Percolating the Power of Play, ACRL 2009

We just finished presenting our paper, "Percolating the Power of Play" at ACRL. What a terrific turnout for 8 am! We were very fortunate to have such a terrific group of presenters before us, " We're Not Playing Around: Gaming Literate Librarians = Information Literate Students" from three librarians at Washington State University-Vancouver. I am especially glad to have met Nicholas Schiller. He and I seem to be eye-to-eye in our thinking that by talking to students about how they play games can and will help them understand how information literacy is already a valuable part of their lives.

Also great to see Jenny Levine in the audience! It was her creation of the ALA TechSource Gaming and Libraries Symposium that hatched the idea of an info lit game at Champlain in the first place. As I look back at my thoughts on that conference, I am reminded of how much I expanded my view of gaming from it and how much working with gamers has expanded my view of the role gaming can play in libraries and information literacy instruction.

If you want to have a look at our slides, please do and feel free to ask questions! The audiece asked some terrific questions, which is always the best part of presenting!

Percolating the Power Of Play

View more presentations from Sarah Cohen.

I am off to my next session. ACRL Rocks.

Second Life is so funny...funny "odd" or funny "ha ha"?

A programming professor on our campus is writing his dissertation on Second Life so the Professional Development Committee offered a luncheon for him to introduce it to any faculty or staff member who might want to have a peek.

It's interesting to sit with a group of 25 people who are new to or haven't really heard of Second Life before: what they ask, what they find funny. Perhaps what I find most interesting is just how funny they find it. How they find the fact that there is prostitution in 2nd life funny. That "newbies" being ostracized or exploited is funny.

I wish I could say that they found it funny "odd". But it seemed to me, and I emphasize "seemed", that they found it funny "ha ha".

What exactly is it that's funny?

Is it just new? Is it the avatars that you can make into almost anything you want what causes them to laugh? That notion that their sense of physcial self can be altered or self created?

I am still new to Second Life and I am still trying to figure out what I think of it. I am still awed by it. I read a lot about it, I play in it, I try to think creatively about it. But I also spend a lot of time trying to think critically about it. And that's what I felt was missing from this presentation. It was just a show and tell and people just looked on and laughed.

Need I say that I wanted a whole lot more?

And that got me thinking about how technology is presented. What are the implications of throwing technology like this at people? Often times, people are so concerned with "keeping up" or "adapting" that I wonder if they defer their critiques and considerations of it. This is a dangerous place to be in, especially with so many technologies being introduced, one might never have the time to critically examine the place of the technology in their lives or the impact of the technology on society. There is no decision making, just complacency.

I am advocate for play. I am an advocate for experimentation. But I think there is a lot of effort to include people in something without giving them the tools to evaluate it. Second Life offers a great many opportunities to a wide variety of people with a wide variety of purposes. But there are also a number of issues it presents that warrant examination.

As the technologically literate or experienced bring people into this world, we have a responsibility to those that believe us or trust us to show them more than one side of the coin. In the academic world, as Second Life, and other technologies, take root, should libraries be working with faculty and the institution to shape the presentation of these new and exciting worlds. How do we create a culture of adaptability that emphasizes critical examination? And how do we do that without putting a damper on the thread of exploration and play?

Champlain Gamers...up, up, and away

Rock on Jenny Levine, (aka the Shifted Librarian) for highlighting Champlain College's gaming students in this post. Our gamers really are amazing and I wish them the very best of luck in this hard core contest. I know they will rock it in Orlando!

These are the same students that are working with the Library to develop an information literacy game to complement are developing IL program. We met for a brainstorming session last night and they are a rowdy, smart, creative bunch. They latched onto key IL concepts and ran with it, offering a slew ideas as to how to make information literacy exciting to college kids everywhere.

More to come on the project. Exciting stuff coming out of Champlain...

Getting a Second Life

How can we know what we think about games, virtual worlds, and technologies unless we play, right? That was the overarching theme at TechSource and since every other session discussed the importance of Second Life, I thought I would give it a go.

I spent two hours getting my avatar dressed.

Seriously.

And frankly, that was enough for me. I decided to be a buff, black woman with purple hair. And I loved making that decision.

And while I still haven't made it off the Orientation Island yet, and honestly am not sure if I will have the time to do so over the next week, I think my experience dressing my avatar touches on the very essence and purpose of this virtual world. It was empowering to decide how I would appear in this world. It was a chance to try something new, to experiment, to imagine, to be something other than me. I can understand the attraction, especially to teens who are struggling to identify who "me" is in this world.

But that is the part that continues to bother me. The idea that more time is spent being someone you wish you were rather than developing or working on who you actually are, or are becoming, is disconcerting, especially among young people, but also for adults. I fully support exploration, reinvention, dreams, wishes...anyone who knows me, knows that I am a dreamer. But the creation of an alternate reality seems self indulgent, at least at first glance. Perhaps one might argue that you will be more extroverted in SecondLife than you are in real life. But if you aren't taking that forthrightness and bringing it out into the real world, then so what?

Perhaps my perspective on Second Life will change once I figure out how to get off the Orientation Island. But I must admit, I am skeptical and feeling like it is a great procrastination tool. Frankly, I barely have time to enjoy or maintain my first life, why do I need a second one?

Expanding the definition and my view of Gaming

TechSource's Symposium on Gaming and Libraries might be the best conference I've ever been too. Seriously.

The amount of energy and enthusiasm for not just gaming but for learning, for expanding the role of the library in our patron's lives and for the role of the library in society is inspiring. People at this conference wanted to learn and to share and I loved it.

And there was good food.

I have pages and pages of notes and comments to go through over the next few days (I will never attend a conference like this without my laptop again) but a few things stuck out:
1. Come Out and Play. This concept of Big Games was shared byGreg Trefry, manifested in this festival he started that turns New York City into a giant game board! Greg came out and riled up librarians to re-envision our spaces and remember that there is such a thing as physical space to play in too. What a relief! What I got from his preachings was to involve people, use your local space in ways that are silly and surprising to educate. Get up, get out, move. I love it. It reminds me of the glorious days of summer sleep away camp. And that is quite a wonderful memory to start developing library games from.

2. Jim Gee spoke about using principals of gaming in our educational methods. What I most appreciated about this lecture was his call for us to understanding the complexities of both gaming and learning and to recognize the inherent connectedness between them. It was a fascinating talk and one that reads some time in the head to really articulate. More on it in a later post.

3. Second Life. I have a lot of thoughts on this one, and a lot of them are quite mixed. But if there is anything I learned from this conference it is that games are going to played, whether we like them or not. I think the issue I have with building spaces in Second Life is that I'm not sure there is any true purpose in it other than to be cool. And I am all for that. But at least at smaller institutions like myself, I cannot validate spending valuable time and money in Second Life when we have a first time coping with our first life. I am intrigued by it and curious how other libraries will develop it over the next few months/years, but I am certain that for both practical and philosophical reasons, Second Life is not on my plate.

4. Liz Lawley gave a phenomenal speech to close up the conference that really put it together for me. She essentially said that whether we like games or not, whether we play them or not, our patrons do. And if we don't start providing a space for them to play, resources to support play, and even more importantly, resources to evaluating games (as we do for evaluating books, journals, dvds, and all of our other resources) than we, essentially, are not doing our jobs. Her example was if you google "recommended books for kids", we get a slew of reputable, credible organizations (NYPL, ALA, PBS, etc) helping us figure out what to suggest and why. Now, substitute books for games. No such similar guidance. Great example, no. While, as an academic librarian, I have a slightly different role in my patrons' lives, I think her point is compelling.

And that's just it, this conference made a very compelling argument for the role of games in libraries and in education in general in a variety of shapes and sizes. It also points out how much gaming is already a part of our daily lives, it's just that we often don't realize that we are playing. But this conference expanded my definition of "gaming" and I feel all the more enriched because of it. I am looking forward to sifting through more of my notes and parsing more of the experience with my thoughts on our ever-changing profession.

Chi-Town, here I come

Leaving on Sunday for Chicago and the TechSource symposium on Gaming and Libraries. It is looking good! Secretly I am hoping I win the Wii...I played it at a friend's place in Boston a few weeks ago and was amazed at how much I enjoyed it. Especially the boxing.

I am looking forward to hearing Henry Jenkins, in particular. We just got his most recent book in at the library, and after reading the intro and first few chapters, I think I will really get a lot out of his lecture.

So, the Sheck is out of town for the next few days. I will try to return with interesting stories, good ideas, and some pics on Thursday.

And yes, Harry Potter will be accompanying me on my plane ride.

Back and Pumped about TechSource

The Sheck is back from vay-cay! I am still sorting through pictures, unpacking, adjusting to life back at the library, etc. Check back for pics of the trip in a day or two.

I noticed on my Feevy this morning a post about July's Tech Source Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium and I am pumped! The Shifted Librarian's update has brought my excitement to 11! I am really looking forward to this program on gaming and information literacy, a direction that we are heading towards. Educational gaming, and especially gaming as a tool in information literacy, as I have discussed in previous posts, is such an exciting opportunity and I am looking forward to what other institutions are doing with it.

The symposium is still a month away but I am starting to read up and getting ready to push myself in a new direction and explore what games can do for the library.

Gaming in the Library: forcing us to a new frontier

Gaming seems to surround me: I just registered for the ALA TechSource Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium,
Champlain's E-gaming program is a constant source of ideas for collaboration and creation, and then today's posting on the ACRL Blog about serious gaming. This after having listened to a number of gaming professors talking this week about how to change the public and the academy's perception of gaming such that it is considered a true discipline.

But to stick with Marc Meola's question about libraries and gaming: he's right that gaming offers libraries incredible opportunities to teach skills and to learn about our own resources. But what I think is missing from his post is the empowerment gaming gives to students as they learn. I think what is missing from non-gamers understanding of the game world is that we just think of it as a "game." What could possibly keep someone playing for hours? Why are they "wasting" their time? But what I am learning is that gaming empowers players to explore whatever information is conveyed through the game in a way that interests and works for them. Different people want different things from the game. This seems to echo Henry Jenkins belief that what young people are taking from games is far more than just entertainment. They are bringing a whole different skill set to the game and extracting a new skill set from it. In many ways, its nonlinearity might be more challenging for libraries to incorporate into games where we have a IL outcomes in mind. But that same nonlinearity might be the very key to making information literacy a truly essential component to students' critical thinking mechanisms.

I agree with Meola that gaming is opening up in new ways that libraries can explore in a multitude of ways. But a large part of that is for libraries to think differently. Is it outcomes that are the preliminary focus? Or might it be more about collaborative tools in learning, and how the collaborative, interactive nature of gaming can be less "used" and more impactful in instructing our students.