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Citation: 

Kee, Kevin and Nicki Darbyson. “Creating and Using Virtual Environments to Promote Historical Thinking.” In New Possibilities for the Past: Shaping History Education in Canada, edited by Penney Clark, 264-81. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011.

Abstract/Summary: 

The use of virtual environments can enhance historical thinking in students in new and innovative ways that written text cannot. Virtual environments (VE’s) use virtual reality technology to, in essence, allow users to be in a different environment. How this unique form of interactive media can be paired with an acknowledgement of larger academic interest in the field and how historians can employ VE’s effectively using the work of game theorists are explored. VE’s can communicate the substance of history and historical thinking through students’ engagement in historical practices and through the use of expositions and role-playing in VE’s as biographical recounts, historical recounts and factorial explanations. In the end, using VE’s as a mode to teach historical thinking may entice students to no longer see history as “boring” but rather as an exciting way to become a character and to view history as a historian.

Source/Credit: 
Erika Smith