Global Kids' Digital Media Initiative

I got an opportunity to speak about Global Kids's approach to youth development and the kinds of services we offer other institutions at "Nonprofit Week" on Orange Island in Second Life today.  It was neat being among the 150 or so avatars who rezzed in for the talks today by my friends Coughran Mayo and In Kenzo, and myself.  Thanks to Jade Lily and Orange Island for the chance to address my colleagues and others interest in the active and growing public good sector in Second Life.

As a recap for those that weren't able to be there, Global Kids has learned a lot in the past three years about how to best leverage virtual worlds for our particular brand of constructivist youth development.  We have found Second Life to be fertile ground for getting young people to engage with each other, create a variety of media, and present that work to a wider audience.  That said, we have some concerns that as Linden Lab considers created a "mixed ages" grid, we worry that some of the unique affordances of Teen Second Life might be lost. 

Beyond our own work, we have a strong interest in facilitating other nonprofits and public institutions to be using virtual worlds to further their own missions.  In particular, we offer a variety of services at various levels, including:

• Event Simulcasting:  We have organized virtual simulcasts of scores of real world events, from conferences to workshops to awards ceremonies.  We can bring a live event to a variety of virtual worlds, such as this speech by Kofi Annan that was simulcast to the web and four virtual worlds.
• Curriculum Development: We have a set of free curricula that can help any institution teach their students how to use Second Life.  Or we can work directly with your institution to develop a curriculum that is unique to your site and population.
• Staff Training: Confused about how to integrate virtual worlds into your strategic plan? We can help you and your staff think strategically and holistically about how these tools can advance your mission.
  
• Summer Camps: We have run summer camps in Teen Second Life for a number of institutions, including UNICEF and the Field Museum of Chicago.  We are able to tailor our programs to fit your schedule and students needs and interests.

If you are interested in talking about any of these services for your own organization, contact me at rik@ globalkids.org.

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Continue reading "OLP's 2008 Year End Review" »

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In a recent post on the VW 4 Real Learning blog, Viki Silvansky goes over an interesting micro lesson focusing on avatar appearance, she developed using the Global Kids Second Life Curriculum. Her thoughts being that avatar appearance is one of the first key elements most users of virtual world spaces like Second Life want to tackle.

"In the last blog I mentioned about my view of you in-world orientation places and how they use different approaches for helping newbeis. In this blog, the focus will be on out-world source called "Global Kids Curriculum (GKCx)" and the method it use to motivated users to try and learn new things so that I will finally be able to come up with I own learning environment in-world used GKCx methods. The curriculum is divided into 9 main levels, each including some related modules with predefined missions for students to carry out. I've been asked to choose one modules out of 4 modules (appearance, walking and flying, talk a close look and chat) within level one as part of my weekly activity and develop my own environment based on that."

Read the full post here.

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We recently had a online wiki review of our Second Life curriculum, which while not totally glowing in nature, was a very lovingly crafted, thorough overview of it.

You can read the review here.

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Since Barry Joseph's keynotes at the two recent conferences, Virtual Worlds LA and SLCC, and the announcement of the release of GK's Second Life curriculum, we have been getting a lot of buzz lately in the blogosphere.

Some of the sites talking:

• A post on Caleb Booker's site focusing on business and virtual worlds site here.
• Kelly (from Eye4You Alliance) blogged about us and gave a shout out to Barry's SLCC talk too here.
• The Wall Street Journal's MarketWatch posted an article here.
• HASTAC blogged about the release of our SL Curriculum here.
• The blog Second Life Update featured a post on the curriculum here.

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Today, Global Kids’ Online Leadership Director Barry Joseph will speak to leaders in digital media and education at the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo held at the Los Angeles Convention Center to be followed on the following Saturday, September 5th, with Joseph providing the educational keynote at the annual Second Life Community Convention in Tampa, Florida. At both, Joseph will showcase the launch of Global Kids Second Life Curriculum — the most significant resource in 2008 for those educators interested in incorporating virtual worlds into their classrooms.

Global Kids Second Life Curriculum, available the first week of September at RezEd.org, contains over 160 lesson plans for teaching the basics of Second Life, whether in a classroom, a library, or at home. The curriculum is available at no cost and is designed to be adaptable by practitioners for a variety of uses, from teaching science, to literature to global studies.

The full press release follows...

Continue reading "Global Kids’ Groundbreaking Second Life Curriculum Featured at Virtual Worlds Conferences in LA and Tampa" »

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On April 1st, the 110th Congress Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet held a hearing entitled Online Virtual Worlds: Applications and Avatars in a User-Generated Medium.

Listening to the testimony, it was hard not to imagine what I might have shared were I asked to testify. It might have gone something somewhat like this:

Chairman Markey, Ranking Member Stearns, and Members of the Subcommittee, we at Global Kids are honored to have this opportunity to share our experiences as experts working with youth and virtual worlds.

To provide background, in 2006, following extensive research into the educational potential of virtual worlds, Global Kids became the first nonprofit to develop a dedicated space for conducting educational programming in Teen Second Life (TSL). Specifically, Global Kids is conducting intensive leadership programming for youth, bringing students from its New York-based programs into the space, and streaming the audio and video of major events into the world. This work has received significant funding from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, among others, and been conducted in partnership with many other organizations, including UNICEF, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the International Criminal Court.

I would like to begin my testimony with a quote from an earlier Congressional Subcommittee hearing that took place just over a half-century ago.

“Formerly, the child wanted to be like daddy or mommy. Now they skip you, they bypass you. They want to be like Superman.”

This testimony from Dr. Fredric Wertham on the connections between comic books and juvenile delinquency, and his earlier publications on the matter, helped to stoke a national hysteria around the lurid dangers of this once new medium. While barely a decade old, more than 90% of children between the ages of six and eleven read comic books, as did over 80% of teenagers. Parents in the Cold War era, unsure how to handle a variety of new social forces, found a convenient scapegoat in the colorful and ubiquitous magazines. Wertham’s testimony helped the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency hold comic publishers’ feet to the fire and led not to new regulatory policies but a new industry-administered code of conduct that shaped comic books for over thirty years.

Generation after generation seems to go through its own “cycles of outrage,” whether with the waltz, pulp novels, comic books, rap music, or most recently with video games and online social networks. New mass media come and go, gaining relative acceptance or falling by the wayside, but concerns about the safety of children and regulations surrounding their freedoms never go away.

Virtual Worlds, practically non-existent just a few years ago, are just the latest commercial media to be seen as “colonizing” the lives of youth, once again raising a variety of concerns about their impact. The growth of youth involvement with virtual worlds is predicted to surpass 50% over the next few years, so one can expect a number of concerns to be raised about virtual worlds that are similar to the mediums of the past--a threat to law and order, a threat to traditional learning, and a threat to traditional values.

Continue reading "[staff] My Testimony For Congress (had I been asked)..." »

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Philip Rosedale was asked in an interview last week: What are you most proud of this year?

He responded:

I am most proud of the uses of Second Life in education that have started to happen, because personally I am just really into that. I have a bunch of teachers in my family (and my background is in physics), and I am just really interested in how you can use Second Life to teach science. The things that have started to happen in the latter half of this year around education is just really, really amazing. For me that emerging use is the thing that I am most proud of.

And this is presumably BEFORE Philip learned of our Science Through Second Life High School class. I can't wait to learn what he thinks of that.

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Motorola announced this past week the recipients of their new Foundation Grants program. Global Kids was picked as one of the recipients with our proposal of creating further virtual world focused curriculum, this time spotlighting teaching science through virtual worlds.

Read the press release below or here.

Continue reading "[press] Motorola Foundation Grants $3.5 Million to Inspire Next Generation of Inventors" »

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We have been receiving our first reports from our wonderful curriculum beta testers. In addition to alerting us to occasional oversights (thank you!), they are really enjoying learning the skills.

As one beta tester emailed recently, "Thanks again for this opportunity - it is a blast!"

But wait... there's more! Our creative team is now also developing the narrative that will immerse these skill-based lessons in the context of an engaging, exciting adventure!

It just gets better and better. Stay tuned!

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This is why an iterative design process always makes sense. Now that we are a month into our summer process of developing the draft of our SL Curriculum, it became clear that we had lost some of what motivated the original project.

There are uniquely effective ways to develop education in a virtual world. We have learned this in Second Life. And we wanted to reflect this through the curriculum, to create a games-based constructivist style pedagogy. But something happened along the way. We focused so much on the details of the step by step skill acquisition that we lost track. Rather than offer learners "missions" which would motivate them to learn the required skills, these "missions" turned into no more than your regular skills assessment.

Now we are working to shift the focus once again, to leverage the engagement and motivation to learn found within games. We are working on a narrative to contain the learning, and re-incorporate game-play elements.

At the same time, now that we are adding story and characters, that raises the question: why should we keep the curriculum all text based, when Second Life is such a visually-rich environment...

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As Second Life becomes increasingly popular as an innovative learning and teaching platform, educators are asking for a curriculum they and their students can use to quickly acquire needed skills.

Following a successful pilot program this past Spring, Global Kids is pleased to announce their Second Life Professional Development Curriculum is scheduled for completion mid-September 2007!

Currently, feedback from students and teachers in the pilot program is being integrated. In addition, volunteer teens and educators (all very new to Second Life) are preparing to try out new lessons.

As one tester commented, "I am a total SL newbie, and need all the help I can get." Another teacher from Australia adds, "One thing I can guarantee about my SL skills is that I don't currently have any. I am very much a newbie and it sounds like a great way for me to develop my own skills as well as explore the possibilities for my own students." In fact, currently, educator testers represent a number of countries from three continents. The Global Kids Second Life curriculum really is global!

Stay tuned for updates throughout the summer as we follow the experiences of our intrepid testers as they master Second Life skills and prepare to use them in their own innovative ways.

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The teen teen-run SL development company, Digital Refinery, gave the students in the McKinley program a tour of the Playing 4 Keeps game currently in production.

The McKinley students will now turn from the SL curriculum missions to the game process. But first let's look at a chart showing who has completed which missions:

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Yesterday the students in Brooklyn in the Playing 4 Keeps program met with the students in Washington, D.C. at McKinley High School. Using TSL and Skype, The P4K students shared their plans for the upcoming game with the McKinley students and together they brainstormed about how to take it into Second Life.

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On this trip I learned about the past, like when Russians were treated badly and when people thought they was going to another country but they was being sent to die. I also learned that people's hair was shaved off to make carpets blankets. I learned that college students were burning books written by people from the past. Soliders put black bags on people head so they could get ready to die. I also learned about the "enemy of the state". I learned about kinds of ghettos. I learned a little bit about African Americans in WWII and learned what the Holocaust means (which is massive destruction). I also got to meet with D.C. kids and learn how they are involved in the museum. Some of the students give us a tour of the museum and told us what their thoughts were about it.

In conclusion, I learned that there is a lot of discrimination in the world.

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Yesterday we finally jumped all of the tech hurdles and got the McKinley students right into both Second Life and TIGed right away. The students gathered in our clubhouse so we can start from the beginning.

The process worked surprisingly well, considering it was our third meeting together. The students agreed to the Global Kids guidelines, which immediately improved the language they used with one another, we played a game, and then they began using the curriculum. It was exciting getting the program off the ground, in the sense that now it can be self-guided and we adults can play the role of facilitators in the use of the curriculum.

We established communication through a group - so they can move around but still be in contact through the group IM window - and started in the clubhouse and ended with the intention of watching the volcano erupt.

Oh, one last thing. The majority of these students are part of the U.S. Holocaust Museum's Ambassador program, in which they learn how to become guides for the exhibits. Before we watched the volcano I realized we were standing next to our virtual version, that shows photos on the side from Darfur. I asked the students if they knew what the building was. "Holocaust Museum," they said.

I thought that was cool. How many people can indentify the U.S. Holocaust Museum, let alone a 3D facsimile?

Posted by Barry at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We had a LOT of technology challenges last week. Secondlife.com AND Tiged.com are BOTH blocked by the D.C. system. Ugg. Of course, teens know their way around a proxy, but it slowed things down. Also, the net connection was too slow to have all the teens on their own Skype headset, which was a bummer. But we continue to persevere.

We also finally created a few of the curriculum modules to get them up in time, but due to the slowness of the tech challenges only a few actually made it into Second Life.

Posted by Barry at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In March we began developing our curriculum for educators to teach themselves, their peers, and their students how to teach Second Life and use it for education.

While we develop it, we are fortunate to be working with a student group who can test it out. The students attend the unusual McKinley Tech High School, in Washington, D.C. The high school works with youth similar to ours in NYC, but offer high tech training in a number of fields. What a great group to work with to train how to use Second Life.

So here's the plan - twice a week, a teacher at McKinley will organize the students into a classroom, taking them into Second Life. With Skype broadcasting our voices into their classroom, and then occasionally speaking back, we have folks in NYC and Scotland who will run the program and facilitate the use of the curriculum. The curriculum itself is a self-guided program and available through TakingITglobal's new TIGed system. Between Second Life, TIGed and Skype, we have a lot going on!

It turns out a number of teens already have experience in SL. One below runs her own clothing business.

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