Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The culture of the Clubhouse is one in which “school-like” language or concepts as
well as competition is not advised—for example, instead of the word “curriculum,” the
word “activities” is used. Instead of a “rewards” system we have a recognition system.
Instead of “questionnaires” we ask for feedback. And, the word “research” is not used
with the youth either. Remember, you are working with kids who are in a place that is
not school (and specifically designed to be a non-school-like atmosphere)—we want
Zora to be a fun and interesting place to be!
In addition, the Clubhouse Network provides access to a lot of extremely
advanced and cutting-edge technology and is a testbed for many research
projects that are competing to catch youth's attention and engage then in a
sustained way.
Conclusion
This chapter shows the prevalence of virtual worlds in the lives of young people
and presents four case studies of a diversity of programs that used a particular vir-
tual world, Zora. Zora was designed and implemented to be used by researchers and
practitioners developing psychoeducational interventions. However, in order to have
successful learning experiences, the virtual world by itself is not enough While all
programs presented in the case studies utilized the same virtual world, as shown in
each of the above sections, they all took their own approaches to the eight dimen-
sions that should be taken into consideration when designing and implementing
programs that use virtual worlds: (1) curriculum, (2) mentoring model, (3) diversity,
(4) project scale, (5) type of contact with participants, (6) type of assessment and
evaluation, (7) access environment, and (8) institutional context of usage.
For example, in some projects such as the multicultural summer camp and the
ACT program, the virtual world was used by participants who had face-to-face con-
tact. The role of the technology was to provide another way for youth to engage
in conversations about their learning. Because participants and program staff were
in the same room, technological support was easily provided on-site. The face-
to-face contract with participants also allowed for easier data collection, as pre-
and postquestionnaires were distributed out by hand and included as part of the
intervention and the participants were accessible for in-depth interviews.
In other projects, such as the work with posttransplant patients and the ClubZora
project around the world, participants were only able to meet each other and work
together through the virtual world. Technological support was done online. This
posed challenges for both projects. For ClubZora, we had to conform to each
Clubhouses' technological limitations and restrictions, often which included local
firewalls (to protect Clubhouse members from certain types of Internet content)
that often unintentionally blocked the Zora software. In addition, when Clubhouse
Coordinators or members asked for technological help, they themselves did not
have the authority to make changes to the Clubhouse technology (i.e., a techni-
cal consultant may be used), nor did they know the vocabulary with which to
explain the problem, thus making remote troubleshooting difficult. In the case of the
