Can Second Life Save Creatively Stymied Kids?

Roland Legrand of Mixed Realities has a very interesting post on how user-created virtual worlds can save creative kids who are stymied by factory-style school systems. Or as he provocatively puts it, "How Second Life can prevent schools from drugging ballerinas". Snip:

The basic lesson of Second Life is that the user should create and control her environment. Even though there is this learning curve and practical hurdles, it is essentially possible to create from nothing a whole universe. Maybe business people don’t have the time to script and build, but scripting and building are great activities in an educational context.

I think the first part is true, but at the moment, I'm not sure 3D virtual worlds are the best platform for kids. As some educators have noted, most Gen Y students actually seem to feel stymied by a totally open-ended world like Second Life. Then again, that's also true of trigonometry, figure drawing, and other pedagogical subjects. Perhaps the best thing is to immerse students in worlds like SL in the assumption that everyone will at least be challenged to think more creatively-- and the hope that a handful of them have a new medium in which to flourish even further.

Comments

[Eddy]

SL is to expensive and oppressive for kids to create in :-p

[Lizzie Lexington]

Ok so I will not name names on this one but....I have a couple of SL friends who are content creators who allowed their children under the age of 9 come in to SL supervised and on their land only. And what these kids created was unbelievable. They were building and designing in less than 24 hours. So I strongly disagree with the idea that most Gen Y kids would be stymied by an open ended world like second life. Yes they may need a bit of guidance but, oh my god, isn't that what parents and educators should be doing anyway?

[Ann Otoole]

I used to teach very advanced electronics to just out of high school kids. Some were hard to teach and it took extra time with them for the lightbulbs to turn on.

Had I had SL as a teaching simulator it would have saved a lot of time and made the connections faster. Asi things were they had to trace circuit paths with colored pencils. That was most of the day for days on end. Might have been better to have them build the circuits in a 3D simulator where they were literally inside the equipment.

The fact of the matter is to learn you have to have goals and a path to get there. By enabling some degree of freedom you can help some people get to the "ah hah!" moment faster.

But just allowing a bunch of kids to roam a grid all day seems unproductive. There must be goals and tasks to complete.

The reason WoW and EQII are more popular (and they pay $15 a month to be there) is exactly because it is structured, there are clear goals, and there is status to be obtained by rising to the top. How do you translate that structure to Second Life in an educational sense? We never had this technology before. Totally new territory.

On the other hand kids that are taking adderall are probably going to excel at learning in a 3D world. That particular psychogenic medication is also prized by college students from what I have been told. So it depends on the meds as to whether someone is being drugged into a stupor. I do think that putting kids into a stupor is a cop out for people to not have to deal with them. When I was a kid there were no drugs. Only switches, paddles, and coathangers for ADD/ADHD kids. We all survived without the dope. So can today's kids. Schools seem to be trying to maintain order through psychogenic medications. 3D metaverses are not even going to make public school administrations stop administering dope to keep kids compliant zombies. Your going to have to get congressional help with that.

Tell you what. Maybe someone needs to build a summer camp over on the teen grid and find out if it works. I'm not keen on the concept of LL dragging freebies to the teen grid but that is what is going on. We had to build ours. Why can't they? Do they need some textures or something? Some alpha masks? what is it they need to build their own world? Why do they need our stuff? etc etc.

Interesting topic.

[AlterEgoTrip Svenska]

@Eddy

Drugs for various made up mental deficiencies are too expensive and oppressive for kids parents to afford. Personally I feel that virual learning would make a wonderful and interactive platform for children of a certain age.

Its too expensive not to develop and leave valuable group of children to rot in conventional school systems. Schools themselves can have their own private sims, the kids don't need to pick up a bill and then mark it all up to educational spending. (this will probably be much lower than a football team and would probably utilise computer labs that already exist)

[Deadpan]

I can see this working if we provided them a separate grid and asset system. And some moderation to keep gutterheads in check.

[Doreen Garrigus]

I really object to kids being segregated away from the main grid. We have a rating system in SL: PG, Mature, and Adult. Merge the grids and keep the kids in the PG areas. Then enforce the ratings.

Gen Y needs the open-ended experience that Second Life provides. They have spent their entire lives scheduled tight, herded from supervised activity to supervised activity, with almost no down-time in between. Of course the idea of a place where there are no grades, ranks, or point systems terrifies them. They have never been given the opportunity to dream.

[Iggy O]

"Yes they may need a bit of guidance but, oh my god, isn't that what parents and educators should be doing anyway?"

@ Lizzie, when Feldie interviewed me for the original story about Gen Y that Hamlet notes here (I prefer the term "Millennials") I was not encouraged about their ability to be creative. I'd taught two courses with SL and it wasn't looking good. My data seemed to support a number of decent demographic studies show US youth born after 1982 to be overly cautious about novelty and play, partly because their lives in the US have been so programmed.

But that is only part of the story. In my third encounter with Millennials using SL, I gave them (as my sources recommended) more structured tasks, step-by-step guidance, and, at a few points (in particular the first hour in world) one-on-one mentoring in SL and IRL. We sat together with our laptops and some good coffee...jab in the ribs at LL because laptops are how almost all of my students compute, so adjust your graphics requirements accordingly, Linden dude.

The students in that class (all 18 year old first-years) did great work. By semester's end they built some simple structures for a photo-show for some off-campus visitors to our university island, and we were having FUN at midnight, working on this project in SL.

[Hamlet Au]

Fascinating, Iggy (and all.) I'd love to see more explicit test cases I can blog about. :)

[Nexii Malthus]

Coming myself from the Teen Grid (Now 19 yrs old, joined at 15rys~), I think that my opinion has a substantive weight here.

The biggest problem I see, is the oppressive nature of adults against children. Ageism is rampant in our society, causing great potential to become lost in all this madness, from prejudice and pressure put on us.

This whole "Teen Grid" thing itself is pretty ridicolous, I seen many friends just quit SL altogether as soon as they were forced into the Main Grid.

Registration is a second issue here, it is hard to register an account into the TG, whereas it is very easy to make an account on the MG illegally, indeed, I have known MANY fellow teens who have accounts here in the MG.

Back onto prejudice; I will give you a little story, an unfortunate overlooked story that has happened a few too many times:

Teen creates an account on MG (without any care of ToS/age limit or being oblivious to these rules). Enjoys the freedom SL brings, blossoms into a potential talented creator. He is happy with the world he lives in, has a good moral code, never steals or griefs. Until one day he shares his age, along comes the bandwagon of adults who are disgusted of a child being on their grid. They Abuse Report the Teen, shout insults and shun the individual, unfortunately they are right, because the Linden Lab rules state that Ageism is a clearly legal conduct. Teen is banned, and a rose disappears in a sea of rotten minds.