Digiteen

A good website filled with much information and some good tips on netiquette and treating people right in the social world.

This is an example of a virtual world. "Show off your creativity by building and decorating your avatar world, a full 3D Home that expands as you play! You can also meet new people in public hangout spaces, attend live events within Smeet, try out items brought to you by our partnerships with popular artists and brands and complete fun tasks. In order to make Smeet a personalized and user-friendly experience, we also offer a special virtual world for teens where they can interact with other users their own age and chat about everything from Pop stars, music and movies to teachers, classes, and homework. The virtual world for adults allows users the opportunity to show off the latest Smeet styles, playfully meet and flirt with new people, and create an exciting online life."

"The global digital divide is a special case of the digital divide, the focus is set on the fact that "Internet has developed unevenly throughout the world" [7] causing some countries to fall behind in technology, education, labor, democracy, and tourism. The concept of the digital divide was originally popularized in regard to the disparity in Internet access between rural and urban areas of the United States of America; the global digital divide mirrors this disparity on an international scale."

Stalkers are a real danger in virtual worlds. This shows the results of a survey taken about being stalked in Second Life.

This bookmark is about how hidden curriculum is a skill that everyone must learn on there own. It cant be taught it has to be observed and learned that way. "Richard Lavoie described the hidden curriculum as important social skills that everyone knows but no one is taught. This includes assumed rules, adult or student expectations, idioms, and metaphors. Understanding the hidden curriculum is difficult for everyone, but it is especially so when compounded with a deficit in social interactions."

This webpage shows a lot of information about copyrights.

"The importance of intercultural awareness and communication has also becomes very important for internal management of organizations. We find that frequently large organizations across the world tend to employ people from many different cultures. This is quite well known for companies having different business units across the globe, and transferring employees across the globe to different countries. But this problem has also become also very important to organizations operating within confines of a single country. Thus we find that now US population consists of many different ethnic groups such as earliest American settlers, African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and so on."

"Given the newness of these types of technologies, it is only in the last few years that educators have started to notice them and explore their effects on student behavior and performance. While there is supporting evidence to suggest that these technologies have a large influence on the social development of adolescents, an even more pertinent issue for classroom teachers is what effects these technologies have on the academic development of young people. In this article, I examine how students' use of text messaging technology, specifically IM, affects their writing skills. How does IM use affect students' interest in traditional writing (as learned in school)? In what ways does IM usage affect students' writing ability? How does "IM-speak" change students' views of what is considered "proper" language? How can classroom teachers build on student use of this increasingly popular technology? In this paper I provide a discussion of the current issues and current teacher practices surrounding instant messaging as it relates to student writing."

This shows laws about cyber stalking and cyber harassment (and what states they apply in) which are huge problems in virtual worlds.

This page talks about copyright and fair use

digital literacy resources

Taking the Mystery Out Of Copyright

Just caught up with this video today - another great way to start the conversation about our online life with students.

Changes coming for the COPPA law