Guests from NYLC and Learn and Serve America
Jim Kielsmeier, Founder and CEO of National Youth Leadership Council, along with Amy Cohen, Director of Learn & Serve America at the Corporation for National and Community Service, and Bradford Lewis, Program Officer for Learn & Serve America at the Corporation for National and Community Service, talked with residents for the first time in Teen Second Life on a live audio panel on Wednesday, March 21, 2007.
The 90 minutes panel featured a discussion on "Service-learning in America, what does it mean and why is it important?", and was well received by over 45 teens that dropped by to listen in. Mercury Metropolitan was asked to be the teen interviewer and moderator for the event.
Each guest shared about their experience in the service-learning sector, talked about their work abroad and provided vivid real-life examples on how teens are making the world a better place by serving their local schools, communities, and volunteer work.
The audio and virtual avatar interactions made it possible for teens from different parts of the United Kingdom and U.S.A. to participate and ask questions on how they can get invovled in real life, while some even managed to make friends with the guests after the panel ended.
Click below for the audio recording of the entire event, and click here for the photos taken during the event.
Thanks to New Media Consortium, the live audio stream was broadcast simultaneously on the Teaching sim on the main grid for educators to listen in. Next week during the 18th annual NYLC Service-Learning conference, adults will also be invited to witness the live video and audio stream of the conference along with teens in Teen Second Life.
Stay tuned for the 18th Annual NYLC Service-Learning Conference (March 28 - 30, 2007) that will be streamed LIVE on Global Kids Island and on the NMC campus!
Adults in the main grid were welcome to join us via a live audio stream host, while residents in Teen Second Life attended the discussion on GK Island.
Click here to download the audio or listen to it below.
Meet Dr. Jim Kielsmeier
President & Chief Executive Officer
NYLC’s founder, Jim has committed his life to transforming the roles of young people in society — building youth-adult partnerships that help young people grow from recipients of information and resources to valuable, contributing members of a democratic society. In the process, he has woven concepts of national service and experiential learning to pioneer service-learning, an educational approach that has benefited countless young people, including many who haven’t responded to traditional educational models, and helped strengthen communities around the world.
Jim’s work is rooted in his time as a youth worker in Harlem and then as a U.S. Army Infantry platoon leader and community relations officer in Korea during the 1960s, where he saw firsthand that the potential for life and learning were not equal for all. With the Army, he developed a program placing GIs as tutors in Korean schools, an approach that not only had educational benefits but also improved relationships between GIs and the communities in which they were stationed. This experience would feed his ongoing passion for combining community service and education.
Meet Amy Cohen
Director of Learn and Serve America at the Corporation for National and Community Service. Prior to joining Learn and Serve America, Amy was associate director of what is now the Center for Community Partnerships at the University of Pennsylvania. Cohen received her degrees from Brandeis University and the University of Pennsylvania. She currently resides in Falls Church, VA, with her daughter, Lia.
Learn and Serve America is one of three programs of the independent Federal Agency, the Corporation for National and Community Service. Learn and Serve is the leading national funder and resource provider for service-learning. Learn and Serve supports School- and Community-Based programs as well as programs in Higher Education institutions throughout the United States. These programs engage individuals and institutions in school-community partnerships to address local community needs while building students’ academic and civic skills. Learn and Serve America also administers the National Service-Learning Clearinghouse (www.servicelearning.org), the nation’s source for service-learning information as well as recognition programs for service, including the President's Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll.
Meet Bradford Lewis
Program Officer for Learn and Serve America at the Corporation for National and Community Service, an independent federal agency where he has served for nearly 12 years. He manages a grant portfolio in the North Central region of the United States as well as working on youth voice, community-based issues and technology initiatives. A past grantee of the Commission on National and Community Service, Mr. Lewis received his Master’s Degree in Social Work (MSW) from Columbia University in 1983 and then worked in New York City and Connecticut for the next 10 years. Positions he held included directing youth leadership/after-school/service-learning programs, teen travel/residential summer camps, and Assistant Executive Director of a community YM-YWHA. He also served as a Governor's appointee on the Connecticut Juvenile Justice Advisory Committee and more recently as Adjunct Faculty at the University of Maryland Graduate School of Social Work and Field Instructor for the Howard University Graduate School of Social Work.
