Global Kids' Online Leadership Program

A December Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning blog post, featured how using digital media and virtual worlds to engage you in education of civics issues.

Say the word “civics,” and most people will likely conjure images of well-meaning citizens trudging to the polls to do their democratic duty, soberly pulling levers behind dim curtains for city council members on local election days.

Civics, that is to say, rarely inspires rapture.

But that may be changing as kids, thanks to digital media, are first encountering civic issues in engaging and, yes, dynamic ways, both through school curriculums and on their own.

The article goes on to highlight Global Kids civics based Witnessing History project.

High school kids from Washington, D.C., involved in the Witnessing History project, certainly appeared motivated by the immersive aspects of working in the virtual space of Teen Second Life. The project was produced in conjunction with Global Kids and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Continue reading "Teens in Virtual Worlds Learn Civic Lessons" »

Posted by joyce at 9:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Christmas is a very common holiday around the world. We all acknowledge that almost every country celebrates it, but do we know how they celebrate Christmas? For this reason, I decided to build an exhibit to showcase how different countries celebrated Christmas. The countries that I had built an exhibit for was Mexico, Australia, Nigeria, Italy, India and Japan. Starting with Mexico, I took all the attendees around the exhibit room to talk about the different pictures that were up. After going around the room, I had announced a “contest”. The participants were to take a photo in second life regarding what Christmas meant to them. Anything and anyone (with their consent) could be used in the snapshot. The winner of the snapshot contest would have their photo put onto the wall in the exhibit. The snapshots were handed in, and so it was then time for a discussion. Teens answered questions about what they saw in the exhibit, such as the similarities between the different countries and the common themes of Christmas. Overall, the ideas of food, thankfulness and family were relevant in every single country.

Overall, I think event ran pretty smoothly with a minimal amount of downtime, except for the time given to produce a snapshot. The tour gave explanations of each photo to expand the general knowledge. The discussion towards the end of the event really made me realize that teens are able to understand any topic, regardless of the complexity. The questions weren’t just answered, but were expanded by the participants. If I were to do the event again, I would have had higher level questions ready for the discussion, also I would have addressed some ways how teens can help their society with the information they just obtained. I would do the event again in a heartbeat and thanks to all that came, and I hope you will be able to use what you learned for Christmas in 2009.

Posted by Nate - SL Intern at 6:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday, February 2, Global Kids held a special fireside chat on the Teen Grid of Second Life focused on HIV/AIDS in Africa. The workshop began with Rafi leading a small group of teens in an exercise to have them think about the links between poverty and HIV/AIDS, and the role of Western governments in the fight against AIDS. Then we streamed into Second Life a live phone conversation with Victoria, a teenager in Uganda whose life has been particularly affected by HIV/AIDS.

Victoria spoke about her family background, how she was able to attend the most elite school in Uganda and her plans for university. Victoria then discussed about how the Ugandan government and civil society have been dealing with a recent upsurge in HIV cases, using a variety of media and strategies. Click play on the media player above to listen to our conversation with her.

To help young Ugandans like Victoria to go to school and find a better future, please see http://leaduganda.org.

Posted by Rik at 12:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hello Everyone.

I'm going to share with you my review about my first GK Intern event.

I hosted it on Thursday, 4th of December 2008. The topic had to be Global Warming because I really do like the topic and stuff related with that. So I throught it would be cool to do something in-world about it for the TG Community to enjoy. The event was hosted at the GK Intern area on Global Kids Island, awesome place!. Before the event I managed to set up a few globes and uploaded a few pictures related to Global Warming along with additional details required for the event.

The event lasted for 1 hour and 20 minutes with many teen grid residents of the community joining in and debating about the past, present and future of Global Warming. I think in total there was around 20+ that attended the event which is great, because there was not many folks on the grid when I started. I was worried who was going to show up, but I managed to get the word out on time.

At 1:33pm SLT, the volcano went off during the event, at the abnormal weather stage. Could this be a sign or something else? lol

Here is the shedule of the Global Warming event
1pm SLT - Introduction of the Intern Event
1:10pm SLT - GK Guidelines
1:15pm SLT - Section 1: Background on Global Warming & Q&A
1:22pm SLT - Section 2: Global Warming Changes
1:30pm SLT - Section 3 - Impacts of Global Warming & Q&A
1:35pm SLT - Section 4 - The future
1:45pm SLT - Q&A
2pm SLT - Section 5 - How to make a difference
2:11pm SLT - Section 6 - How to Take Action Now
2:15pm SLT - Section 7 - Global Warming information packs & final Q&A
2:20pm SLT - The end of my event - wooot

My review

Okay, so..I managed to find and I did alot of planning for the event. As you know, I love spreading the word about events on GK, so I decided to send out Event notecards to my friends around the TG grid first. Then 8 minutes before the event started I sent out event details through all global kids groups and started group conferences, haha.

Things that worked well, was that many found it interesting on some section areas of global warming during the event. The participants brought their points across really clearly and the feedback extremely helpful and very specific. I throught people enjoyed listening to the facts and information I was sharing with them. I'm sure that people throught I was very positive and very welcoming through out the event, which is awesome.

Things that did not go so well was asking enough questions to the participants to get more views across about certain things of Global Warming. Some participants decided to drop out half through and teleport else where, so maybe I need to look into what makes teens stay longer for next time. However, I managed to get help from participants to get more people back to the event, I think that worked successfully. I was happy that people were interested still.

Areas to improve on for next time; I think I would expand the time frame out If I had to do it again, from 1hr 20mins to 2 hours to allow more time to discuss, play a game and get more teens engaged into Global Warming. My idea for next time is to use Human Barometer to see if people agree, disagree or don't know about certain statements and then they could talk about why they picked that option.

If I had to do it again, I would change a few things. I would change the time of the event to later in the day like 4pm SLT until 6pm SLT because many U.S residents are on then and more people on the grid, wooot. I also would change the event details and expand that by asking people that attend more questions about the subject. At the start I would add a fun activity section where everyone did a quick brainstorm about Global Warming and then feed back to the rest of the group, which would be great fun for all. :D

My last thoughts is that the GK Intern event went really well and everything went smoothly without many problems to worry about, hehe. I hope everyone enjoyed the event and throught it was interesting to find out new things. :)

Thanks so much for attending my event. If want a copy of the Global Warming information packs, please IM me in-world or e-mail me. :)

Daniel Voyager
TSL Resident.

Posted by Daniel Voyager - SL Intern at 1:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So on November 17th , 2008 I ran the event “Genocide it has to end!” To try and raise awareness of whats going on in darfur.

So, when I started the workshop voice went down. So I found it pretty hard to adapt to typing but I found it kind of easy after a while. So when I started the workshop, I asked the participants a few questions about what Genocide was and a couple of other questions just to get some ideas about what they knew. This went down pretty much without a hitch.

After I got through the views on genocide, I moved on to my main task, a RP (role-play) activity involving four groups, each one with a specific link to the genocide in Darfur and each could have a few possible solutions for the problem. I found that I wasn't clear enough with presenting the task and suffered for this later, however the groups that asked me about the task and grasped what I meant had some really amazing discussions on their views of the subject, some of them collided and turned more into a argument rather than a discussion but it was kept under control. Then as I went round group to group asking about the views or possible solutions to the genocide, I was really surprised about how much thought some of the participants had put into their answers, for me this was the highlight of the event as it implied they had read all of the information I had given them and learned a lot of it and became aware of the situation in a lot more detail.

After the RP, I decided to finish the fireside with a few questions that turned into a discussion, again I found this to be really exciting, as a lot of the teens there really started to get involved in their answers, and I had to calm them down so I could move from question to question, but this went pretty smoothly too. It took up a lot more time than I thought that it would but it turned out to be the best activity to get all of the participants involved in.

After running over by about 20 miniutes, the event finally finished and I felt it was a big success as some of the teens that came stayed and continued to debate even though it was over.

On the whole Id say the workshop even with drawbacks like having no voice, went really well for my first attempt. Ive learned to pre-type anything I can think of as it saves time typing during the workshop. And that I need to be A LOT more clear when I'm giving out instructions, even if it means taking extra time so that someone fully grasps what they are doing.

Posted by Grimreaper - SL Intern at 5:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I first learned about the crisis in Burma last year from the 30-day campaign challenge to rally 50,000 voices to speak out for the Burmese who, in their own country are not allowed to speak out for themselves. If they did they could face serious time in prison. How much? Recently a blogger speaking the truth about the oppression was sentenced 20 years in prison.

After following the campaign closely and spreading the word in my hometown I found that sadly Burma’s issues are unknown by the general public. So I decided that holding a fireside workshop in TSL on the topic would be a great idea.

Participants were given basic information on the crimes being committed in Burma, a general time line of events from the 40’s all the way up to today, and information on major players and their impact on the crisis. This was probably the most challenging part of the entire fireside. Planning was quite frustrating, what would be too much information, what is most important to get across, and how do you go about presenting this much information at once without boring people to death? I eventually came to the conclusion that my best bet would be to include all of the facts needed for basic comprehension.

For the main activity groups of participants were given 10 minutes to research a topic and find a picture that represents it. They would then upload the picture and explain to the group why the picture represented the topic. The groups were given the topics 8-8-88, and human rights. Both groups did an excellent job both defining their topic and finding pictures/making shirts that represented their topic.

Group 2 does their presentation on Human Rights.

As always there were things I learned while planning and running this fireside.
1. My mic hates me so if someone is telling me its not cooperating I need to switch to text instead of waiting to see if it will clear up.
2. Large amounts of information need to be broken up so participants don’t get bored. Finding a more interactive way of presenting the information would also work.
3. Getting frustrated that things I can’t control keep causing problems just creates another problem.

Over all I think that my main goal was reached. People who had never heard of Burma now know it exists, know of the junta and all the despicable crimes they commit everyday.

Posted by Victoria - TSL Intern at 2:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Election Event went over very fantastically. I would like to thank Nate Kongo for helping me out during this entire event. I would also like to thank all of the Gkids for making this election year a good year for the teenagers of Teen Second Life. This event would have gone down badly if it wasn't for the people that kept it together.

The event itself consisted of a few different key elements that made it successful. Whether it be the intelligence of all the teen residents that decided to have a voice or perhaps even the fact that the topics were spoken about so intelligently. It was all a very mature conversation and a lot of people seemed to have enjoyed themselves.

The event itself was not the best thing that happened that night. The voting booth showed that Barack Obama had a clear victory over the teens in the grid with most of the votes going to him over McCain.

The event was a complete success in all different aspects. I have never seen an event go so long and still feel like a powerful event even after the 2 hour limit that was set unto the previous events. This event has indeed inspired me to make a longer event and without haste I will again do another event of this magnitude. All the teens have respected their rules and have sent me IMs within the past week saying how good of an event it was. My reply was always the same. I always said "I want teens to have a voice, and I am glad that you appreciate the gift that was given to the teen grid" as a sign of gratitude.

Continue reading "[tsl/leadership/teen] Election Day Event" »

Posted by Lee - SL Intern at 9:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'd been looking for an excuse to use this great video on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for a while now, and yesterday I finally got a chance to. It was in a fireside workshop I did in Teen Second Life I titled "Know Your Rights!" which was kind of a 101 on human and civil rights, what the difference is between the two, and the struggles to defend them historically as well as up to this day. (The workshop, as is the case of many of the firesides we do, is actually a riff off of a classic GK face to face workshop on the same issue called "Youth, Understanding Rights and Civic Participation").

Conducting it in SL allowed me to more easily add the video as a nice appetizer to the subject, and I knew that SL teens, being more design oriented than average, would enjoy its clean aesthetics. It led into a substantive discussion on the differences between civil and human rights (civil are granted by the state, human are implicit in being, well, human), and I was impressed by the number of teens that participated that were able to articulate the difference between the two.

Our main activity was called "The Prioritization of Rights", and in it teams had order the US Bill of Rights in terms of importance. One of the things that I found most interesting in hearing the teams present their opinions was how much variance there was between the groups about which rights they felt were most importance. Freedom of speech and religion were often towards the top, while I think I only heard freedom from cruel and unusual punishment in the top five once. It really highlighted how hard it is to rank rights that are so basic, which is, of course, the point of the activity.

We closed off with a more broad based discussion about the nature of rights and how they're valued (or not) in different parts of the world, and whether certain ones are given more attention or priority than others. Inevitably, one of the teens brought up the recently passed Proposition 8 (which bans gay marriage in the state of California), and talked about how in his opinion that was a violation of basic human rights, and others from the group chimed in about whether they felt it should even have been on the ballot considering it takes away rights (most felt it should not have been). It was really heartening to see teens looking at the world through this lens of basic human rights and evaluating what they saw on that basis. We'd live in a better world if everyone did the same.

Posted by Rafi Santo at 7:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

On November 4th, 2008, many teens came together to discuss various issues regarding the presidential election led by Lee Soothsayer and myself. Despite not being able to vote, they still had ideas to carry the event for hours. When considering the idea to host a debate in teen second life, questions come up about whether or not teens are mature enough to discuss topics that are generally taken care of by adults. After hearing what some teens had to say, it was clear to me that the answer to the previous question was yes.

Even emotional topics, such as abortion and the minimum wage were discussed by the group of teens. Some other topics discussed included the Iraq War, the US economy, education, taxes, healthcare, and energy. As people started coming, the discussion really picked up into a fully fledged debate. The great thing was that everyone had respect for each other, and so the debate had not gone out of control.

For discussing the war in Iraq, we had used the agreement scales to put forth our opinions. For the most part, teens seemed to be against the war in Iraq and that America should pull out. With abortion teens were pretty much split with the idea of banning it. One argument was that it should be the choice of the person giving birth as it is part of them. The other side had put forth the argument of, what if the country’s best president could have been born, but was instead aborted. Pretty much for every topic discussed, there were enough people on each side to put forth valid reasons of argument.

After running this event with Lee Soothsayer, we both feel that teen second life is a perfect place to hold debates because teens have a huge amount of ideas and opinions to put forth, and after all, we are the future of the world.

Posted by Nate - SL Intern at 9:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As we blogged yesterday, yesterday in TSL we coordinated a mock election. With the help of many amazing teens including Ryan Dayton, who scripted a grid-wide voting system, and Victoria Hanfoi, who put together non-partisan candidate fact sheets to place near the polls (not to mention staying online all day yesterday teleporting people to vote!), we managed to hold what we think might be the first ever mock US Presidential Vote in a teen virtual world.

After teens voted, many stopped in and participated in a GK Intern run event by Lee Soothsayer and Nate Kongo; an open mic/debate about the race and the issues related to it. (Look for a blog post from them soon!) It was incredible just to be a fly on the wall during the event, listening as teens debated really touchy issues from abortion to the war in an incredibly civil way.

Oh? What's that? You want to know who won the TSL mock election? Oh, right! Here are the results:

358 Votes Total

John McCain/Sarah Palin: 91 votes. (25%)

Barack Obama/Joe Biden: 245 votes. (68%) - WINNER!

Chuck Baldwin/Darrell Castle: 2 votes. (1%)

Bob Barr/Wayne Allen Root: 7 votes. (2%)

Cynthia McKinney/Rosa Clemente: 2 votes. (1%)

Ralph Nadar/Matt Gonzalez: 11 votes. (3%)

Thanks to all who voted, and next time hopefully you'll be of age to do it in real life!

Posted by Rafi Santo at 5:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)