The Fourth Estate a Reality: Students Able to Broadcast Stories to the World
The plot-lines, debates, and discussions that we observe within civicmirror.com are absolutely incredible. In-class walk-outs, impeachments of student Presidents & Prime Ministers, business deals gone bad, fascists coup d’etat, and pleas to save family members are just some example. Students, unfortunately, have had no way of sharing these stories with friends, family, and anyone else interested in learning about their simulated experience. Now they do.
Placed into the CM web interface, users will now see a “Broadcast Your Story” banner on every page.
When they click this, they will be taken to an article submission page where they will be able to either write an article about something happening in their country, OR submit a YouTube URL if they have produced a Videocast of some nature.
Once they compose and submit their piece, the Civic Mirror publishing team will review it for appropriateness, and then publish it on this blog — like right here — for the whole world to see. The stories will also feed into a “newsreel” that we added into the web-interface for everyone within the CM Community to see. Students now have the ability to become journalists who can break a story, editorialize in order to put pressure on their political leaders, or just simply share and showcase.
Admin Security Features
The stakes in Civic Mirror are fun as well as intense. So much so that every once in a while we receive reports of students sneaking into another user’s account to discover important in-game information, to steal $$ or economic units, and other such things. To help our users protect from these instances, we added a safety feature that requires users to re-enter their password for things like money and points, Hidden Agendas, as well as a variety of teacher-admin features. While there are thieves in the real world, and while
