Teaching Empathy Online Using Online Technology to Increase Empathy
Using Online Technology to Increase Empathy
We’ve spent some time exploring where empathy exists or is lacking in the online world. Now, let’s look at some creative ways empathy is being taught.
Perhaps one of the newest and most innovative ways we see empathy being instilled is through the use of new Virtual Reality (VR) technology. VR provides an immersive experience which is the closest we can get online to actually being in someone else’s shoes. We can see the world from a different perspective, even if it is just pixels in a virtual environment. The app and site Within: Storytelling for Virtual Reality is one good example of a relatively new repository of VR experiences found online. Within exhibits a lot of pop culture experiences, but it is in videos like “Notes on Blindness,” “Clouds Over Sidra,” and “The Displaced,” wherein we are placed into a world and become instantly empathetic in the purest sense of the word.
