Visions of three-dimensional or virtual workspaces, metaverses, and education. Virtual reality and learning

Presentation of the special issue and conclusions

Abstract

The idea of this special issue was to give space to contributions that essentially included empirical research or development of technologies, such as inclusive virtual reality, and to analyze their influence on learning or its improvement. We were thinking of the metaverse, with the technology that it presents or with hypothetical new platforms that are emerging. The perspective was to improve and expand pedagogical possibilities in specific aspects, where it was more difficult to improve. This is the case with those offered by traditional symbolic systems, whose advantages are obvious and refined by tradition and culture: those related to learning and acquisition of reading and writing, learning and acquisition of abilities to produce computer codes (computational thinking) and, finally, those related to learning and acquisition of mathematical symbolic writing.

We briefly analyzed the problems and vicissitudes to deal with the novelty of the approach and possible doubts about the validity of the call for papers. It can be said that, although the monograph has brought together ten works of sufficient quality, most of the objectives set forth have not been achieved. Of the papers published here, four are exclusively about the metaverse. A very interesting one gives us an idea, after some conditions that guarantee its reliability, about the state of what is being done with metaverse in classroom practice in the design and implementation phases. Finally, there has been an aspect in which the objective has not been achieved at all, and this could cause us to reflect on some proposals made in terms of metaverse speculation. There was no contribution among the accepted papers or the many rejected manuscripts on the metaverse as a new code capable of supporting the communication and representation of thought  or similar similar to how key codes, the basis of communication and learning, do so: alphabetic writing, writing through numerical codes and program codes, computational thinking.