I was reading some of the blogs that I normally read in the morning and Marko, from Youth Specialties, posted about a website that he found useful. This site is a great tool for parents to get informed on a still growing trend: the Internet. (I personally didn't know that the concept of the Internet had started back in 1986, with some Lucas Arts game, so I guess you do learn something new each day.)
One quote that stuck out to me was from the Developers of Habitat:
"At the core of our vision is the idea that cyberspace is necessarily a multiple-participant environment. It seems to us that the things that are important to the inhabitants of such an environment are the capabilities available to them, the characteristics of the other people they encounter there, and the ways these various participants can affect one another. Beyond a foundation set of communications capabilities, the details of the technology used to present this environment to its participants, while sexy and interesting, are of relatively peripheral concern."
On that note, when I was researching websites most commonly visited by jr. highers, a majority of them were of the "virtual world" and all of them are listed on the website that Marko had linked to called MediaShift.
Before I continue, the phrase virtual world means an "online three-dimensional spaces where you can interact with other people, collect items and build structures, and communicate via a virtual representative of yourself called an avatar" (Glasser 10 Oct 2007).
Anwway, this PBS-based website also has summaries of many other online trends, such as blogs, podcasts and widgets.
My question is:
"How often do you visit 'virtual world' websites and how often do you find your kids visiting these websites?"
Knowing where your kids are on the Internet is an important thing, and understanding the virtual worlds that they might join/play in will help with understanding the culture in which they live.
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