Metaverses or how game technology could affect learning technology

1. Lifelong Learning in a Changing World:
From (serious) games to metaverses
Baltasar Fernández-Manjón
Grupo e-UCM (www.e-ucm.es)
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
balta@fdi.ucm.es @BaltaFM
15/11/2021, WEEF-GDC, UNED, Madrid Educación Digital y Juegos Serios
Cátedra Telefónica-Complutense

2. Metaverse: virtual worlds and real economy
• Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash created the term metaverse
• A persistent, synchronous, virtual space where people can interact with one
another in real time and where both planned and spontaneous events occur
that bridge the gap between the virtual and real world ( def by Mathew Ball)
• Persistent interactive virtual world with their own economic system breaking
the barrier across devices and the physical and virtual world
• Metaverse not that new as ICT system
• Second Life
• Isolated persistent digital world ( $$ Linden dollars)
• Still around with their Tilia payment system

3. Metaverses: Why now?
Disruption create by the COVID pandemic
• Technology role in the new normal
New development in supporting technologies
• Game technologies, including AR and VR
• World-wide game infrastructures
• Crypto currencies
New Metaverse initiatives with big investments

4. Metaverse major players
and education
• Epic – Fortnite
• Facebook –Horizon, oculus
• Microsoft –Minecraft, Teams, Office
• Roblox

5. Metaverse as educational disruptors?
• Open new possibilities for more interactive immersive experiences
• Hybrid environments: Augmented reality, Virtual Reality, Mixed Reality
• Multimodal content with seamless user experience across devices
• Increases the already existing access gap -> tech divide
• Role of the educators in the new metaverses
• Sophisticated content complex and expensive to produce
• Content creators or just consumers?

6. Education, Research and Ethics
• Metaverse are highly-interactive integrated systems that get huge
amounts of users information
• All that interaction information could be used for better
understanding learning (learning analytics)
• Private companies will be the owners of users’ interaction data
• Privacy laws such as EU GDPR are not widely enforced
• Role of the educational researchers in this new landscape of big
investment of for profit companies?
• Ethics should drive any educational application of metaverses