Global Kids' Digital Media Initiative

As an educator, you spend a great deal of time trying to figure out who your students really are. Through their work, behavior, even their environment you are constantly taking mental notes to put together as much of a completed picture as possible in your mind. With this picture of understanding, you aim to share information with these students that is not only relevant but that also speaks to them and their life experiences.

Just when I thought I was getting a grasp on this trick, I led my first workshop in a virtual world. I found myself immediately identifying the participants as I would if they were in any classroom or after school setting. There was the one who cracks the jokes, the one who follows all the rules, the one who sits there quietly, I felt like I was in any ‘real-world’ setting and took a sigh of relief as my instincts came into action. Of course, my instinct was to dig into that bag of tricks to reach out and engage all the different types of participation involved in the activity. But then as we sat around the virtual camp fire on a virtual island in a virtual world upon my computer screen, I realized while I may be right on, I may be completely off.

I have no way to know if the one cracking all the jokes really shares any jokes at all. Perhaps, he is the one who sits through his classes in the back corner without saying a word the entire day. Maybe the participant who is sharing the most intriguing of explanations is the same student who struggles to earn a passing grade in each and every class. While I envision him sitting in his room focused in on this virtual world workshop, maybe he is actually camped out in a public library or community center without a computer to call his own. Maybe he signs in to this virtual world, not for added enjoyment but to escape the realities he lives in otherwise. Perhaps he is really a she.

While some of these teens I will be lucky enough to encounter one day in-person in the real-world New York office I spend each day in, many if not most, I will never know at all. I will get to know their avatar’s name, gender, personality, and friends, but I have no way of knowing if this same information rings true for the teen who is sitting at the computer across the city, country, or world from me, signing into the same program, pressing the same keys on their keyboard to join me around the camp fire to learn about global issues.

Some might be quick to assume this would be incredibly frustrating to not really know who you are interacting with and in some ways I have to agree. Yet, I am also realizing its strengths. Maybe this setting allows you to share experiences you wouldn’t otherwise share. Perhaps you now are more eager to ask questions that you would be too nervous or ashamed to raise your hand and ask when surrounded by your peers. And maybe best of all, you can attempt to walk in someone else’s shoes with an avatar of a different gender, appearance, or style than your own, a life lesson we too often talk about yet can never really try in our everyday lives.