Literacy in virtual worlds

Yay! Am so excited as we (Julia Gillen, Julia Davies, Guy Merchant and myself) have just heard that our ESRC application for funding for a seminar series on children's and young people's digital literacy practices in online virtual spaces (virtual worlds and MMOGs) has been successful. Six whole seminars and a conference on what is my favourite research topic at the moment - simply delicious! I, of course, will be focused on my work on Club Penguin in the series. I met the Club Penguin European production team last week and what a lovely group they are - I was really impressed by how they respond to and build on children's ideas for the virtual world and they reply individually to every email they get (over 80,000 a week in the UK). And not only that, they now enable avatars to wear a wig AND a tiara at the same time - yippee, as that was a recurring complaint made by the children I interviewed about CP! So watch this space regarding the seminar series in the next academic year - we will be posting papers and presentations online for those who can't attend.

Gaming for Good ™

KZero regularly produce useful charts that detail the growth of virtual worlds. They now have a chart that outlines the range of virtual worlds aimed at five- to ten-year-olds, available here. Not sure why a perennial favourite, Club Penguin, isn't listed. The chart indicates that Barbie Girls now has 17 million registered accounts, but that is eclipsed by Pearson Education's Poptropica at 40 million accounts (the games are good, apparently). With so many worlds flooding the market, it isn't easy for new ones to make a splash, but Elf Island has. This virtual world links the gaming to 'real-world' non-profit projects and attempts to inculcate the values of good citizenship. As the producers state on the site:

Through Mirrored Gaming, kids learn about non-profit projects and, by completing a GoodQuest, they help real people, animals and the earth.
- Planting a tree in our virtual world causes trees to be planted in the real world.
- Building a home in our virtual world causes real homes to be built in the real world.
- Helping sharks in our virtual world helps sharks in the real world.

I like the concept of Mirrored Gaming™ , as it explained on the Elf Island Blog (practising good online and reflecting that good offline) - but wonder why the producers of the game felt the need to trademark the phrase - as they have also done with the phrase 'Gaming for Good ™? Let's hope they had good intentions for doing so.

Barack Obama

This is certainly an exciting day, as it is the inauguration of America’s first black president and also a president who is cognisant of the power of technology (just look at the list of social networking sites Obama and his campaigners use as an indication of this). Indeed, he has appointed two Second Life innovators to his ‘Innovation Agenda’ group and so no doubt US educators look forward to virtual worlds becoming a more central part of the education agenda in the years ahead. I will be reading RezEd to find out how this agenda emerges, but in the meantime check out the very interesting report on ethics in virtual worlds produced by the group, available here. As for now, there's only one thing left to say - Go, Obama!

Virtual world links

Thanks to Joanne Larson for the link to this overview of the most amazing interactive interface, g-speak. I can't wait until that technology becomes affordable for schools! In the meantime, there's lots to think about in terms of the educational implications of virtual worlds. I was interviewed by DK of MediaSnackers this week about my 'Club Penguin' research and found out about his excellent website that contains interesting podcasts on virtual worlds, amongst other issues - the link is here. The podcasts have been recorded for RezEd, a community of educationalists interested in virtual worlds. Check out their site, lots of interesting stuff on it.

Virtual worlds and literacy

When I was in Adelaide, I presented a paper on play and literacy in virtual worlds, which can be downloaded here. I have since decided that it should really have been presented as two papers, one on play in virtual worlds and one on literacy in virtual worlds, and so I have now written the former and sent it off to an early childhood journal (and if anyone is interested in a copy of that, contact me and I will send it to you). I am finishing off the virtual worlds and literacy paper now and it includes the list of literacy skills that I argue some of the worlds can foster:

• reading skills and strategies including: word recognition (e.g. the vocabulary choices in ‘safe chat’ mode; instructions; in-world environmental text), comprehension, scanning text in order to retrieve appropriate information, familiarity with how different texts are structured and organised, understanding of authors’ viewpoint, purposes and overall effect of the text on the reader;
• writing skills and strategies including: spelling, punctuation, syntax, writing using and adapting a range of forms appropriate for purpose and audience, using language for particular effect;
• writing for known and unknown audiences;
• using text to negotiate, collaborate and evaluate.

This list ties in with national assessment criteria for literacy in England. However, this is really rather a narrow set of skills and strategies to focus on, given the range of multimodal literacy practices in evidence in children's use of Club Penguin, for example. In attempts to normalise children's use of popular cultural texts in educational contexts, it is tempting to justify it with reference to established standards (and I often do!). But we need to move beyond this and challenge such narrow visions of what literacy is; schools need to be developing assessment criteria that embrace digital text production and analysis. Criteria, for example, that could be used to evaluate this text, which has to be one of my favourite Club Penguin machinima ever...

Clickable fairies

Robin Raskin has an interesting post about Disney's range of products relating to fairies, such as Pixie Hollow in which children can create a fairie avatar for the Pixie Hollow world. As Robin explains, Disney have collaborated with Clickables to provide artefacts that can link in RL to each other and this activity then relates to the online world:

A clickable item...can “click” with another Disney Fairies piece of jewelry, allowing girls to trade items from jewelry to jewelry, girl to girl. Once at home they can place their jewelry in a special jewelry box and whatever trade took place in real life between two friends shows up on their on-screen avatars in the Pixie Hollow world. As you play the games on Pixie Hollow you gain points towards things for your personal space in that world, and when you click bracelets in the real world you get points that you can redeem online.

This is an interesting development on the Webkinz model, in which RL toys integrate with online environments, as it extends the possibilities for RL social networking around the worlds and related artefacts and dissolves further the boundaries between online and offline activities.

Children and virtual worlds

The interest in virtual worlds continues to grow. The Journal of Virtual Worlds has been launched and the first issue can be found here. On this site there is an interview with Gauntlett and Jackson on their study on Adventure Rock. And here there is a report on research that illuminates how some children are operating in virtual worlds. I certainly found some children in my current study reporting on scams they carried out in Habbo Hotel, and I do think that the anonymity of the world meant that children who might not otherwise have done so joined in with the scams. However, there was also supportive/ collaborative behaviour reported by the children, which seems to become sidelined in articles like this. Meanwhile, Guy has started to compile a list of virtual worlds for children. To this we can add: Bin Weevils, Zwinky, and Handipoints, in which children earn in-world credit by doing out-of-world chores and homework - mmm, wonder how popular that is?

Second Department

Here is my avatar in Second Life, Jackie Darkstone, pictured outside our new Departmental building, which has been kindly given to us by our University of Sheffield colleague Sheila Yoshikawa. She runs the Infolit iSchool in Second Life and this building is on the Infolit Island. I am a relative newbie to SL and am, along with my colleague Jason Sparks, exploring ways to embed it in our teaching programmes. I haven't had much time to spend on this before now but then realised I couldn't delay any longer and am amazed by what people are achieving in SL. Sheila, for example, manages to run Infolit Island and has her own virtual shop. A group called 'Global Kids' Digital Media Initiative' is doing some great stuff with teenagers and of course Angela Thomas has been showing us for some years what educationalists can do in SL. My own explorations will be rather more modest in nature but I am keen nonetheless - and if you are not yet convinced by the idea, then visit the SLED blog for more inspiration.

Adventure Rock

David Gauntlett and Lizzie Jackson have undertaken an evaluation of children's responses to the BBC's virtual world Adventure Rock, which they reported on at the conference I attended last week. You can find their presentation here. They identified eight different 'types' of virtual world users:

• Explorer-investigators
• Self-stampers
• Social climbers
• Fighters
• Collector-consumers
• Power-users
• Life-system builders
• Nurturers

These are helpful categories, I think, but it seems to me that children move across these categories at different times. It would be interesting to trace these categories in relation to gender at some point. In the meantime, you can read a news bulletin about the Adventure Rock study here.

Children and virtual worlds

I went to an interesting conference on children and virtual worlds today where I was able to pass on to a Club Penguin representative the finding from one of my studies that young girls are really getting frustrated that their penguin avatars can't wear a wig and a tiara at the same time. Important stuff. Lots of good things were said about user-generated content all day and so hopefully soon kids will be able to make their own wigs and tiaras in CP. I was a little worried at the end, however, when someone from the BBC suggested that 3D television would soon be here. I already get motion sickness from using Nintendo Wii and flying in Second Life and so the thought that I will now also have to face travel sickness when watching TV is just too much!

More VIPs

The latest in the 'virtual worlds linked to offline artefacts' phenomenon aimed at girls is the Littlest Pet Shop VIPs, (Virtual Interactive Pets) by Hasbro, a clear copy of the Webkinz and MyePets forumla, which is:

a) A physical artefact, a 'cute' pet that has its own individual, 'secret' code.
b) A certificate of ownership or adoption.
c) Excessive use of pastel shades in the products themselves and related artefacts and texts.
d) The physical pet can be represented on screen in a related virtual world once the owner enters the code on the relevant website and becomes a member of the 'community' of owners. Websites incorporate aspects of social networking e.g. chat, collaborative games. For example, the 'Littlest Pet Shop VIPs' marketing blurb states:

'A virtual world wouldn’t be complete without knowing what’s going on in your community. The LITTLEST PET SHOP VIPs world will include fun and informative community features such as “Breaking News” and a “Community Calendar” alerting girls to the new and exciting activities that are unfolding, “Pet of the Day” a random spotlight on a pet based on photos submitted by VIPs owners; and “High Scores” to see how you and your pet stack up against others in overall rankings of the 16 mini-games.'

e) Discourses of care and nurturing permeate the sites - owners are encouraged to house, feed, play with and pamper their pets. For example, you can 'pamper and primp your e-Pet at the Spa'.
f) Owners are able to personalise their pets, both on- and off-line.
g) There is on- and off-line marketing of a range of related texts and artefacts e.g. cards, books. This includes an area on the websites which offers a 'store locator', or guidance about how to buy the pets and related goods.
h) Membership procedures involve the company having email addresses of customers.
i) Websites include areas for parents which reassure them about safety issues (but not economic ones).

Littlest Pet Shop VIPs will be launched in the US in October, followed by a global launch in spring 2008. My colleague at the University of Sheffield, Julia Davies, wrote about a similar phenomenon, that of the virtual baby site, 'Babyz'. In her paper, she talks about how some of these site users 'barbarise' their babyz. Maybe the same will happen to these nauseous virtual pets...

Virtual worldz

The virtual world market for young children continues to grow, with the news that Disney have just bought Club Penguin for 350 million dollars(set to be £700m if the site meets targets). In the meantime, check out Webkinz, which requires you to purchase a pet in the 'real' world before you can join the virtual one. A parent writes about his six-year-old son's experience of using it here. A big and growing business - just let's hope the producers begin to offer better fare for girls than the Barbie experience. Scary, then, that the Barbie Girls virtual world will soon be bigger than Second Life in terms of membership...

Virtual genetics

If you think that the Barbie Girls world is rather saccharine, then you will no doubt think that the virtual community that is Pony Island is just as bad, filled as it is with My Little Pony creations, including newborn ponies...Participants can raise and train their ponies but if you think that it is just all play then the Pony Island creators claim on the parents' page that it 'uses a simplified version of real life genetics, our players will over time learn about dominant and recessive genes, how they work and are used'. Simplified genetics? Surely young girls deserve better than this as they begin to explore virtual worlds?

Children's virtual worlds

I have been observing my 5-, 8- and 9-year-old nieces as they navigate the virtual worlds 'Club Penguin' and 'Barbie Girls'. Interestingly, the social side of this 'social software' appears to take second-place to identity construction and shopping (and therefore needing to earn enough money to shop). Children's play has been embedded within commercialised practices for many years, but this engagement with a virtual labour market is novel. Some parents may no doubt quite like the idea of their children developing a work ethic, but it seems to me that this aspect of these worlds mitigates against more extensive social involvement and further entrenches children in the markets of globalised commodities. For example, the Barbie virtual shopping experience is linked to the 'real'-word purchase of a Barbie MP3 player - once you have purchased that (with 'real' $s, not 'Barbie bucks'), you can buy more, even cooler, things in the online world. I guess what is going on here is little different to some of the adult activity in virtual worlds - this is, as we know, a booming real-word economy. This analysis of virtual (or 'synthetic') world economies draws on Bourdieu's concepts of economic, social and cultural capital, concepts as relevant to these spaces as 'meat-space'. Certainly, an analysis of the interactions of these three forms of capital can help to illuminate much of the current activity in 'Club Penguin' and 'Barbie World' and is informing a current paper I am writing, which I will post here when I set up the appropriate feeder site. It will be interesting to hear about the project Guy is involved in, in which he is working with schools on constructing and using a virtual world - what form of capital becomes of most value in an educationally-orientated virtual world? Virtual cultural capital?