Global Kids' Digital Media Initiative

NEWS RELEASE

Global Kids
137 East 25th Street New York, NY 10010
www.globalkids.org
212-226-0130

Contacts:

Jonah Kokodyniak, Global Kids, 212-226-2116, Jonah@globalkids.org
There.com: Aimee Yoon, Dotted Line Communications, aimee@dottedlinecomm.com, 646.678.4980
Second Life: Peter Gray, Lewis PR, secondlife@lewispr.com, 415.992.4434

For Immediate Release:

Virtual Worlds Collaborate to Spread Kofi Annan’s Message About International Justice: Global Kids Plays Lead Role in Bringing Event to Online Communities

On March 20, 2008, spearheaded by Global Kids, Inc., a unique collaboration amongst virtual worlds, which combined report audiences of over 10 million users, streamed live from the Waldorf Astoria where Kofi Annan received the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s first award for international justice. While Annan spoke before a live audience of 1,200 people in New York City, hundreds more watched and discussed the live speech across four virtual world communities, creating the largest massively multiworld simulcast to date.

At events coordinated by Global Kids, Inc. within There.com, Whyville, Second Life and Teen Second Life, virtual world residents, both teens and adults, viewed the MacArthur Foundation awards ceremony in which Mr. Kofi Annan received the first MacArthur International Justice Award of $500,000 to be distributed to a non-profit of his choice. During the live presentation, the virtual audiences, led by Global Kids staff with support from the virtual worlds companies Makena (There.com), Numedeon (Whyville), and Linden Lab (Second Life), engaged in vigorous discussion and debate.

A demonstration video can be viewed at: http://youtube.com/watch?v=tEtDEdyf3bM and samples of the teen responses can be read at: http://tinyurl.com/6bn62x.

Continue reading "[media] Virtual Worlds Collaborate to Spread Kofi Annan’s Message About International Justice: Global Kids Plays Lead Role in Bringing Event to Online Communities" »

Posted by joyce at 8:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Below is a reposting of an article from MacArthur's Digital Media and Learning, in which Connie Yowell asks: What can we learn from young people about why they find virtual worlds so appealing?

An affordance is a quality of an object, or an environment, that allows an individual to perform an action. This term came to mind as I read through Barry Joseph’s post—Comparing apples and oranges in virtual worlds. The recent simulcasting of an extraordinary speech by Kofi Annan into four different virtual worlds certainly provided an opportunity to think about virtual worlds and how young people use them. I came away from the event most struck, perhaps, by the size and quality of the discussion held in Whyville. Over 180 young people attended the event in Whyville, creating streams and streams of thoughtful chat discussion. Quite extraordinary really. What is it about the norms, practices, adult roles and other such affordances of this space that is so appealing and engaging for young people? More importantly perhaps, is if we cast aside our adult expectations and standards, what it is we can learn from young people about why they find this virtual world such an engaging learning space?

These are the kind of questions that form the basis of MacArthur’s grantmaking in Digital Media and Learning. What can we learn from young people about how to use digital media to support learning? What do young people have to tell us about the shape and future of learning environments in the 21st century? As research begins to emerge and as we observe the extraordinary engagement of young people in virtual worlds such as Whyville, Quest Atlantis and others, we have begun to form a tentative list of the kinds of affordances we see in environments that support learning. So far, we see the greatest engagement in those environments that allow young people to pursue a need to know, to share, to produce, to make their thoughts and productions public, and to develop a specialized language.

These are just a few tentative ideas that are emerging and are offered here simply to stimulate discussion. We think they are useful because they focus on the experience of young people in these environments rather than on the technology. In the posts that follow, I have invited a few of our colleagues to share their thoughts on the affordances of virtual worlds.

Posted by joyce at 12:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Below is a post from the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning blog in which Barry Joseph writes about Comparing Apples and Oranges in Virtual Worlds.

Global Kids reflects on lessons learned from a massively multiworld simulcast of Kofi Annan’s receipt of the MacArthur Award for International Justice.

Not all virtual worlds are created equally, even those with the greatest potential to host educational content. On March 20th, Global Kids hosted the first massively multiworld simulcast across four virtual worlds, bringing a live speech by Kofi Annan after receiving the first ever MacArthur Foundation ‘s International Justice Award to Second Life, Teen Second Life, Whyville, and There.com, not to mention the web.

To see what I am talking about, please watch the brief video below:

Continue reading "[In the Media] Comparing Apples and Oranges in Virtual Worlds" »

Posted by joyce at 1:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On March 20, 2008, Global Kids produced the simulcast of Kofi Annan receiving the MacArthur Foundation's first international justice award. The simulcast was broadcast not just to the Web, but to four online communities within virtual worlds, each within its own simultaneous but unique event: Second Life, Teen Second Life, Whyville, and There.com

Posted by joyce at 8:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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)..." »

Posted by Barry at 2:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

On March 20th, Kofi Annan accepted the MacArthur Foundation's International Justice Award at the gorgeous Waldorf Astoria Hotel, NY. While the participants were enjoying the night and experiencing the uniqueness of this first time ever event at the hotel, Global Kids were broadcasting the event in different virtual worlds as well as on the Web. One of the virtual worlds was There.com. There.com is a 3D social world where members can make friends, communicate with each other, customize their avatars, shop, host events, play games, and many more other things which are mainly social.

With a lot of help from Betsy Book, Director of Product Management at THERE, the event was hosted at Orangutan Stage in There.com. The members of There.com came to join us for this exciting event on May 20th and listen to the talk given by Kofi Annan, and the award ceremony from their computers with hundreds of others in different places. In front of their computers, There.com members experienced this unique event which is a step to bring the same experiences/events into different virtual worlds for different types of users, and share global values, human rights and justice in this case.

I want to thank you all There.com community for participating this unique event which is experienced in several other virtual worlds, and I hope we will be able to work with you for more events to get more familiar with There.com community and share our experiences.

Posted by Selen at 7:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Welcome to the website of the International Justice Center, a virtual clearinghouse for public education and action in support of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and related human rights concerns. Based both here on the web and in the virtual world of Second Life, the International Justice Center will host news, information and live events in support of the ICC.

Schedule of Events

• 3:00-4:00 PM EST: In-world remarks and Q&A with ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo. Mr. Lloyd Axworthy, former foreign minister of Canada, will introduce the Prosecutor.
  
• 4:30-6:00 PM: Panel discussion by major human rights officials on the topic of “The Emerging International Justice System”. Featuring :
  • Jonathan Fanton (President, MacArthur Foundation)
    
  • Moderator: Lloyd Axworthy (President, University of Winnipeg)
    
  • Louise Arbour (United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights)
    
  • Francis Deng (United Nations Special Adviser for Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities)
    
  • Juan Mendes (Director, International Center for Transitional Justice)
  
  
  • Allan Rock, Former Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations
  
  
  • Kenneth Roth (Executive Director, Human Rights Watch)
  
  
  • Luis Moreno-Ocampo (Prosecutor, International Criminal Court)
  
  
  • 9:00-9:40PM: Award ceremony and keynote address by Mr. Kofi Annan

  How to Participate

  • Via Second Life: Teleport to the International Justice Center, on the Justice Commons sim at this link
  
  
  • Via the Web: streamed video during the event.
  
  
  • Via There.com: Sign up here and attend the event at the stage zone.
  
  
  • Via Whyville: you can attend the event live in the Greek Theater.
    

  "Building Justice" Background Video on Human Rights and the United Nations

  

  View a short video presentation about Human Rights, the International Criminal Court and Kofi Annan at this link. "Building Justice" examines the development of international justice through the lens of the new International Criminal Court and its first two cases from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Filmed on location in the D.R.Congo and The Hague, with survivors of crimes against humanity, justice activists, and ICC prosecutors, "Building Justice" shows how the criminal prosecution of individual perpetrators can help build an international justice system to end impunity. "Building Justice" is the work of Skylight Pictures in collaboration with The MacArthur Foundation, and draws on material from "The Reckoning" – a Skylight Pictures feature length documentary film and educational initiative about the International Criminal Court, to be released later this year.

  
  How to Stay Informed of Future Events

  • Join the IJC Google Group to receive updates via email.
    
  • From within Second Life, you can join the group "International Justice Center" by searching for that phrase under group search, and then click "join."
    
  • Add the Justicecenter.net blog to your RSS aggregator using this link.
    

  Special thanks to the Vesuvius Group for coordinating the amazing build-out of the Justice Center and the Justice Commons sim! They went above and beyond the call to donate their services to the Justice Center. See their website at http://www.thevesuviusgroup.com.

  Posted by Rik at 1:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)