NMC Campus Observer

Henry Jenkins SL Visit

CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) : Dec 21, 2006 12:40am

Today was a multi location event where Henry Jenkins was visiting the Teen Grid for the Global Kids A World Fit For Children Festival. Wow was my computer screen busy with all the things we needed behind the scenes to make this work. We had Henry and Barry Joseph on a teleconference line, with the audio going into my laptop and streaming back out to second life via our streaming server. There was audio coming in from a stream provided by Alpha Z - one of the Global Kids teens, and we had a collection of music stored on my computer that we streamed back to both locations for the breaks between Henry’s remarks (time for dancing!).

Audience gathered in NMC Campus to hear Henry Jenkins speak. Photo in back was sent from the Global Kids Island just before the program started; side screens flashed random photos.

We offer apologies to anyone’s who lost audio or experience hiccups- we are still investigating, but there were some things we tried for this event for the first time. And also, sorry for the background noise as my microhone picked up my keyboard tapping and chair movements! Anyhow, the recorded audio archive is available below– we edited out the dance music segments with some quick fades.

Henry Jenkins From Global Kids Island

On our end from the Huntley Ballroom on NMC Campus, we could not “see” the activity on the Teen Grid, so we had set up two screens with randomly changing pictures of the Impact of Digital Media symposium from October, where Henry first visited via a video stream from New York into Second Life for the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Learning announcement. There were also other photos of henry snagged form flickr, and some of the snapshots fro Global Kids Island.

So some highlights from Henry’s remarks… There were some insightful questions form the teens! Like Mariel, a 16 year-old GlobalKid from Mexico, who asked, “Do you think the presence of activism and education in digital media will make the opinions of young people more relevant and more involved?” Henry’s response:

There’s plenty of signs that young people are using new technologies to find out more about what’s taking place in the world around them. We’ve seen protest marches here in Second Life and a variety of other games where you have people expressing their opinions. I wrote recently in my blog about a protest march in a Chinese game, Westward Journey. It ha well over 1000 people going up and protesting in the game to express their dissatisfaction with some aspect of national politics. Because they can hide behind their avatars in the game world, they can express their ideas in China that they would not be able to rally in Tiananmen Square and express. I think these games are beginning to be a place where people learn how to be parts of communities, how to care about issues.

I write in my new book about Alphaville, the largest city in the Sims Online, and the elections that were held there– which turned out to be an election between a 21 year old guy and a 14 year old girl. They ended up having a debate on national public radio about the issues that were affecting their town in the Sims. And the whole thing became a big issue about the election– who could vote, there was election fraud, there was heated debates. And out of which came a lot of commitment of young people to try and figure out a way to make real world democracy work better.

Henry acknowledged a lot of his fans repeated fascination with his beard, so it was no surprise when one of the kids asked, “Will Henry ever get his beard corn-rowed?” (tune in to the podcast to hear te answer!)

Alpha Zaius, the teen DJ who streamed the music before and after the event wanted to know where will the internet, and interactive media such as Second Life, might be in 5 years…

Someone argued recently that we were about to move from Web 2.0, which is the world of social networks like mySpace to the world of 3.0, the era of immersive worlds, like Second Life. I think that Second Life is emerging as a really important space where people are doing lots of experiments, a space where governments are involved, industry is involved, education, political activists, minority groups of all kinds. So we’re seeing it as a place that is almost as diverse as the real world itself. And its a place where people can go and spin all the rules, try things they would never be able to do in the real world. So you can come in with 3 eyes and green, or your dressed as your favorite anime character– that becomes part of what you’re doing in Second Life, but you can also reinvent the economy, You can also re-imagine governments, you can create new connections between people in different countries around the world. And that’s what exciting people now about Second Life and why its going to be an important site for whatever changes take place in digital media over the next handful of years.

And from our location at NMC, Beth Kavka asked, “There has been a lot of criticism lately that Second Life is just a fad and does not have educational value, partly in response to recent hype, what is your opinion? Are we all wasting our time and money?”

I don’t think its a fad. Once you reach the point where you have two million subscribers, you’ve created something that has some impact in the culture. I know that there was some criticism of Second Life recently arguing that yes there are two million subscribers but there’s far fewer numbers at any given time using te space. I think that’s a fair criticism. It has been hyped. To some degree, the educational value is in being able to reinvent the world. And that’s a powerful educational thing. it’s about being able to bring together people from many different spaces and have them co-exist together and have a kind of communication that’s possible through distance learning… in a much more embodied way. That’s what we’re involved with right now. The are people here from very different places.

It’s what you do in Second Life that’s educational. There’s nothing intrinsically educational about Second Life. It’s certainly educational to have a world where most of the content is generated by the users– the opportunity to program and build stuff in Second Life is pretty awesome. Again, it’s what you do with it — technologies don’t have an inevitable consequence; it’s based on the choices we make on the ground, within our own societies, for how we use these technologies.

We have to find ways to use games not to escape reality, but to re-engage with reality, and that’s the exicting thing about the work of Global Kids — it is grounded in both the virtual space and the real space. You’re talking about real things, that touch real people, and you’re asking people to bring what they learn here back to their own communities, and make a difference.

Wow, it was quite an afternoon at both grid locations! We really appreciate the folks– Barry, Tabitha, Rafi at Global Kids for this opportunity to collaborate, and to Henry Jenkins for entering this whole word feet first (even dancing).

For more content see:

• NMC Campus location chat transcript
• Photos from NMC Campus
• Photos from Global Kids
• Music Video of Henry Jenkin’s Visit
• Global Kids / UNICEF A World Fit For Children festival

And elsewhere, news on this event:

• Henry Jenkins blogs his own experience and answers the philosophical question, Should I Cornrow My Beard? and Other Questions at the End of 2006
• Second of Mariel’s Voices of Youth, Global Kids Related Post (Global Kids Blog) -Mariel was one of the teen organizers and introduced Henry– great photos here! see as well the post on her own blog
• Serious Games & Global Kids: A World Fit for Children Festival at FUTURE-MAKING SERIOUS GAMES
• Henry Jenkins discusses participatory media in Second Life (Beth Kanter at Beth’s Blog)

Story filed under: Campus Headlines, People, Places, Things, What's Happening

See all stories by CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine)