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Feb. 15, 2001
Expert Advice
Dr. Kimberly Weiner, Virtual Peacemaker
Can kids resolve conflicts better online? We asked an expert for her take on using technology to help students sharpen their social skills.
By: Amy Poftak
Q. Tell me how you ended up focusing on conflict resolution.
A. I was teaching third grade in Chicago. It was tough because a lot of these kids came from situations where what they used to survive in their environment was the kind of behavior that is a nightmare for a teacher. Somebody disses you. You have to diss them back to prove your power. Using my background in performing and what I knew about technology, I started creating different programs to help these kids learn social skills.
Q. What are some examples of the programs you created?
A. One of the things we did was good, old-fashioned word processing. We would write group stories, come up with characters to role-play, and then write down three different possible endings. For third-graders, it helped them to see beyond the moment and learn the power of their own decision making. We took this further by going online into MOOs. I've been a MOO freak forever. It's like living inside a book. In a chat room, there is no context-it's words displayed out on a page. But within a MOO, you have an entire environment and you can build things, change your costume, and describe how you're looking and feeling.
Q. How did learning social skills enter into this?
A. Within this environment, there's a lot of freedom that comes from being able to express how you feel, and in a MOO you look at your thoughts before you send them. So you have a moment of reflection that in the normal course of a conversation you don't get. And we all worked together to build our ground rules for what it means to be a good citizen in this world. It was amazing to see how the kids' vocabularies grew because they couldn't rely on facial expressions or some physical mannerisms to really describe how they were feeling.
Q. Were you watching from your own screen?
A. I was always online with the kids. There are different levels of security and I was a "wizard," which means that I could see who everybody was even if they were in different rooms. Because the kids wanted to be there so badly, we never had a problem. I had one kid who would physically sit on her hands when she was getting angry to prevent herself from typing something that would get her thrown out of the MOO. This was a kid who was shut down-she didn't want to talk to anybody in that school-and this was her way of making sure she was able to stay in the environment.
Q. What do you think about the recent spate of online classes for kids?
A. I've seen some that are really good, really bad, and just downright spooky. There's no one right recipe. Some kids, especially if they tend to be very shy verbally, will blossom in an online class because they don't feel that "eyeball" effect. Some kids get so caught up with how their words look to the professor-they need that immediate feedback so badly-that an online environment is very challenging for them. It's dependent on the individual child. If the child is getting something online that he or she cannot get in the immediate vicinity, why in the world would we not want to provide that? But if we're putting a child online just because it's cheaper or easier for us, then I think we've got a lot of thinking to do. The most frightening thing is trying to reach too many at once, so that we lose the whole concept of the individual.
Amy Poftak is executive editor of Technology & Learning.
Dr. Weiner will be presenting at SchoolTech Expo New York this March on using the Internet to integrate social skills, conflict resolution, and peer mentoring across the curriculum.
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