ABSTRACT
In 2020 Jeremy Hunsinger wrote about creepy treehouses, stating that a ‘creepy treehouse is when a faculty member chooses a technology, they prefer because of their history with it and forces the students, against their comfort, to use that technology in the classroom. The technology almost always has elements that creep the students out, such as invasions of privacy, surveillance’, Hunsinger adds, ‘the creepy university is the future of the university’. This chapter examines the impact of Creepy Tree houses on both staff and students, evaluating whether the author’s own teaching via Mozilla Hubs and game engines such as Unity has had a positive or negative implications for teaching and learning; does the use of technologies within accelerated hype cycles add to the neoliberal short termism and extractivist tropes of contemporary tech driven education, or does it support a much-needed criticality? The chapter will address the kinds of support the author believes is needed to help faculty and students to effectively use and critically encounter XR, describing some of the technical and epistemic strategies which aim to balance technical competency with critical theory. The author will outline a post qualitative approach to teaching VR and AR, in which students identify the materiality of technologies which are often framed as immaterial or removed from questions of their material and political implications. The author will explain how using VR has changed the way they teach, in particular the ways in which they frame spatiality in the pandemic and post-pandemic university.
