Serendipity35

A group of ninth graders have been using Google Lively as part of a project teaching digital citizenship. Unfortunately, as I have written here, Google has announced it will shut their virtual world experiment down on December 31st.

The students have created a blog and I discovered there that they had a protest today in Lively. You can find out more & see some video on their blog. They have a post about things they learned by using Lively.

Their teacher is Vicki Davis. She was someone who worked with Ning to get ad-free student networks. She has been influential in the Web 2.0 education world, and you might know her from her wonderful Flat Classroom program.

They are asking for people to create an account on Lively to get Google's attention.

Can they save Lively? I'm not that optimistic that Google will reverse their decision, but I'm very optimistic about what these kids are learning and doing. Listen to them on the video talk about digital citizenship, copyright, teaching younger kids good and safe Net skills and you know that some important learning is going on in that classroom. Their protest alone is a great piece of real world classroom learning. They would also like to see others start their own Lively rooms, sign the Lively petition, write to Google, blog about this and just raise a virtual ruckus.

This particular issue is also a cautionary tale about using services and applications in the cloud that you can't control. (Of course, how much control do teachers have over ANY application they use?) If all your photos are in Flickr and Yahoo! decides to make Flickr go away, what happens to that photo archive you created? If the host of your wiki or social network goes away, what happens to your content? Not that educators should be frightened away from Web 2.0 or cloud computing. I don't see many real alternatives in some teaching situations, and I certainly want to see educators use the new tools with students.