We are trying to grow understanding and wisdom about immersive experiences through the telling of many stories about the experiences that people have had that they think were immersive.
Experiences are the things that make up our lives. They involve participation (being in) events, situations, relationships, thinking; they require us to see/sense objects, thoughts and feelings through the senses and the mind; and they lead to memories, changes in perception and other sorts of learning (knowledge, wisdom, skill, capability, belief, attitude and more..).
Immersive experience is a category of experiential learning. Immersion is a metaphorical term derived from the physical and emotional experience of being submerged in water.The expression, ‘being immersed in’, has both positive and negative connotations. Positive associations include being deeply engaged, absorbed or engrossed in a situation, problem or opportunity. Negative associations include being overwhelmed, engulfed and not in control.
Being immersed in a rich, challenging experience is particularly favourable for developing insights, dispositions and capabilities for working with complexity.
In education, immersion is assciated with a number of contexts: to describe deeply absorbing experience-based situations; in language education where only the target language for learning is spoken in an instructional situation and in the virtual world of digital game playing where gamers become so engaged in their virtual world that all else is excluded. 'Immersions' are used by aid organisations like the World Bank to enable professionals to learn directly about the people they are helping. The term immersive experience is also used in the travel business to describe experiences that set out to immerse and educate people in other cultures.
Immersive experiences can stimulate creativity and there seem to be strong links with Czsentmihayli’s (1997 p110) concept of ‘Flow’ at the higher levels of immersion.
Because of these intriguing and educationally important dimensions to the idea of immersive experience, the concept is worthy of exploration.
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