Focus in on Chatting and Forums

Forums

I think these forums are great places for kids to get an idea of how these venues are used on the greater World Wide Web. I know I have checked out forums many times in my own personal experience to answer random questions from “what is wrong with my ’98 Toyota Sienna” to “how do I defeat Sepheroth in FFVII.” Kids should be aware of these resources the internet has to offer, and the Whyville forums are a nice safe way to introduce the concept to children.

On Whyville itself, from all of the forums I read through, they seemed pretty clean. The topics ranged from books to science to beauty to sports and outdoors. Some of the forums in the Health and Body portion were about puberty, and I know that can be a touchy subject, but there weren’t any totally inappropriate comments.

There was one forum on books. The kids were actually posting back and forth about what they thought of books and questions they had. I thought that was pretty neat. I actually saw a pretty hilarious forum going on about Twilight, but there were also forums on more normal kid books such as Bridge to Terabithia.

Chatting

The way that chat is incorporated into Whyville amazes me. Not only can you go to certain areas and chat with other kids, but you can also type in certain phrases to accomplish tasks.

The chatting with people is pretty neat because you can type directly into your talk bubble. If you are caught being inappropriate by either a City Worker or a fellow civilian, you will lose your chatting privileges. I tried the chatting, but I felt slightly creepy being so old. So I settled on doing some observations of the types of conversations being had in various chat settings. It reminded me of the early AIM days before the really creepy people came out in full force. I always thought it was really cool to chat with someone from Texas or some other state randomly via the internet. It was a great opportunity for me to ask how they lived and discover similarities and differences. Also, chatting has admittedly contributed to my typing speed. I don't think I would have ever learned to type as fast as I do now if I had not started using Gmail's Chat and various other platforms before that. So chatting has the potential to increase student familiarity with the keyboard and provide motivation for honing their typing skills.

Using chat to accomplish tasks and get goodies is another way that this instant messaging idea is incorporated into Whyville. Like I said in a previous post, once an avatar learns a dance at the Dance Studio, that avatar can perform that dance anywhere they could normally chat. All a student has to do to make the avatar dance is type in the key words, if they can remember them. Also, when clams are being spent, the chat process is used to verify that the buyer does indeed intend to make a purchase.