[tsl/leadership] Power of Citizenry in Second Life comes to its years end
We've reached the end of the year here at GK's Power of Citizenry in Second Life program, and an incredible year it's been. I've actually had a number of opportunities to reflect about the program recently in both qualitative and quantitative ways. On the qualitative side, I wrote up a best practice about the project for GK's RezEd virtual worlds and learning hub, and on the quantitative side, for our own internal numbers section of GK's year end board report.
For those that don't know, the POC in Second Life program was designed to translate Global Kids' flagship offline afterschool leadership program, titled the Power of Citizenry, into an online virtual world setting. In the offline program, we work with youth in high schools across New York City to educate them about international affairs and global issues via interactive workshops and develop their leadership skills through a variety of opportunities and projects throughout the school year.
In the best practice, I largely explored the question of what that translation has looked like structurally within Teen Second Life, and in the board report, I provided a summary of all the events that the teen interns that took part in the program were involved in in a leadership capacity over the course of the year.
Stepping back, I was amazed on both counts. Structurally, the program has come a long way, with a robust set of questions being addressed in terms of how to develop leadership skills in a virtual world. The questions, and a rudimentary stab at possible answers, were these:
Increase the fidelity of communication. When possible, talk to teen leaders via voice chat of one sort or another (whether it's in Second Life, Skype or phone) to get a better sense of who they are and what they're like, as well as for them to get to do the same for you. Know how best to leverage multiple communication channels with different personalities. For some, text chat works great, for others, email or voice maybe preferred.
Require teen leaders to attend events where the skills you're aiming to develop are displayed by professionals, and have meta-conversations about those skills based on what's being modeled and practiced by those teens. In the case of POC in SL, we developed the idea of required "Fireside Workshops", hour long interactive workshops on global issues that were open to the TSL public but had a key role for the teen leaders in terms of modeling skills.
Be open to a range of types of participation and leadership roles for teen leaders. On Global Kids Island, we often have numerous projects and events that are ongoing, and which we've utilized as spaces that our teen leaders can engage in taking on leadership roles. Many have assisted in simulcasted events, in-world guest speakers, fireside workshops, art contests, and other projects as well. In addition to having an ecology of projects that teen leaders can work on, we also remained very open to what form their leadership role took. Some assisted with technical aspects of projects, like building or scripting, others with promotion and outreach and still others with facilitation and event management. In all of these, we made every effort to both meet a teen where they were at in terms of their skills, though also push their boundaries in terms of developing areas of expertise they previously lacked experience in. The ultimate goal for each of the leaders was to have them develop, promote, facilitate, document and evaluate their own issue oriented event or projects, and a vast majority of the participants eventually rose to that occasion, with some requiring more scaffolded learning than others.
When I looked more at the numbers and summary of events they'd participated in over the year, I was also quite satisfied. Overall, the POC program reached over 750 teens within Teen Second Life over the course of the year, with over 500 of those reached by teen leaders themselves. (The other 250 or so were attendants of fireside workshops facilitated by Global Kids staff.) Here's a quick snapshot of some of the different projects and events that the teen leaders were involved in:
I'm personally really proud of the incredible work that these teens did, and especially cognizant of the opportunities to develop leadership skills that digital media is providing to teens of this generation. A huge congratulations to all the teens in the teen grid that participated in the program this past year. You've accomplished so much!
