Global Kids' Digital Media Initiative

Once the island was up and running, we were ready to get busy. The island was designed to take teens through the experience on their own. But now we were ready to make our active presence known, as adults with something to offer. It was time to start figuring out how to translate Global Kids experiential, interactive workshops into Second Life.

We decided to start small by putting out an IM call to the Global Kids group inviting anyone interested to come by for some serious play. We chose to start with a simple icebreaker, a Human Scavenger Hunt. We planned to create some general guidelines, give each teen a notecard with questions like, "Find someone who has built something in SL," set them lose, then bring them together to share.

In person we can do this in about 20-25 minutes. We could barely complete it in 1.5 hours. Running it all in text simply took much longer. In person there are all sorts of ways to establish your authority, but those failed us in SL due to the fact that the focus of ones attention is always hidden. Sure, their avatar's head is facing you, but they can focus their visual attention anywhere, not only by looking elsewhere on the screen but by literally moving their disembodied visual focus anywhere they chose, from zooming in on my knee to following a visitor around the island . And even if I knew their human eyes were looking at my avatar, how do I know they are reading what I am saying. The elements that combine to make up my presence in SL become fragmented and diffused, blending into the rush of activity. How to stand out and establish authority in a positive way (as opposed to negatively banning people)? We decided in the future to figure out how to do streaming audio. This would give our voice, as facilitators, increased authority.

For today’s workshop we tried a new ice-breaker. In SL you can distribute notecards so we created one called “Human Scavenger Hunt” with questions like, “Find someone who has felt strongly about an issue.” When we announced it, Veroo Epsilon joked, “Human Scavenger Hunt? What if we aren’t human?” While most TSL avatars are humanoid, many are animals (“furries”), monsters or aliens. In fact, when the notecards were returned, at least one was renamed “Avatar Scavenger Hunt”. Why do they choose to look as they do and what does it mean?

The teens often note with amazement that my avatar looks just like me (albeit with more hair). They don’t understand why I would make such a choice. I soon learned they built a place to share their real-world photos. They call it the Wall of Shame.

There are over 120 photos up at the time of this writing and more than a dozen are added each week. Its name says one thing; the fact it exists says another. There is both the self-loathing and the desire to share it. Now add to that the relationship between this projection of self and their TSL projection, their avatar, which is usually designed to look as little like themselves as possible. Yet while they may pretend to only occupy one of these identities in TSL, clearly all two are visible and create a complex relationship.

The learning theorist James Paul Gee writes that, “Learning involves taking on and playing with identities in such a way that the learner has ... ample opportunities to mediate on the relationship between new identities and old ones.” The Wall of Shame then can be seen as a shared mediation of their relationships with their real world identities. “There is a tripartite play of identities as learners relate, and reflect on, their multiple real-world identities, a virtual identity, and a projective identity.” Learning to bridge various identities in the real world is crucial to developing the identity of an active, critical learner who will be motivated to take on the identity of both one who learns and one who is knowledgeable about some specific field of knowledge. Gee’s argument is that virtual worlds like TSL offer teens an important environment to safely experiment with identity, whether through furries or the Wall of Shame, and make such explorations explicit.

Teens spend a considerable amount of time in TSL shaping their projective identity through various avatars and relating them with their real-world identities. In fact, one could argue that this is all they do in TSL; everything else is just a means towards that end. This leads me to wonder: what role can GK play to develop a meta-awareness amongst teens like Veroo Epsilon of this identity-play and an understanding of how it can shape them into more active, critical learners?

To take advantage of the strange physics of SL, I thought it would be fun to hold our first workshop on a platform high in the sky and keep it small to keep us closer together. Big mistake.

Immediately the teens complained that there wasn't enough room. Someone would accidentally bump another who would fall off the platform and plummet to the ground. You can't really die in SL, but I had placed the platform so high it was hard to return.

Before long, teens began adding their own platforms to our own. I immediately deleted them, as an affront to my initial design. But I was wrong, and they were right, and we ended up inside this excellent blue and red dome that held us all in. I learned quickly: when the teens see a problem they feel empowered to fix it. Being in SL in and of itself encourages the teens to view themselves as leaders.

All Global Kids workshops have guidelines, developed over the years with out Global Kids leaders.
1. Participation: You get out what you put into it. Definitely true in TSL
2. Safe Space: Treat each other with respect even when you disagree. More true in TSL than offline, as the ramifications for physical violence are less.
3. One Mic: One person speaks at a time. We are still figuring out what this means in TSL.

It was clear right away we needed some TSL-specific guidelines and we asked the participants to help us figure out what they should be. In the end, we modified Safe Space to also mean:

“Safe Space also means that everyone here should be safe from annoying or distracting behavior. NO PVP, NO BOUNCING, NO GESTURE SPAMMING -- NO PHYSICAL ACTIVITIES AGAINST ANYONE ELSE.”

By the second workshop we had many changes to implement.

We grounded ourselves, designating a plot for our use. This allowed us to control who was there. Otherwise we would become a public spectacle, attracting tourists and hecklers alike. This also allowed us to selectively allow the teens to build. Finally, the selective nature of the event - anyone could participate but once begun we refused to let anyone in - emphasized the importance of being on time and created a sense a consequences in a space where there tends to be little.

Instead of rehashing the guidelines in a group IM, we wrote them up in a notecard dispenser to review when we'd begin.

Instead of using the public chat we announced that all GK related conversations would occur in the group IM. They could continue to say anything they wanted in the public chat, giving the teens a backchannel to comment on what we are doing, a space to separate out non-related issues, and prevent those not involved from heckling the main conversation.

In addition, we announced that facilitators would not be reading the chat, which is crucial. In this case their reading attention tended to follow our own. In other words, our listening powers trumped our speaking powers. Finally, directing teens to ask procedural questions or comments to our personal IMs (e.g. I want to speak next. How much longer will this go for?) allowed us to keep the group conversation more focused, organize our own reading needs in a calmer fashion, and ensured that important questions and comments would not be lost in the shuffle.

All of these changes were a significant step forward that allowed us to start getting a handle on the basics of SL group management.

These next series of workshops focused on Human Barometers based on material developed to support teachers to prepare their students for the Digital Media Essay Contest. Our goal was to get them thinking, interested, then informed about the contest.

In person, Human Barometers are a device to encourage discussion of controversial issues by forcing participants to take a stand. On one wall we hang a sign that reads, AGREE, across from a sign that reads, DISAGREE, with a sign between that reads, UNSURE.

We read a statement, participants literally take a stand, positions are defended and, occasionally, sides are switched as minds are changed.

But in Second Life, who needs walls!

We made slightly tilted platforms, branded with Global Kids' logo, to represent the various positions.

First, all would organize on the neutral platform.

Next, we make a statement, as we did here: "Race does not matter online."

Teens flew to the platform of their choice and then, one platform at time, defended their positions.

We posed other statements for debate as well:

It’s safe to share information online

Here is a photo taken by a participant, Jackson Widget, about a question regarding learning from Second Life.

Afterwards, we regrouped, discussed how the workshop went, got advice for future workshops, and then promoted the essay contest.

Hecklers still tried to intervene (one such guy spent the better part of an hour crashing various vehicles, a taxi, a police car and airplane into the invisible barrier that kept him out.)

The overall results? It worked. The dialogue flowed and stayed focused. The issues got deep. And voices were heard. It felt quite promising. we might actually pull this off after all.