The auditorium on ISTE Island was packed last night, with a maximum of 74 avatars gathered to hear online community pioneer Howard Rheingold talk about his Social Media Virtual Classroom project. He did that and a lot more.

For me, one of the key points of the talk was that young people today, and the adults who educate them, are at a very important point in deciding the future of the participatory media like blogs, wikis, etc. Howard admits to being “hopeful” that the kids who mash-up videos, create online content, post, paste and pass on data will learn to use these skills to critically challenge what they see around them and in the process transform participatory media into a real citizen’s media where the messages of civil society are broadcast with equal penetration as the messages of big media. I am too am hopeful of this.

As Howard put it: “Rupert Murdoch saw enough potential in MySpace to buy it.” That should tell us something. It tells us that this media is important and the decisions of who controls it are being right now at this moment in history.

Very exciting stuff. It leaves me fired up to weave another layer of critical thinking into the media literacy of young people.

Here are some pics I grabbed of the talk. Click on them to make them bigger:

If you want to see more pics and video of Howard’s talk, check out Scott Merrick‘s great post, Howard Rheingold in Second Life over at Oh Second Life.

And I’m even more excited to hear that Howard is busy putting together the next episode of the Martian Report! Blast-from-the-past must-see-TV. It’s eerie how well those martian’s predicted our future.

On a side note: This was my first event in SL and what a weird, fascinating experience it was. I’ve spent a lot of time in online spaces with other people but this one (and Second Life in general) continues to blow me away. Will post on this further.