Quest Atlantis at NECC: Using Virtual Worlds to Teach Net Citizenship

Comment came from the panel at the Quest Atlantis session this afternoon with regard to something that came up during one of the leadership sessions at NECC 2009.

One of the members there suggested that we just get beyond fear.

Start acting like educators and stop being afraid of making mistakes.

Allow mistakes to produce innovation.

And that's so right on. Maybe we should ask the folks who demand we live by the rules of their fear exactly what it is that they've innovated recently.

None of us want kids to be put in harms' way. I've got three elementary aged kids of my own. I want them to be safe online.

But in the same way that you need to go through the somewhat dangerous practice of driver's ed in order to teach a kid how to drive safely, you need to teach kids how to exist in the virtual realm in order to teach them how to be a responsible Web citizen.

Quest Atlantis is exactly the type of virtual world to allow this sense of play and learning about virtual worlds among schoolkids.

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In the same session, the question of strangers and meeting people online came up.

Quest Atlantis itself is a very safe virtual environment for kids. Second Life it is not. It's more of a practice world where students get to take in all different sorts of lessons.

But there's really an even bigger reason we need kids to learn to manage their online lives as young people. Because, the world that they will enter into as young adults will be a world where they can NOT hide from strangers and the unknown. It is a world in which -- if they are going to be successful -- they will have to be prepared to ENGAGE strangers and the unknown.

Rather than hide from strangers, the panel threw down the real gauntlet:

"We should be TRYING to meet other people".

What it comes down to is this: we need to teach kids how to become citizens of the world. This doesn't mean we want to throw them into some imaginary nest of Internet perverts in a Second Life whorehouse. It means we want them to understand that 'being connected' means being connected to everyone; and that with connection comes responsibility.

And - most of all -- it means that you are not the center of, but rather a vital part of that world. You and billions of other people.

Student-centered virtual worlds such as Quest Atlantis are precisely the type of place where this education in digital citizenship can start.

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Get beyond fear.

No fear of technology. No fear of one another.

Idealistic? Yes.

Necessary? Absolutely.

Possible? If you want it.

It's Virtually Education

Thinking about video games. Well, not just 'video games', but MMOGs -- Massively Multiplayer Online Games.

Ed Week has got an interesting piece on gaming that ran a few days ago.

While the piece stresses the way in which players can handle multiple situations at once, (and of course what that implies about the human thinking apparatus), I find it even more interesting to think about what extreme gaming has done to the visual and experiential expectations of students.

Why are we trying to convince students that VRoma is a virtual environment when they've already toured all over the virtual environments of Azeroth?

Go ahead, click that last link and watch the trailer. Then you'll get an idea of what our kids 'expect' when we talk about 'virtual environments'.

I, for one, think this is a good thing. The kids are ahead of us. That puts us into the position of either catching up or becoming technologically irrelevant. I see this as a great challenge and a great opportunity. Why not engage in co-ops with game makers to create authentic virtual learning environments? Why not teach the Civil War by actually taking part in a virtual reconstruction of it? Why not teach the Theory of Relativity by living as virtual characters in Einstein's world? Why not learn US Government by living and working within a virtual US Congress?

I see a real future in merging ed tech with what's already going on in culture tech.