Google, e-safety tuition and Virtual World Digital Citizenship
Vicki Davis and her students are rightly annoyed that Google is effectively killing their project (or the prospect of repeating it) when Lively is switched off at the end of this month. Lively is a 3D environment rather like Second Life which Google Labs set up six or so months ago but have now decided to pull. Vicki and students set up a virtual room called, Digiteen World in which older students would teach younger students about Digital Citizenship and e-safety. They have recorded their project and reactions to the project on a wiki, which can be found here.
On news that Google were shutting down Lively, Vicki and her students decided to engage in an online protest to get their views across to Google about the loss of Lively. Here is an example of one protest statement the group made
Find more videos like this on Digi Teen
and the blog they set up to keep the protest alive.
A perhaps more interesting recording was one they made two days ago live from their classroom with students explaining how they used a 3D environment to both introduce Digital Citizenship and make others aware of the issues around e-safety including how to act online and the dangers addictive behaviours such as excessive texting as well as expressing their views on the technology, and on the closure of Lively.
The student’s views are extremely coherent and persuasive, but are unlikely to change Google’s mind. It’s admirable to see Vicki turning the disappointment into a learning opportunity, but perhaps a little ironic that one of the lessons of Digital Citizenship is that content stored on online digital systems is ephemeral in nature. While in the past, software might fail to run on newer operating systems or due to hardware upgrades, Web 2.0 applications are even more likely to come and go at an even greater rate. This provides a challenge for education where new and innovative practices might never have the opportunity to become embedded in other teachers’ classrooms.
Image credit: Digiteen blog - students in the Google Lively Protest Room
Tags: vickidavis, digiteen, lively
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December 12th, 2008 at 7:58 pm
Thank you so much for sharing the message of our students - although many say this is a waste of time, I think that empowering students to speak out on things that matter to them is NEVER a waste of time!!
Thank you so much for pointing out the positive things relating to this topic.
December 17th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
[...] as six months. Vicki’s class had just got into using Lively for a real educational purpose when the rug was pulled from under them, and Yahoo have just thrown Jumpcut into the deadpool, a free online video editing service [...]