-50 years. What might be possible? What would we like to see change? How might these aspirations for transformative futures bolster our efforts to innovate in the present?

This paper recognizes the value of these nontraditional forms of teaching development as vital to transformation of the academy.

Author:

Reference:

Osvath, C. (2018). Ready Learner One: Creating an oasis for virtual/online education. Journal of Language and Literacy Education, 14(1), n1. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1175849.pdf

Additional References:

For more science/speculative fiction fun related to teaching and learning online, check out the following:

• Costello, E., Brown, M., Donlon, E., & Girme, P. (2020). ‘The pandemic will not be on Zoom’: A retrospective from the year 2050. Postdigital Science and Education, 2(3), 619-627. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00150-3

• Macgilchrist, F., Allert, H., & Bruch, A. (2020). Students and society in the 2020s. Three future ‘histories’ of education and technology. Learning, Media and Technology, 45(1), 76-89. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2019.1656235