Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

5.7.08 | I live on a ranch outside San Antonio Texas.  If you ask a native Spanish speaker in San Antonio: “where in Mexico do you come from?” the answer is often “San Antonio!  What part of Mexico do you come from?”  It turns out, the border crossed them, they didn’t cross the border.

I feel the same way about virtual worlds and learning/education.  We launched Whyville in 1999 as a learning community, based on 17 years of research (while running the Caltech PreCollege Science Initiative) on how to most effectively use computers and networks to engage kids in learning.  We were identified as a virtual world later.  We believed at the time that this structure of Internet space would be particularly effective in engaging kids in learning.  We believed if we were right, they would come and stay. They did and have.

In my view, it is wonderful that an organization as significant as the MacArthur Foundation has been able to engage the considerable abilities and expertise of researchers like Doug Thomas, Yasmin Kafai, Constance Steinkuehler and others in the study of virtual worlds and learning.  This is important and interesting work.  I also believe that many of the comments by Doug, Yasmin, Constance and Connie  (the Director of the MacArthur program) are right on.  The issues raised in these blogs are interesting and thoughtful, and probably I could write a book in response (perhaps I will).  However, I really want to cut to the chase - and identify what I think is the most remarkable feature of Whyville, and not incidentally what I personally believe to be the most important measure of the effectiveness of virtual worlds for learning or anything else. 

How many users are REALLY there, and how much are they REALLY engaged and for how LONG?

Connie mentioned that the Kofi Anann event attracted almost 200 Whyvillians, many of whom activily participated in the discussion (which BTW continues on Whyville).  But broadcast videos aren’t the way we most effectively engage our kids.  When the CDC launched their virtual vaccination campaign the end of last year and kids could protect themselves from the much dreaded ‘Why-Pox”, 134,000 children participated in 6 weeks (and invited 6,000 of their grandparents to get virtually vaccinated too).  5% of Whyville’s users in 2007 visited the Virtual Getty Museum (and 3/4s of Whyvillians surveyed know the Getty is in LA).  Our citizens made 587,000 requests of the site’s dietitian on how to stay healthy eating virtual food.  Many citizens have stayed healthy eating virtual breakfast, lunch, and dinner for more than a year.  In 2007, our citizens published almost 2,000 original articles in the Whyville Times, made more than 500,000 entries on internal discussion boards, sent 3.6 million Whymail messages to their friends, and generated 585 million chat phrases.  Oh yes, and our kids have contributed 700 videos about Whyville on their own on YouTube (an order of magnitude larger than for Teen Second Life).  Overall, of the 3.4 million users who have registered in Whyville since April 1999, 1.7 million re-logged into Whyville in the last year, including 10% of the users who registered in the year 2000. 

So, I am happy to leave it to the academics to place a larger frame around why Whyville works (until I write my book J ).  In fact we have an open door policy for academics.  But for certain, one key to whyville’s success has been our focus, from the outset, on building a community of learners, supported by a sophisticated community management system that involves our citizens too, and YES we designed Whyville to be our kids first life (not their second life), and YES our children love Whyville and want to be involved.  We know they also believe that Whyville is “their world” managed by benevolent adults (which they also apparently regard as increasingly rare in their real worlds).  But most importantly, if they keep coming and engaging, we are doing our job, because learning and education is the most engaging thing we do as humans.  It’s what we care about first and foremost in Whyville - and our kids know it.

As they say in Texas “if they ain’t there, you can’t learn-um.”