Using VR technology to increase empathy and emotional engagement
Together with Stefan Bos from DEXLab, the library’s Digital Literacy team organised a workshop on how to implement VR in education. The session took place in the recently opened XR lab at the Inner City Library, a space designed to facilitate extended reality (XR), virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) for teaching and learning.
In this session the participants got first-hand experiences of what VR can do while trying Stefan’s app in which you experience what it’s like to be poor in the Netherlands. The app is designed to create empathy. This is one of the ways in which VR can be used in education.
The workshop also explored when VR adds value in an educational context and how to best approach this. We also covered the practical aspects and the opportunities in the library’s “Digital Labs”. With the integration of VR and XR into our services, we are currently transforming our multimedia facilities into Digital Labs.
We are currently working on the website to introduce the XR Lab and our Digital Labs in more detail, so stay alert on the library website, or if you cannot wait, contact us via the form below.
Critically exploring GenAI-tools for literature discovery
This workshop is one of the outcomes of a collaboration project on ‘Searching with AI’ with different library services: Information- and Digital Literacy, as well as the Systematic Review Support.
At the start of this workshop, we asked about the background of the participants and whether and how often they use AI. Not very surprisingly, only one person declared not to use AI, and of the people using AI almost 70% used AI daily and 23% weekly. The struggles with AI were similar and circled around access to the tools, keeping up with the fast development of the tools, as well as environmental impact, bias, and misinformation.
The session focused how to teach students the responsible use of AI connected to using an AI tool for a literature search. The session ran two ‘experiments’, one where users conducted a traditional search while aided by AI, and another where specialised AI tools were used for the whole process. During the session, participants experienced some of the struggles students encounter when using AI for a literature search.
It was a lively session. We will publish the outcomes of the project in an upcoming post. If you already want to integrate our workshop in your course, please contact us via the form below.
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