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NetFamilyNews
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Date: 26 Feb 2004
Post in our forum for parents, teens - You! - at ConnectSafely.org.
Virtual Worlds field trip
One of the most interesting comments made at the second-annual Virtual Worlds Conference I attended in L.A. this week was from Jon Landau, producer of Titanic and of a project-in-progress called Avatar. Landau said, "I grew up being taught to worry about 'big brother'; with the Internet we have to worry about little brother." I don't think anybody else heard that quite as acutely as an advocate of children's online safety would. Not only is little brother watching, little brother (of any age, basically everybody on the user-driven, fixed and mobile network) is commenting, uploading, producing, entertaining, collaborating, socializing, and exploring identity, as well as creating imposter profiles, gaming the game system, sending nude phone-snapped photos, etc. We're dealing with a new set of blended conditions, with online life not just mirroring "real life" but changing it as well, in subtle ways we don't yet fully understand.One thing that's clear from the research but was confirmed (in my head, not yet by speakers) everywhere I turned at the conference: digital ethics and citizenship have to be central to the discussion as we learn how to negotiate this new space where – definitely for kids, in any case - the line between online and offline is fading. Learning how to behave ethically in community whether digital or physical is central to children's well-being online, right now and increasingly as we move forward.Really exciting projects are going on in and with virtual worlds in schools around the US and world. Check out the collaborative work between schools in California, Japan, and Australia at PacRim Exchange; with libraries in Teen Second Life and youth librarians of the Eye4You Alliance; on virtual islands for public school students (Ramapo Islands) in Teen Second Life; and in Second Life and New York City with nonprofit Global Kids, which aims to help "transform urban youth into successful students as well as global and community leaders" (I want to zoom in on some of these powerful projects in future posts). I spoke with a northern California principal, Patti Purcell of Bel Aire Elementary School, about Bel Aire's six-week pilot project teaching students digital citizenship "in-world" and in the classroom with the help of children's virtual world Dizzywood. Patti told me she felt students needed a space where they could actually practice what they learned in character education, which has long been part of the curriculum. One lesson was in collaborative tree-planting. Dizzywood co-founder Scott Arpajian told me certainly any child can plant a tree in Dizzywood, but the "game" is designed so that planting gets "exponentially faster [and a lot more fun] when they help each other out." Students are given time to explore the virtual world (they're given "agency," a sense of place and ownership in-world), but the experience is structured too, with in-world activities always followed by classroom discussion. "Graduation" included presentations by the students before an audience of parents who were very interested in how character ed was taught in a virtual world. Patti said, "It's very empowering for a 10-year-old to be able to explain their space to a group of adults." Two other cool elements: students participate in creating their own code of ethics, and Scott told me Dizzywood lets them look "under the hood" - learn about how Dizzywood's techies and graphic designers create its activities and habitat (something aspiring designers and software engineers would be fascinated with).A few general virtual-world-industry themes I picked up on (signs of where things are headed): not making users download special software, but bringing virtual environments to them right through their Web browsers; whether kid virtual worlds should "grow up" with their users (as has happened with about 10% of Whyville.net's users, now in college); predictions of a merging of social networking and virtual worlds; your avatar going wherever you go on the Web (not locked into a single virtual world); and other signs of interest in or movement toward interoperability.Going to this conference was a déjà vu kind of experience for me. Though it wasn't just about kid products and services, it felt a lot like Jupiter Media's "Digital Kids" conferences in the late-'90s: a very young industry trying to get a fix on metrics, markets, and competition folding in lots of start-ups, a handful of well-established B2B and B2C companies (Whyville.net, There.com, Second Life, Multiverse) and one or two old, giant media players (e.g., Disney) barreling ahead, seemingly announcing a new "world" about every six months (Pirates of the Caribbean, ClubPenguin acquisition, PixieHollow.com, forthcoming Cars world). Lots of numbers were tossed around (some admitted by the speaker to be educated estimates because research is limited): a current 100 million+ virtual-world residents worldwide, 75% between the ages of 8 and 24, with virtual worlds "about to collide" with the Web's 550 million social networkers worldwide, and a current $1.5 billion market in virtual goods (e.g., weapons in World of Warcraft, clothes and furniture in Second Life). One number that has been researched – by the conference's organizers – is that there are now more than 150 virtual worlds for youth 3-17 either available or in development (see this post).Related links"ClubPenguin's newest competition""Top 8 workarounds of kid virtual-world users""Here comes social gaming""Xbox Live with avatars""Benefits from having virtual selves"Virtual World NewsLabels: ClubPenguin, disney, dizzywood,
Important decision on fair use
It was an important decision for all those digital video producers and YouTube users out there. The Los Angeles Times called a San Jose federal court decision last week "a victory for fair use." Judge Jeremy refused to dismiss a lawsuit that a Pennsylvania woman filed after Universal Music Publishing forced YouTube to remove a video of her children cavorting to an old Prince hit," the Times reports. "But it may prove Pyrrhic, as the judge expressed doubt that the woman would ultimately be able to prove her case." According to PC Magazine, the judge said that "content owners must consider 'fair use' before sending Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices." The case was about a 29-second home video depicting little kids dancing in a kitchen to Prince's "Let's Go Crazy."Labels:
Everybody's 'digital dossiers'
Most people have no idea how many details of their lives are out there on the Net - copious detail, increasingly easy for anyone to find and put together. "These data points, some publicly accessible, others safeguarded to various degrees by companies and agencies that collect and store this data 'make' Andy's identity - as it forms, even before he himself begins to shape it," starting with the sonogram that goes into hospital records and the details behind a newborn's bar-coded bracelet. "Andy" is just a name pulled out of the air by the producers of a video on our "digital dossiers." The video is a project of the Digital Natives group at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. "Andy's digital dossier will even grow after his death - photos or videos of the funeral, RIP messages on MSN Messenger, or as Facebook status posts. Andy probably never knew how large his dossier was. How aware are you of the digital tracks you leave behind?" the producers ask. At the end of it are some resources for further information about the digital tracks we leave just about everywhere we go, online or offline. Here's a description in the Digital Natives blog.Labels:
'Law 'n' order' in virtual worlds
It's a fledgling concept, but there are some interesting community-policing efforts afoot in virtual worlds such as Second Life, VZones, World of Warcraft, and mobile-phone-based Cellufun for mobile phone users, the Washington Post reports. For example, "in World of Warcraft, a popular online fantasy game, a character who is acting out runs the risk of being attacked by a group of self-appointed sheriffs. While the avatar doesn't face official penalties, the interference from other players can deter future crimes." In one of Worlds.com's worlds, users created a novel sort of virtual scarlet letter: "an animated bird that drops an unpleasant [virtual] substance on the heads of outlaws, known as 'griefers' in virtual-world lingo." There needs to be a flip side too, of course. I love the way London-based Childnet International put it recently: "Digital citizenship isn’t just about recognising and dealing with online hazards. It's about ... using your online presence to grow and shape your world in a safe, creative way, and inspiring others to do the same" (see this item) - an important focus for parenting and schooling going forward along the lines of "an ounce of prevention," "a stitch in time," etc., etc.... Speaking of which, virtual world safety expert Izzy Neis recently blogged about how a kids' world itself will be used to teach civility. She wrote that Dizzywood.com for kids 8-12 was "selected by the YMCA of San Francisco to enhance the youth program’s technology curriculum ... to reinforce its program emphasis on activities that promote values such as caring, honesty, respect and responsibility."Labels: Cellufun,
Hi5 socializing for mobiles
The difference between Hi5.com's social-network site for the cellphone screen and those of MySpace and Facebook, CNET points out, is that Hi5's mobile edition 1) "openly targets" people around the world who primarily use mobile phones, not computers, to socialize, and 2) launched in 26 languages. CNET says Facebook and MySpace's mobile editions are designed more as supplements to their Web browser-accessed sites. Point No. 1 above makes particular sense for Hi5's Latin American market, if comScore's international social-networking data is to be believed. ComScore's recently unveiled data showed a 1,055% increase in traffic for Hi5 between June 2007 and this past June. Here's my summary of the comScore report. Here, too, is some context on the growing MoSoSo, or mobile-social-networking, phenomenon from the Christian Science Monitor.Labels: Hi5,
 Name: Anne Collier Location: United States (bio here)View my complete profile
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Virtual Worlds field trip
Kid-driven community 'newspapers'
Stealth surfing further enabled
Silently advertising to teens
Important decision on fair use
Students' online free-speech rights
Everybody's 'digital dossiers'
US tweens prefer to be online
West slow to take on Net addiction: Psychiatrist
'Law 'n' order' in virtual worlds
NFN 1998-2007 Indexes
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