Techlearning blog

This past week my wife (a school counselor) invited me into our 3rd and 4th grade classrooms to talk about Cyber Safety and Cyber Bullying; a great topic to cover during Wellness and Personal Safety month at our school.

I met with eight classes over 4 days, and had some great conversations with the students. However, it was within the first 5 minutes of the first classroom meeting that set the tone for the rest of the classes.

"Mr. U what about chatting to people in Club Penguin?"

Club What? Yes, I have been out of touch with this age group and where they like to go and what they like to do on the Internet since moving up to the middle school. Do not get me wrong, Miniclips is still their favorite site overall, but Club Penguin is running a close second.

That is right, a virtual world just for children. Now compare their site to Second Life who states:

"Second Life is a 3D online digital world imagined, created, and owned by its residents."

Hmmm, I don't know about you but it looks like we are setting students up for a virtual life.

My favorite part while cruising around the Club Penguin homepage has been reading some of the Frequently Asked Questions such as:

What happens to my coins, clothes, etc. after cancellation?
If you cancel your membership, your penguin’s belongings will go into storage and will be automatically retrieved when you re-subscribe.

I am just learning how to fly in Second Life and third graders are making money in their own virtual place? Where have I been, how did I miss this one?

Jim Dornberg points me to this New York Times article titled: My Daughter, the Burger-Flipping Penguin. I think it is a necessary read for every parent and educator. The article gives some great insight into what happens in Club Penguin and where our students are going to hang out and play online.

My daughter lives in two worlds. In one, she is the same small person I have always known, the one who chews on the end of her braid when she reads. But in the other, her imagination runs wild as she plays online at the kids’ social network sites where she and many of her friends recently persuaded their parents to open accounts for them.

Our students live in two worlds today…and if you think this is a bunch of nonsense, just ask them. I asked the 3&4 graders how many of them have a computer at home. 100% of the students in the classes I have asked have a computer. Some of the students even laughed at the question: "Everyone has a computer!" one little girl said. My wife also informs the students that they need to help their parents out, to teach their parents about the Internet and how to be safe, because they grew up without the Internet.

As my wife said this, I focused in on one little girl who looked wide eyed at me with her mouth open…the look on her face clearly asked "how in the world could you have grown up without the Internet?" Or as one of my 7th graders put it: "What did you do?"

This is the divide: Our students know a place that is foreign to us.

It’s parents who can’t keep up. Even after being reassured by representatives of these sites that they guard my child’s privacy and by psychologists that sitting at a screen for hours won’t kill her imagination, I wonder what she’s doing, whom she’s talking to and — here’s the part I find most mysterious — why it’s fun.

Kill her imagination…no it won’t kill it, instead it is probably helping it. When we were young, we went outside and ran around. We imagined bad people chasing us and played cops and robbers to stretch our imagination. Kids now are doing the same things, just with hundreds of other kids around the world. I am not saying all that screen time is good, but it is not all bad either. Think about what these kids are learning about in this space.

I went to the kitchen. There, I was happy to find Clementine was now considering a career in veterinary medicine. She had become Dr. Quack’s assistant, dispensing bandages, ice packs and medication to various animals.
“How do you know what treatment to give?” I asked.
“By the symptoms,” she said.
“I don’t see any symptoms,” I said.
“Shh,” she said. “I have to concentrate.”

These are places of learning. This student is learning to look for symptoms; earlier in the article, she was flipping burgers to make money for a scooter. She needed 50 bucks so she could buy a scooter. This is a place of learning, learning virtual social skills, virtual work ethics, and making virtual friends. This is all stuff you and I do not understand, but to these students, this generation., this is their playground

“Kids say it’s fun because they get to be a bit more in control than maybe 9-year-olds are in the real world,” Ms. McVeigh said. “What we tried to do is appeal to just about every range of interest. Some kids like to work, or look after pets, or decorate. Just like in life, you can follow your fancy.”

That sounds a lot like the same things my brothers and I did growing up. Of course, we did not have an interactive screen, we interacted with each other, but the games are the same…just in a different connected world.

This is a generation gap I may never bridge, having grown up in a time when typewriters roamed the earth and grazed alongside rotary dials. When I was Clementine’s age, we had a telephone exchange named “Terrace” and my phone number was TE3-2748.

Am I the only parent lost in the 21st century?

Many parents are finding themselves in this same situation. They are stuck in a world that they were not prepared for. We know how to keep our students safe in the real world, because we were taught how to be safe in the real world. This cyber world is different. For the most part, we are not there, we do not want to go there, we do not get it, and we do not see any need to get it.

However, we need to force ourselves to look into these virtual worlds to engage students in these spaces. Not for our future, but for theirs! Their future is a place that is more virtual than reality. Whether or not you think that’s a good thing, I think that is their future. By fighting it, we allow students to venture into these worlds unprepared to deal with the dangers that are out there. Club Penguin is safe for now…but what is next? Teen Life? Second Life? Or something that has not even been developed yet.

We do not need to ‘get it’ for us, we need to ‘get it’ for them.


Slatalla, M (2007, May 3). My Daughter, the Burger-Flipping Penguin. New York Times, p. Online Shopper.


Sidenote:
I am glad to see Existential Paine join our list of bloggers here at techlearning. I look forward to learning more from him in the coming weeks on just how we learn to adapt to this new virtual learning space.