Global Kids' Online Leadership Program

Eileen Newmark of the Eurica Media Lab was one of the featured presenters at the Global Kids' Roundtable on Nonprofits and Virtual Worlds that took place on July 20.  Here is a machinima clip of Eileen talking about how she is thinking of integrating Second Life into their existing cross-cultural exchange program between American and French youth.

• Mary Del Bianco, Bluford Drew Jemison STEM Academy (SL: Telos String)
• Eileen Newmark, Eurica Media Lab (SL: Eileen Serrari)
• Tonia Lovejoy, Reach the World (see below for Tonia's prepared remarks)
• and Eliot Rosenbloom, Center for Character and Citizenship (SL: TJ Coeur)

We had a very interesting discussion at our roundtable, with our presenters discussing various applications of virtual worlds for civic engagement, education, and cultural exchange. Thanks to the 35 participants who came into Second Life for this session. As the facilitator, I always learn so much from the discussants and the audience members.

Sadly, this is the last of these roundtables that Global Kids is funded to do.  But we hope that other opportunities for facilitating these kinds of important dialogues among civic and cultural institutions emerge. As the technologies and the applications continue to change and evolve, it's an ever present challenge keeping up and staying ahead of the curve for those of us in the public and nonprofit sectors.

Thanks to the MacArthur Foundation for supporting the Virtual World Capacity Building Program.

Continue reading "Nonprofit Leaders Talk about How Virtual Worlds Can Help Their Missions" »

Posted by Rik at 4:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

At Global Kids, in our current job hiring process, we’ve replaced that old adage, “It's not what you know, but who you know,” with “It’s now what you know, but how you came to know it.” It’s a radical shift in our practices we felt it was appropriate to say a little about why we took this giant leap.

Four and a half years ago, we hired a job applicant who had the audacity, or foresight, to submit a personal blog entry as his writing sample. Writing samples are requested to assess the writing and analytic abilities of an applicant. Traditional submissions are created through some formalized process, most often a school paper or something produced in a work environment. They represent an example of something assessed within a formalized school or work environment. So what’s a blog entry doing in that context, something personal as opposed to professional, directed towards an informal audience of one’s peers as opposed to the lines of knowledge authority within a formal learning or work system?

We figured this applicant either didn’t understand the purpose of the writing sample OR understood something ahead of the curve, that digital media was redefining what learning looked like, where it happened, and how it could be measured. We decided to gamble that it was the latter. It was one of the best decisions we have ever made.

Continue reading "No Resumes, Please" »

Posted by Barry at 7:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

"This project has pushed me off the diving board straight into the pool. Fortunately, the pool was not shark-infested. It was full of eager 7th graders who are non-judgmental of a teacher who tells them that we will be working on game design for the entire semester but teacher dearest does not like to play games, has not played many games in her lifetime, and really does not plan on playing games much. How this was going to work was a mystery to me. I was anxious to have workshops with Global Kids because I knew I was out of my element."

Read more about what happened when six New York City high school teachers, coordinated by the National Writing Project, sought assistance from Global Kids to bring their own designs for games-based learning into their classrooms.

Continue reading "GK Supports High School Teachers to Incorporate Games-Based Learning" »

Posted by Barry at 10:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The UK Based Learning and Teaching focused site, Becta, recently published a best practices case study about Global Kids' Playing 4 Keeps program.

Recognising that games are a form of ‘youth media’ Global Kids recognised game design can be a vehicle for engaging children in addressing critical world issues. As such they have developed a number of programmes, such as Playing For Keeps (P4K), which which pairs Global Kids youth leaders with game developers to produce web-based games. The P4K programme trains urban students to think critically about game design and develop games about important world issues. These games include:

• Ayiti: The Cost of Life - a role play game which looks at Haitian poverty (www.costoflife.org)
• Hurricane Katrina: Tempest in Crescent City – a game which looks at the effect of Hurricane Katrina
• CONSENT! A virtual-world based game within Second Life about the history of medical racism against African American prisoners since WWII.

You can find the full case study on the Becta website.

Posted by joyce at 3:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The latest Recommended reading, watching, listening post is up on DMLcentral and we are sharing it by crossposting it here as well.

At the top of this month's list is an amazing music video,"Virtual Love" by Legrand. A collaboration among 20 Japanese students at Temple University in Tokyo and Philadelphia based on hip hop artist Legrand, the music video integrates a variety of social media and simple desktop applications into one seemingly seamless computer screen capture. So clever and interesting. As so much of our work at Global Kids uses digital media to connect people in different places, it is always exciting to see examples of people pushing the envelope

You can read the rest after the jump or here.

Continue reading "Recommended reading, watching, listening" »

Posted by joyce at 12:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)