Journal 14: Avatars the Best Teachers?

The teaching avatars we talked about in class during our last week sound fantastic on the surface. Online learning with teaching avatars (which look ‘remarkably lifelike’) appears to have many advantages. Distance learning brings together minds that normally are separated by ‘temporal and spatial limitations.’ The new teaching avatars of the virtual world allow for optimized information consumption as well. Every student, for instance, can sit in the ‘sweet spot’ – that is, directly in the teacher-avatar’s vision – which has been proven to boost comprehension and grades. The teacher-avatar can also appear differently to each student depending on his/her learning needs. Indeed, the avatar can be modified to be ‘the perfect teacher’ for each student. Finally, the new teacher-avatar can mimic each student at same time, as it has been proven that mimicking behavior enhances learning. With all of these personalized advantages made available by the teacher-avatar (in addition to all of the advantages already available through distance learning), no wonder the claim would be made that ‘avatars make the best teachers’.
However, there are some serious flaws with the teaching avatars if one revisits the philosophy of Dreyfus and Borgmann. First, because these teacher-avatars are still in the virtual world, the embodiment issue raised by Dreyfus is not yet solved. Humans are bodily creatures – the only way we can experience the world is through our body and its reactions to outside stimuli. Virtual reality forces humans to leave their bodies behind, which is not only severely disorienting but problematic to learning, according to Dreyfus. Due to the embodiment issue, distance learning and teacher-avatars can provide only information about a subject. No true experience, crucial to learning, can be gained, even with teacher-avatars. Plus, mastery of a subject, in Dreyfus’ point of view, requires tutelage under a plethora of different teachers with different styles of teaching. With the teacher-avatar, only one style of teaching is provided, which would ironically stunt the student’s growth in learning how to learn. The teacher-avatars, because they are based in virtual reality, would cause a problem for Borgmann too. According to Borgmann, the teacher-avatars would be information posing as reality, which would produce a light-lite kind of reality for the students immersed in this type of distance learning. Being shoved out into the ‘real world’ after graduation would be difficult, then, because the students would not have developed any kind of advanced social skills applicable to actual reality.
Indeed, teacher-avatars are an interesting new development in technology. Obviously, they are not worthless and could be used as a supplement to classroom activities. However, I would never say that teacher-avatars are the best teachers – far from it. They have serious flaws, some of which are made obvious by the arguments of Dreyfus and Borgmann.