The Future of Education

Τhe covid-19 pandemic highlights the need to exploit and upgrade distance education structures. During the last 28 months, our workgroup has been studying and developing an advanced platform towards distance education in Digital Arts, enabling real-time collaborative creation and interaction. The @postasis platform, developed under Erasmus+ @postasis: Virtual Artistic Laboratory project (apostasis.eu), enables the setup of educational multi-participatory sessions, linking virtual entities, Internet-of-Things constructions (IoTs), and humans (e.g. avatars, observers, performers), in the globally interconnected physical and virtual space. It incorporates technological functionalities and specialized methodologies, in a composite and creative way, enabling a wide range of educational actions (courses, workshops, seminars) and large-scale exhibitions. These methodologies, even though they mostly target art education and have been applied to different levels of it (secondary, higher) [1][2][3], they have the potentials to be applied, also, in special education [4]. One such case is the experience of the “Creation of the world” workshop presented in this paper. The workshop took place between students of the Department of Special Education of the University of Thessaly (Greece) under the supervision of the Instructor Dr. Anastasia-Zoi Souliotou, and members of the @postasis workgroup from the Athens School of Fine Arts (@postasis coordinator) namely Professor Manthos Santorineos and the Instructor Dr. Stavroula Zoi [5]. The students experimented, based on @postasis platform, on how they could exploit emerging creative technologies and distance education concepts, towards including people with disabilities in new forms of educational activities. Individual phases of the workshop are analyzed: collages creation based on physical materials with discrete haptic properties, transfer of materials and their properties in @postasis virtual space as textures, mapping of space, creation of virtual entities (avatars, NPCs) ‘dressed’ with physical drawings, and potentials of adding IoTs for enhancing interaction. Each of the above creative phases also included a real-time multiuser session for jointly experiencing the potentials of a multi-sensory experience inside such a space. This experiment highlighted the need to make special education students aware of concepts in the intersection of creative technologies and distance education, for further investigation. As this constitutes an emerging research topic, thoughts for the future are presented.

Keywords: Real-time art education, @postasis multiuser platform, special education.

References:
[1] A proposal for an experimental seminar on the concept of “Ξένος” (Alien) through the use of the virtual three-dimensional platform @postasis, Manthos Santorineos, International Conference on Creating Conditions for Deeper Learning in Science (DL 2019), Ellinogermaniki Agogi, 29-30/6/2019, Greece
[2] An approach for teaching concepts of programming to students of Digital Arts, Stavroula Zoi, International Conference on Creating Conditions for Deeper Learning in Science (DL 2019), Ellinogermaniki Agogi, 29-30/6/2019, Greece
[3] Evaluation of @postasis platform from different participants and contributors, Report, http://apostasis.eu/LIBRARY
[4] Stemming on STEM: A STEM education framework for students with disabilities. Hwang, J. & Taylor, J. (2016). Journal of Science Education for
Students with Disabilities 19 (1). pp: 39-49
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ5b3F99kCw&t=55s