Last week Pilot and I spoke with Dr. Amanda Licastro, Digital Scholarship Librarian at Swarthmore College, about everything from the limits and possibilities of virtual reality in higher ed to the challenges of archiving protest signs from Swarthmore’s Peace Collection. Licastro astutely navigates the importance of exploring augmented and virtual reality in the classroom while both acknowledging and pushing back on the current ecosystem dominated by big tech, which often ignores issues of preservation, interoperability, and open formats in the push for platform lock-in and accelerated obsolescence.
You can see more of the work that Licastro discusses at Swarthmore College’s Immersive Realities Initiative LibLab. One of the projects mentioned during the discussion was the history of land appropriation in Philadelphia’s Chinatown, a brilliant example of student work attempting to augment urban history using multidimensional technologies. It highlights a truly compelling bit of community-focused scholarship using cutting edge ed tech. In fact, the possibilities of storytelling in this brave new world is still very much nascent, and the concern that the technology is increasingly enclosed by just a few companies like Meta and Apple highlights the importance of a broader discussion around alternatives.
