Learning In Virtual Worlds
Posted by anastasia on 11-15-2007
Last night I spoke on a panel at USC about kids and virtual worlds sponsored by Common Sense Media and The MacArthur Foundation. I'm waiting for the video to be posted, but in the meantime, I'll share my impressions.
Passive learning. When people ask whether these virtual worlds are educational, you often think of the content being provided by the creators of the world itself — for example, memory games or the science-y stuff in Whyville. What I really took away from last night was the value of passive learning, which Doug Thomas so brilliantly articulated. It goes beyond just increasing literacy through typing messages back and forth to each other, it's learning how to be in a community, how to treat others (and the consequences of treating others poorly), or organizing/collaborative/leadership skills you pick up planning a virtual party at a virtual club. I was re-reading the news article about Zwinktopia, which talked about how residents decided to staff a virtual pizza joint — created uniforms and showed up for shift work. Now if only teens would still do that in real life…
Don't just limit screen time, understand exactly what kind of screen time you're limiting. This was interesting to me on the parent angle, since I encourage parents to set limits. The analogy was made to reading Harry Potter. Would you limit your kid to only one hour of reading their favorite book? It's a complicated issue, but the gist was being able to weight the passive learning of spending lots of time in certain games with the need to play with friends, get exercise, etc. I would love to see researchers and pediatricians team up on this to offer parents some real guidelines they can use, but it also sounds like it's always going to be a judgment call.
Cursing, cheating, bullying, stealing and bumping. Kids are still kids — so everything they would do in real life happens virtually. I loved the slide Yasmin Kafai showed from Whyville revealing how tweens have gamed the filters to be able to curse. That takes some serious literacy skills. It would be naive for us to think that all of human nature wouldn't somehow be reflected in these worlds or that kids wouldn't want to experiment with virtual sex. One of the attendees told me how she began to notice "bumping" in Club Penguin (she linked it to the Disney purchase). Bumping is basically penguins trying to have sex with other penguins. It made me think of what I used to do with Barbie and Ken…
Virtual worlds used for GOOD. I love what Barry Joseph is doing with teens in Teen Second Life — i.e. engaging them around social issues like child soldiers in Africa and learning about the Holocaust. I just wish Second Life wasn't so hard for most teens to use. Global Kids must be replicated in other after school programs and in schools. How much more interesting would it be to learn about the Holocaust by being a virtual tour guide for your peers at a virtual Holocaust museum? This type of experiential learning beats memorization hands down in my opinion.
November 15th, 2007 at 9:25 am
Personally I owe a lot to video games, and I liken them to Ap Calc. AP calc is basically useless for what I do, but it was a mental exercise and overall it has intangible positive effects on my thinking process. Hours spent playing real time strategy games, interacting with people in MMOs, and trying to predict my opponents strategy in a first person shooter definitely made me smarter in the long run. In addition, I learned to fix and build computers to fuel my gaming addiction.
Just some thoughts. It isn't just edutainment titles that grow kids minds.
November 15th, 2007 at 9:54 am
I'm totally going to share my "bumping" story today. I relayed it to my co-workers (and then again to Joi Podgorny) today…
It was super great to see you yesterday (a friendly face was just what the dr ordered). And great job with the panel! Woo hoo!
November 15th, 2007 at 10:30 am
Hmmm… I'm not sure I understand how the stuff teens are typing is increasing literacy. The words I receive on my text messages and e-mails are often shorthand and/or spelled wrong. Could you elaborate more, or send me a link where I can learn more about this.
Your final thoughts on the educational aspects - learning through virtual worlds - is a fantastic thing, and I, too, would like to see more of it.
November 15th, 2007 at 4:51 pm
Hi Paul — I think typing in shorthand and typing to talk period means you are reading (other people's messages) and writing (even if you're playing with the language to make it more efficient for the medium).
See a related post on this on Totally Wired.
November 16th, 2007 at 3:01 pm
Thanks for the bumping comment. I've noticed lots of attempts to kiss, mostly by penguins that seem to be operated by girls. I do kind of wonder what's going on in some of those igloos. I am not completely convinced about all the positiveness of kids virtual worlds. It's inevitable and part of me thinks it's great. But it sort of sounds like the panel was too optimistic. So I blogged about that today as I'm trying to follow CP stuff
hightechparent.blogspot.com
November 17th, 2007 at 5:40 pm
Paul,
You may want to check out the kind of work the folks at UW Madison are doing on this:
Research on Games and Literacy
November 19th, 2007 at 11:28 am
Anastasia, Thank you so much for the kind words. To watch my homemovie of the day, or the original video from the event, please go here.