After reading the articles above, write a post of 400 words that considers one advantage of the use of either virtual or augmented reality, and one disadvantage. Discuss in relation to a library or information organisation that you are familiar with.

There are multiple advantages in using virtual and augmented reality objects in education (Dahya et al., 2021), and these new applications offer an invaluable opportunity to teach school curricula through experiential learning (Hannah et al., 2019). A case in point is the use of augmented reality to engage children with English writer David Almond’s Seven Stories, through immersive experiences of magic realism described in his literary works (Reynolds et al., 2020).

At my school, one of the Humanities assessment tasks in Year 7 consists of creating a guided virtual tour on Google Earth of the novel Once by Morris Gleitzman. The students have to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the geography of Poland and its relevance in the novel by mapping out the journey of the main character using Google Earth digital tools. In order to maximise the learning potential of this task, the Humanities teacher, with the help of the teacher librarian, can incorporate Google Earth virtual reality software to the teaching of this unit. The sense of presence (Zote, 2021) and interactive quality facilitated by virtual reality will allow the students to not only immerse themselves in the physical setting of the novel, but also engage emotionally with the experiences of the main character, who was an innocent victim of religious persecution during World War II (Dahya et al., 2021). This connects to another positive outcome of virtual reality, which is the building of empathy for others and ‘embodied cognition’ through walking in someone else’s shoes (Dahya et al., p. 3, 2021). The teacher librarian can collaborate with subject teachers in the design of units of work that explore virtual and augmented reality technologies, for example in History and Social Sciences curriculum delivery (Hannah et al, 2019).

It is the responsibility of the school library to organise, catalogue and make accessible to students and teachers, learning resources that support the school curriculum. Virtual reality collections present multiple challenges in terms of controlling and defining the provenance and quality of the items found on the Internet (Hannah et al., 2019). The librarian needs to ensure that the virtual reality resources are accurate and contribute to enhanced learning outcomes, and this is no easy task considering the plethora of materials that can be downloaded from the Internet, which are often of unspecified intellectual property (Hannah et al., 2019). The task of collecting and curating virtual reality materials will contribute to increasing the already stretched workload of the teacher librarian, who may need to acquire new skills in how to maximise the use of virtual reality in the library learning programs. Despite the many hurdles to be overcome with such cutting-edge technology, the potential benefits of using virtual reality in education are immense (Hannah et al., 2019; Reynolds et al., 2020).

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