Ideas for furthering of mental health and well-being aims

Today Dale (our Second Life builder) and I discussed ideas for extending the usefulness of our work in Second Life, based on both our Avatar Project activity and the multimedia classes we are running in Second Life. Some of these are:

• using Second Life to work with young people who have a hearing disability, with other hearing-disabled young people acting as mentors. This idea came about through our current work with a very talented multimedia student who has such as disability and who has done some wonderful work in Second Life
• Creating specific tasks within Second Life that refer specificially to mental health and civic engagement outcomes, such as creating a virtual time capsule exploring the current state of the world, the environment, and life for young people in these times
• Enhancing civic engagement by exploring visions of the future. For instance, one of our computer games classes is creating an “Evil Future Melbourne” in Second Life with a dark take on the city, parking inspectors etc and models of buildings like the Flinders Street station (it’s on the Victoria University island in SL if you’re interested). To that end we have made contact with the City of Melbourne with a view to deploying Second Life as an engaging way for young people to feed into the CoM’s Future Melbourne strategy (http://www.futuremelbourne.com.au/) described as: “a process for learning from the past and looking to the future to build a shared vision for the city. Through Future Melbourne, the City of Melbourne and its partners (including you) will develop a plan to help us achieve our shared vision.”