Digital Citizenship in Virtual Worlds
This session titled Digital Citizenship in Virtual Worlds: A Playground for Rehearsing Ethics on March 30, 2010, was amazing. I was immersed in this virtual world listening to how educators use virtual worlds to support the learning of (such as Quest Atlantis and Ramapo's Teen Grid) for school-aged children and the issues surrounding appropriate behaviour and social responsibility.
One of the biggest messages I got from this session was that while students are engaging in virtual world environments to assist their learning it is vitally important that they are still aware of the requirements to adhere to acceptable behaviours and social responsibilities. These social responsibilities are no different in world to those that are expected in the real world. This confirms what hosts Bron Blomome and Maggie Marat suggests that Quest Atlantis, and other virtual environments, are an extension of the school rather than being a separate world.
I will attempt to summarise what I got out of attending this session - bearing in mind that I dipped in and out at various times to attend to my two pre-school children. Despite this I still managed to hear a lot of the conversations and debates regarding the use of virtual worlds for education and the ethics that arise as a result. The hosts of the session consider that student and teacher sense of community that is developed in this online environment to be a better way than strict monitoring and filtering by outside agencies. The hosts proposed that by developing positive attributes from within students in trust and behaviour. This initially occurs through student orientation whereby students earn the right to chat and earn an avatar. They argue that it is better to moderate student use in virtual worlds, rather than to control. It is ensuring that students engage in age-appropriate behaviour by taking ownership of the virtual world they belong to.
By engaging in virtual worlds for learning, students are encouraged to develop/extend their social skills. Students need to be wary in the way they interact with others and need to be aware there is a real person on the other side of the avatar. Students learn to be sensitive to others in the environment - avatars don't have gestures or other visual communication cues that give clues as to what is really meant. The facilitators proposed that learning in a virtual environment mirrors the norms and behaviours and appropriate social discourse of the outside school world in terms of privacy, online safety, cyber bullying and digital citizenship. Where there are issues of concern regarding student behaviour in virtual worlds, these cases are in the minority. The hosts indicated that of the tens of thousands of students who engaged in virtual learning - it was only a few students who behaved inappropriately.
Based on the conversations of today the benefits of virtual learning whereby students can explore, discuss, live out and reflect on notions of identity, online safety and digital citizenship outweigh the concerns. Quest Atlantis offers students a safe harbour - students understand the boundaries and respect the autonomy of others within a space to learn. Students learn social responsibility in a secure environment - learning in a context to experience and learn appropriate behaviours where there is a safety net through teacher moderation, not censorship.
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