My avatar's talk: Online safety 2.0

I - or I should say my avatar Anny Khandr - recently gave some talks about safety on the social Web in the virtual world Second Life. The experiences were great fun and kind of magical on many levels. First, I'm giving my PowerPoint-enabled talk from an easy chair in my family room, using a mic plugged into my laptop. I'm watching myself (or the Anny Khandr cartoon version of me) standing next to my slides before an audience of amazing tech educators around the country, who are all probably listening from easy chairs in their houses too, but at the same time gathered in one place: a beautiful "outdoor" virtual lecture space, complete with stage, screen, benches, and ambient birdsong. We were "gathered" on one of ISTE's islands in Second Life (ISTE for the International Society for Technology in Education, of which both my audience and I are all members).

My, er, Anny's first talk - kindly arranged for by New Jersey tech educator Kevin Jarrett (aka "KJ Hax," who gives teacher tours: see this) - was in a bigger venue and had a substantial audience, but there were problems in the recording process. So the "machinima" you'll see is a more intimate talk I later gave to a small group of avatars/educators, some of whom amazingly came back for seconds! [A machinima is a kind of animated video, or moving screenshots - video recorded within virtual worlds - and can range in subject from "action" videos like what you see in videogames to videos of professionals' avatars giving PowerPoint presentations. Quite the range!] The recording of my talks was done by Marianne Malmstrom, aka the extremely clue-filled "Knowclue Kidd," another great teacher in New Jersey. The whole idea, I think, was Peggy Sheehy's. Peggy, literally a rockstar tech educator (a former rock vocalist), teaches in Suffern, N.Y., and on several islands in Second Life, where she/her avatar is known as Maggie Marat. These educators are the real magic of Second Life to me. If you opened your own account at SecondLife.com, created an avatar, and teleported to ISTE Island, you'd experience what I have: the members' seemingly bottomless kindness and patience and what the tech education part of it has to teach about the gift economy (see this entry in Wikipedia).

The talk is best viewed here, but if anyone would like to download this animated 40-min. talk to their laptop as a better way to show it to fellow parents or educators, please feel free to download it here (it's a huge file, so it can be downloaded either in two parts or in full). Email me via anne(at)netfamilynews.org. if you'd like my PPT notes, with links to all sources. If it's a cartoon, it's a serious one - maybe a little boring too, but also a snapshot of the latest research on social Web safety.

Young practitioners of social media literacy!

What do you get when you cross Greek mythology with a media literacy class on paid political advertising? Well, if you're media literacy teacher Marianne Malmstrom, you get 30-sec. video ads about kicking various lesser gods off Olympus that end with "I am Zeus, and I approve of this message" (see "The Dog Ate My Homework" project at the Elisabeth Morrow School in Englewood, N.J.). This is media literacy education 2.0. It can take many forms, but this approach teaches critical thinking about media messages by having students create their own messages collaboratively, using social media - in this case, the Second Life virtual world. Malmstrom's students created avatars, wrote scripts, and "filmed" and edited machinima (like video screenshots, or "movies" of what's happening in a virtual world). Check out the first ad on that page (it's only 30-some seconds). Also don't miss this 5:46 video, "No Future Left Behind," created by multiple stars at Suffern Middle in Suffern, N.Y., with the help of tech and media teacher Peggy Sheehy. It's a keynote presentation for the Net Generation Education Project involving 10 schools. The students were asked about how education was preparing them for the future, and their collective answer is an appeal to us adults to allow them to learn in school the way they already are on the Internet, as social media practitioners and producers and as fluent "information hunter-gatherers," as MIT media professor Henry Jenkins put it. "Education really needs an upgrade," the first line of the students' video goes.