Global Kids’ recent featured interview in the RezEd podcast series on education and virtual worlds focused on the results of the most significant study to date on youth and online safety. The results of the study, and how they were rejected by the very players who called for the study, provided me with some valuable insights regarding the challenges to using online communities for education and civic engagement.

First… Continue

If Linden Lab turns Second Life into a mixed-age grid we should not presume that, as night must follow day, that the need has passed for their youth-only grid, Teen Second Life (TSL). I would argue, in fact, that just the opposite is true, that the promise offered by TSL has yet to be realized and that replacing it with a mixed-age grid will only exacerbate existing problems that prevent youth from taking full advantage of this remarkable space.

The future of TSL has been in question for nearly… Continue

The University of Southern California’s Network Culture Project has invited Global Kids to participate in a small forum to discuss the compilation of an upcoming volume on virtual worlds, digital media and learning. The volume, supported by the MacArthur Foundation, is intended to define a collective vision for virtual worlds and to outline a multi-year research agenda.

As we prepare for the meeting, I would like to invite members of the RezEd community to weigh in and contribute to what GK can… Continue

This is a section we created for those new to Virtual Worlds. We will periodically add new information to this section over time. Feel free use the comment section to ask questions as well.

This is reblogged from the MacArthur Foundation's Spotlight Blog on Digital Media and Learning

Barry Joseph: Comparing Apples and Oranges in Virtual Worlds

Global Kids reflects on lessons learned from a massively multiworld simulcast of Kofi Annan’s receipt of the MacArthur Award for International Justice.

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