(by Giovanbattista Trebisacce, Professor of General Pedagogy University of Catania and AIDR member)

The Eduverse, or the use of the Metaverse in education, constitutes a recent field of exploration that offers countless teaching and learning possibilities that must be well understood in order to be able to use and make the most of them. Wanting to trace the origin of the term Metaverse, it appears for the first time in the post-cyberpunk science fiction novel Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, published in 1992. "Hiro is not where he is at all - we read -, but in a computer-generated universe that the machine is drawing on his goggles and pumping into earphones. In industry parlance, this imaginary place is called the Metaverse."

For Metaverse in contemporary literature we mean a "digital reality that combines aspects of social media, online gaming, Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR and VR)". According to the School Plan 4.0 (DM 161/2022) "the use of the Metaverse in education constitutes a recent field of exploration, the Eduverse, which offers the possibility of obtaining new spaces for social communication, greater freedom to create and share, offer of new immersive educational experiences through virtualization, creating an educational and scholastic continuum between the physical space and the virtual space for learning, or rather an onlife learning environment".

An important American research body, the Brookings Institution's Center for Universal Education, has intended to outline a series of guidelines for an adequate use of the Metaverse in the educational world through the Manifesto A whole new world: Education meets the metaverse. From reading the guidelines, six key words emerge which are indispensable for knowing how to orient and govern change.

• COOPERATION. Knowing how to work in a team has become fundamental today in any field. Maintaining this way of interacting in the Metaverse will be important.
• COMMUNICATION. The importance of communicating adequately through correct and respectful behavior is a fundamental value in daily life and in social networks. It will be even more stringent in the Metaverse where onlife is one with our being.
• KNOWLEDGE. Learning through discovery and learning by doing will be important approaches for those approaching this new dimension. Let's think about the disabilities and the application potential of the Metaverse.
• CRITICAL THINKING. It has always been the basis of a teaching that aims at an internalization of the contents and at an authentic learning that enriches the learner. Not a head to fill but a thinking and "well done" head.
• PROBLEM SOLVING. Being able to generate solutions even in unforeseen situations.
• SELF-CONFIDENCE. What is missing in the new generations. Persevere in achieving a goal but get up stronger than before in the face of failure.

A new challenge, therefore, which society, but especially the school, cannot escape. A school that knows how to become a bridge, as in Kafka's story of the same name, which uses the metaphor of the bridge to make it an active subject of transit and relationship. The school correctly interprets its vocation and mission as a bridge if it does not look back, with the risk of losing what constitutes the object of its attention and love, that is knowledge, which is also nourished by the testimonies of the past , preserves and enhances them to acquire effective interpretative keys, aimed at reading and better understanding our present and not being afraid of looking towards the future and the unknown, precisely because it is strong in the solid cultural bridge that it has built between past and present .

Therefore, a school that knows how to build a bridge, as in the interpretation that Kafka provides, is not afraid of change, on the contrary it is a candidate to govern it, to study and manage its consequences as regards both ways of thinking and doing, putting the new generations and all of us in a position to be active digital citizens.

Education meets the Metaverse