[sl/teen] Adults: Good or Bad on Teen Second Life?
Hello, everyone! This is Mariel –Voyunicef- again.
As you most probably have already noticed, Global Kids is celebrating its first year in TSL. It has been a year of events, success and, above all things, hard work; therefore, it has had a huge impact on the concept of Teen Second Life.
Apart from providing teenagers with a space to learn and make a difference by owning a sim on TSL, Global Kids is the pioneer of education/activism on the Teen Grid, and also most probably the basis of all the related projects on the same grid. As it happens with everything, some think that’s good, and others thing that’s bad. That’s why we gathered on Thursday, March 15 to debate the role of adults in online teen spaces.
Holding a debate was a real challenge, I think, because of the technical part of it. Keeping control of the interventions to avoid interruptions was very hard, but I think it ended up well thanks to everyone’s cooperation. Also, at first things were difficult because four of the participants of the debate were in favour of adult presence while only one was against it; however, more people joined this debate and there was a balance of positions.
Barry set the guidelines of the debate, which were the main points we discussed: What can adults offer to teen spaces? What does their presence take away? When is it not safe to have adults and teens interact? When are teens ONLY safe when adults are present? As each of the questions received different answers, new points arose to the debate.
After some minutes of participation of the panelists, residents from the audience were invited to participate, too. At this point opinions were more diverse, which represented more obstacles and yet more benefits to this debate.
In the end, no conclusion was reached; however, as the different opinions faced each other, we were able to find common points we all agreed on, like the fact that some adults are needed in places like TSL to protect teenagers from online predators.
What I conclude after this experience is that the debate was very useful because, no matter that we didn’t really get to an absolute consensus, the whole Teen Grid community (and also the adults who are interested in running projects in it) will have a stronger basis to work on now that we’ve found the points at which both perspectives meet. Now I’ll just encourage you to judge by yourself – here is the chat log.
