Global Kids' Online Leadership Program

The rambling part of the email was mostly about the technology that I’ve been able to engage the young men with at the facility so far such as bringing a PS3 and playing Madden ’08, having the young men take pictures of the library with a digital camera, accessing the computer with the librarian at the facility to apply for a library card and more. I am not naïve to know that in many of the same situations this is unusual and most similar facilities cannot have hardback books much less a PS3 walk into their library.

While it was these initial steps that I think were part of what might have helped build the foundation for access to Teen Second Life at this facility, I can hardly leave out the belief and support of all parties involved that are helping to make this happen as well. I remember getting goosebumps when talking about it, that we were going to make access to this project happen. I remember something in my original email saying that I think participation in the DIDI project could make a difference in the young men’s lives if we can give it a chance.

Sometime I might go into all the steps that we took, as I remember them, to make this project of working with Global Kids, the Dream it Do It Initiative, Linden Lab, and the detention facility a reality but I don’t want to get too bogged down in the details for now. Suffice it to say, we made a proposal to the Linden Lab legal team which included such things as we would close down the island that the teens in the detention facility are accessing while they are logged in and that they don’t log themselves in so they can’t share the passwords with anyone.

Each time I go into the sterile facility, I go with reverence- and I don’t mean for that to sound campy. I automatically take a moment to step back as I’m driving there, that this opportunity is a gift given to us and that maybe the most powerful thing I can do that morning is quiet my mind so that I can listen to the moments that I hear or observe of the learning and hope and change that is taking place within the participants so that I can share it with others or reflect it back to the young men I’m working with.

So far, there are three young men in this particular Dream It Do It Team. “I just want to learn how to fly.” “I want to go to the library when I’m out to access Second Life.” These are a few of the things I’ve heard the participants say before and while engaging in the virtual environment through the laptop computers that are provided.

I think sometimes that the hope we can give them through access to a 3D environment can somehow stick with them even when they do leave the facility. Whether it’s hope that they can be connected to a community of people that help support the fact that the world is a bigger place than the neighborhood they might currently be living in with all it’s circumstances-good and bad. Hope that they have a skill they can develop. Hope that they can control the environment that they live in (as they can control their SL environment) so that they can make a positive difference.

I was told last week that one of the participants was gone. ‘Gone’ could mean several things. It could mean the person went home and are under probation among other things, or it could mean they turned 18 and were sentenced to the adult housing unit or prison. I found out this week that ‘gone’ meant in detention for having a pen in possession when he wasn’t supposed to.

I wonder if and I wonder when knowing how to texture and resize a prim might seem to be a far greater danger to the inmates involved in this program than possessing a pen. I of course don’t mean to insinuate that possessing a pen in this context should be treated lightly, but that something else can be a better weapon sometimes. Hopefully he can rejoin us soon and we can start again, working together, to create a better place.