This post first appeared on aud.life

"This is such an exciting new product!" gushes Edsurge writer Blake Montgomery, in an interview with the CEO of Nearpod, a startup that has just pivoted from making an app that lets a teacher control what lessons and messages appear on students' iOS devices to making "virtual reality lessons." In fact, the latter are pretty much PowerPoint slides that can be viewed on any mobile device. With the use of a cardboard viewer, the images are now passed off as a VR experience. But hey, "this is such an exciting new product," says the journalist whose publication shares investors with the startup he's covering.

From the introduction to the article:

This is not the first publicly available VR tool for schools. Not remotely. Not by decades. But I'm sure that if you think you're first, you'll be ever-so-clever in your efforts to convice teachers to adopt this "exciting new product."

I'm working on a "history of VR in education" story currently, in part to counter just this sort of ahistorical bullshit.