Title: The Classroom Outside of Reality: Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality in Higher Education
Presenter: Elizabeth Losh, Ph.D. Associate Professor of English and American Studies Director, Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Associate Professor, American Studies and English College of William & Mary

Abstract:

This talk addresses possible ways to integrate augmented reality and virtual reality in course curricula. At the same time it acknowledges the ethical concerns raised by using technologies with troubling powers to alter existing epistemological frameworks, such as computer vision, machine learning, or advanced simulation platforms.

From augmented  reality books to immersive virtual reality scenarios, humanists are experimenting with new digital education techniques.  But how can educators navigate the territory between techno-utopianism and techno-dystopianism as computing becomes increasingly ubiquitous in all of our daily lives?

BIO:

Elizabeth Losh is an Associate Professor of English and American Studies at William and Mary with a specialization in New Media Ecologies.  Before coming to William and Mary, she directed the Culture, Art, and Technology Program at the University of California, San Diego. 

She is the author of Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes (MIT Press, 2009) and The War on Learning: Gaining Ground in the Digital University (MIT Press, 2014). She is the co-author with Jonathan Alexander of the comic book textbook Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2013; second edition, 2017). She published the edited collection MOOCs and Their Afterlives: Experiments in Scale and Access in Higher Education  with the University of Chicago in 2017.

She is co-editor of a forthcoming volume on feminist digital humanities from the University of Minnesota Press and author of a forthcoming book on the hashtag as a cultural object from Bloomsbury. Her current work-in-progress focuses on ubiquitous computing in the White House in the Obama and Trump administrations.

She has also written a number of frequently cited essays about communities that produce, consume, and circulate online video, videogames, digital photographs, text postings, and programming code in journal articles and edited collections from MIT Press, Routledge, University of Chicago, University of Minnesota, Oxford, Continuum, University of Alabama, University of Pittsburg, and many other presses. Much of this body of work concerns the legitimation of political institutions through visual evidence, representations of war and violence in global news, and discourses about human rights.