Life in the Virtual Trenches

And not just any trenches. How about finding yourself under heavy enemy fire in one of those dreaded trenches in France during World War I? It’s daybreak, Sept. 26, 1918, the start of the 47-day Meuse-Argonne offensive. It would end up being the deadliest military campaign in U.S. history. You’re in the U.S. Army’s 35th Infantry Division, 60th Brigade, 129th Field Artillery Regiment, Battery D, part of a four-man crew operating an M1897 French 75mm gun, the world’s first modern weapon of its type. And your battery commander is a scrappy, 34-year-old Army captain named Harry S. Truman, who would go on to become president of the United States.

Your job is to load a shell from an ammo box into the gun’s open breech, close the breech, and pull and release the firing lanyard. The gun fires and recoils. A fellow crew member quickly opens the breech to eject the sizzling hot empty case while you grab and load another round. The process repeats indefinitely, firing round after round, a minimum of 15 per minute. As you and your crew become more proficient, the firing rate can approach one round every 2 seconds. All this is happening under a relentless barrage of enemy fire. Welcome to the wild, wonderful world of immersive learning.

Shenandoah University (SU) professors Nathan R. Prestopnik, Mohammad Obeid, their colleagues, and students at the Shenandoah Center for Immersive Learning (SCIL; su.edu/scil) are paving the way, helping to create this next-generation classroom, where cramped desks and fact-filled textbooks are replaced with real-life experiences. Let’s take a look at how they’re doing it and what role we as KM’ers might play in this exciting transformation. Prestopnik provides more details in “Ghosts of the Argonne: Immersion, Presence, and Uncertainty in a Virtual Reality History Simulation” (scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/ ijdl/article/view/36335/42761).