Global Kids' Online Leadership Program

I got an opportunity to speak about Global Kids's approach to youth development and the kinds of services we offer other institutions at "Nonprofit Week" on Orange Island in Second Life today.  It was neat being among the 150 or so avatars who rezzed in for the talks today by my friends Coughran Mayo and In Kenzo, and myself.  Thanks to Jade Lily and Orange Island for the chance to address my colleagues and others interest in the active and growing public good sector in Second Life.

As a recap for those that weren't able to be there, Global Kids has learned a lot in the past three years about how to best leverage virtual worlds for our particular brand of constructivist youth development.  We have found Second Life to be fertile ground for getting young people to engage with each other, create a variety of media, and present that work to a wider audience.  That said, we have some concerns that as Linden Lab considers created a "mixed ages" grid, we worry that some of the unique affordances of Teen Second Life might be lost. 

Beyond our own work, we have a strong interest in facilitating other nonprofits and public institutions to be using virtual worlds to further their own missions.  In particular, we offer a variety of services at various levels, including:

• Event Simulcasting:  We have organized virtual simulcasts of scores of real world events, from conferences to workshops to awards ceremonies.  We can bring a live event to a variety of virtual worlds, such as this speech by Kofi Annan that was simulcast to the web and four virtual worlds.
• Curriculum Development: We have a set of free curricula that can help any institution teach their students how to use Second Life.  Or we can work directly with your institution to develop a curriculum that is unique to your site and population.
• Staff Training: Confused about how to integrate virtual worlds into your strategic plan? We can help you and your staff think strategically and holistically about how these tools can advance your mission.
  
• Summer Camps: We have run summer camps in Teen Second Life for a number of institutions, including UNICEF and the Field Museum of Chicago.  We are able to tailor our programs to fit your schedule and students needs and interests.

If you are interested in talking about any of these services for your own organization, contact me at rik@ globalkids.org.

Posted by Rik at 6:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The year 2008 was a remarkable period for the Online Leadership Program at Global Kids. It is challenging to even pick just a few standouts: An AIDS orphan in Ugandan exchanges text messages from her cell phone with a dozen teenagers in Teen Second Life; high school students conceive and produce a web-based game about local heroes during Hurricane Katrina; youth produce a seven-minute long animated movie about racism as an obstacle to education around the world; a high school class in Brooklyn uses a virtual world to learn about and create their own simulations about science; hundreds of young people across four virtual worlds watch Kofi Annan receive a major human rights award; incarcerated teens use a virtual world to learn how to create positive change in their real community; youth in Chicago and New York City collaborate online with paleotologists on a fossil dig in Tanzania; nearly 1,500 educators share knowledge and advice on how to use virtual worlds for education.

Global Kids would like to mark the new year by presenting a brief flyover of some of our major accomplishments over the past twelve months.

Continue reading "OLP's 2008 Year End Review" »

Posted by Rik at 11:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In a recent post on the VW 4 Real Learning blog, Viki Silvansky goes over an interesting micro lesson focusing on avatar appearance, she developed using the Global Kids Second Life Curriculum. Her thoughts being that avatar appearance is one of the first key elements most users of virtual world spaces like Second Life want to tackle.

"In the last blog I mentioned about my view of you in-world orientation places and how they use different approaches for helping newbeis. In this blog, the focus will be on out-world source called "Global Kids Curriculum (GKCx)" and the method it use to motivated users to try and learn new things so that I will finally be able to come up with I own learning environment in-world used GKCx methods. The curriculum is divided into 9 main levels, each including some related modules with predefined missions for students to carry out. I've been asked to choose one modules out of 4 modules (appearance, walking and flying, talk a close look and chat) within level one as part of my weekly activity and develop my own environment based on that."

Read the full post here.

Posted by joyce at 8:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We recently had a online wiki review of our Second Life curriculum, which while not totally glowing in nature, was a very lovingly crafted, thorough overview of it.

You can read the review here.

Posted by joyce at 9:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Since Barry Joseph's keynotes at the two recent conferences, Virtual Worlds LA and SLCC, and the announcement of the release of GK's Second Life curriculum, we have been getting a lot of buzz lately in the blogosphere.

Some of the sites talking:

• A post on Caleb Booker's site focusing on business and virtual worlds site here.
• Kelly (from Eye4You Alliance) blogged about us and gave a shout out to Barry's SLCC talk too here.
• The Wall Street Journal's MarketWatch posted an article here.
• HASTAC blogged about the release of our SL Curriculum here.
• The blog Second Life Update featured a post on the curriculum here.

Posted by joyce at 12:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today, Global Kids’ Online Leadership Director Barry Joseph will speak to leaders in digital media and education at the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo held at the Los Angeles Convention Center to be followed on the following Saturday, September 5th, with Joseph providing the educational keynote at the annual Second Life Community Convention in Tampa, Florida. At both, Joseph will showcase the launch of Global Kids Second Life Curriculum — the most significant resource in 2008 for those educators interested in incorporating virtual worlds into their classrooms.

Global Kids Second Life Curriculum, available the first week of September at RezEd.org, contains over 160 lesson plans for teaching the basics of Second Life, whether in a classroom, a library, or at home. The curriculum is available at no cost and is designed to be adaptable by practitioners for a variety of uses, from teaching science, to literature to global studies.

The full press release follows...

Continue reading "Global Kids’ Groundbreaking Second Life Curriculum Featured at Virtual Worlds Conferences in LA and Tampa" »

Posted by Rik at 9:52 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)

Philip Rosedale was asked in an interview last week: What are you most proud of this year?

He responded:

I am most proud of the uses of Second Life in education that have started to happen, because personally I am just really into that. I have a bunch of teachers in my family (and my background is in physics), and I am just really interested in how you can use Second Life to teach science. The things that have started to happen in the latter half of this year around education is just really, really amazing. For me that emerging use is the thing that I am most proud of.

And this is presumably BEFORE Philip learned of our Science Through Second Life High School class. I can't wait to learn what he thinks of that.

Posted by Barry at 5:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Motorola announced this past week the recipients of their new Foundation Grants program. Global Kids was picked as one of the recipients with our proposal of creating further virtual world focused curriculum, this time spotlighting teaching science through virtual worlds.

Read the press release below or here.

Continue reading "[press] Motorola Foundation Grants $3.5 Million to Inspire Next Generation of Inventors" »

Posted by joyce at 2:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We have been receiving our first reports from our wonderful curriculum beta testers. In addition to alerting us to occasional oversights (thank you!), they are really enjoying learning the skills.

As one beta tester emailed recently, "Thanks again for this opportunity - it is a blast!"

But wait... there's more! Our creative team is now also developing the narrative that will immerse these skill-based lessons in the context of an engaging, exciting adventure!

It just gets better and better. Stay tuned!

Posted by Cathy at 1:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)