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Civic Identities, Online Technologies: From Designing Civics Curriculum to Supporting Civic Experiences
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Bers, Marina Umaschi |
| Copyright Year | 2007 |
| Abstract | Peter is a twelve-year-old boy. He connects to Zora, a virtual city built and inhabited by elevento fifteen-yearolds. His avatar has his own face. Peter is happy because he feels that the virtual home he created in Zora is almost finished. He put pictures of his favorite things and people, and wrote stories about his family and friends. Peter decides to go around the virtual city. He quickly navigates through Zora’s different public spaces: the Baptist Church, the French Chateaux, the Sports Arena and the Jewish temple. Upon entering the Jewish temple a virtual rabbi welcomes him with a blessing. "This is clever!" thinks Peter, "I will program my soccer player to welcome visitors to the Sports arena.” The temple is populated by Jewish symbols and characters created by other Jewish kids. At first sight, there is a map of Israel, Hebrew letters, and a picture of a man praying. Peter navigates around the three-dimensional space and encounters many different objects. Peter decides to add a television to the temple. Inside it, he puts a snapshot from the movie Schindler’s List that he found in the Web. He associates the value "documentation" to the television and defines it in the Zora Collaborative Values Dictionary as "it is very important to remember history. That way, bad things won’t happen again. Holocaust survivors are getting very old now, and if someone doesn’t record their stories of what happened, we are doomed to forget and repeat the horrors." As he is about to leave the temple, he finds a case placed by Elena earlier that week. It has a Web link to a news article about a shooting in a Jewish community center. Peter clicks on the case and learns more about what happened. He also sees that Elena has used the Zora values dictionary to create a new value, "tolerance,” and link it to the case. As Peter is reading Elena’s definition of tolerance, the Zora mayor invites him to join a meeting in the virtual city hall. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.7551/mitpress/7893.003.0007 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://ase.tufts.edu/devtech/publications/CivicIdentityBers08.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress%2F7893.003.0007 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
