Podcasting continues to get more and more interesting. I’m still not convinced librarians have time to create podcasts, but I’m more enthusiastic than ever about librarians (and everyone else) consuming them and helping others create them (that whole “filling in the participation gap” thing), especially for local content.

• Audible – (sorry I can’t link you to the exact page, but their frustrating site prevents it)
  “You can receive all of your audio magazines, newspapers, and radio programs as podcasts. If you choose this delivery method, all of your subscriptions will be delivered via My Audible Podcasts. Of course, you will still be able to retrieve your audio subscriptions via direct download from audible.com or by using AudibleManager, should you ever need or want to retrieve them in that way.”
  
• Listen365
  “A weekly podcast spotlighting the best indie record labels on the scene. Download each show or subscribe to the weekly feed for loads of great new indie music, band interviews, and more! Brought to you by McDonald's and hosted by BAGeL Radio's Ted Leibowitz.”
  
• iTunes with Podcasting
  “Now you can easily find and subscribe to free podcasts from one of the largest directories on the web — the iTunes Podcast Directory. Featuring over 3,000 free podcasts from favorites such as ABC News, Adam Curry, ESPN, KCRW and more, the Podcast Directory puts all the best podcasts in one place. Once you subscribe to a podcast, iTunes automatically checks for updates and downloads new episodes to your computer. When you sync your iPod, all your podcasts come along for the ride. You get on-demand radio, delivered automatically. All from the world’s best digital jukebox.”

The most obvious, glaring thing is that librarians (in general) have absolutely no clue about what is going on in this area. Academia is only now starting to do more than just study it, but it’s not even on our radar. I’ve noted before that I talk about Millennials in the context of serving them where they are (rather than making them come to us), but I hadn’t really thought through all of the implications of the gaming side of it. If you have young children or grandchildren, you can see how gaming affects them, and in turn how they interact with information and multi-modal interfaces. Henry Jenkins, James Gee, Kurt Squire, and all of the other speakers presented a compelling case for bringing gaming into education and taking advantage of what these kids are learning from it to innovate, create, and collaborate. I’ve definitely drunk that Kool-Aid.

None of this would have changed what we submitted in the gaming grant last week, but now I’m thinking so much bigger. At MLS, we were already discussing holding an institute or a symposium on gaming and libraries this fall, and now I’m even more motivated to make this happen. There’s a lot going on here that librarians need to learn about, but I also want to see some action. For example, it seems to me that parents are also very unprepared for what is happening. Most of them don’t even know there is something happening, and I think libraries can help educate them. So my first thought is to have a two-day event where the first day is learning and education, and the second day is brainstorming actual implementations.

In addition, I’m totally on board with the idea of libraries helping close the “participation gap,” similar to how we’ve helped close the digital divide (yeah, I know that one’s not done yet, but….). I’m starting to dream about a second Gates Initiative (or a Jobs one if Apple would be willing to start donating to libraries on that level) that would help make libraries media centers where these kids can produce their own content (in other words, participate).

Then there’s the whole concept of shifting to where these users are. I talked to several people at the conference who loved the idea of librarians being present in the games when the users need them (very OCLC-scan-ish). In fact, when I first told Megan Conklin about this (because I was curious if she was working with her librarians at all), she said, “You want to be an embedded librarian? COOL!” So maybe I’m not so much shifted as embedded. ;-)  Megan encouraged me to try Second Life because she thinks the idea could work.

Overall, my landscape broadened during this conference, which is about the best thing you can say when you go to one of these things so I’m glad I went. As a librarian, I was already buying into the whole video games in libraries meme, but what also struck me was how I filtered everything I heard as a parent, too. Having a 9–year old, male gamer at home informed much of what I heard, and there were many times I thought to myself, “That’s Brent,” during the presentations.

I fully realize now how much the games are content for him and just how much learning he’s actually doing. When James Gee talked about his son schooling him in how to play Civilization, I was nodding my head vigorously. I immediately thought about last fall when Brent wanted to spend some of his birthday money on a computer game. He chose “The Alamo,” which is a simulation game. We stood in the store debating it for 10 or 15 minutes, with me arguing that it was too advanced for him. He wanted it anyway, so we gave in.

After playing it a couple of times, he became frustrated because his Alamo kept getting overrun by the Mexicans on the second day. It gave us a chance to talk about ratios and “no-win” situations, but I didn’t have the time to learn the game so he gave up pretty quickly. Then a couple of months later, I noticed he started playing it again, this time with his friends. For whatever reason, now he was able to advance to the next level.

Then at the beginning of this year, he asked for “Age of Mythology.” I was even more convinced it was too far beyond him, but I figured we’d see a similar pattern so we bought it for him. This time, however, he got it right away. He plays it every day, at the expense of “Runescape” now. Last week, we discovered that he knew about the online component of AOM and that he had started playing with his friends (and strangers) this way. What a wake-up call that was! The kid is only 9–years old, but he’s learning about mythology, strategies, troop movements, managing resources, and time, among other things. Talk about multitasking - he can run a campaign, talk to his friends, and taunt the girls all at the same time. And as Gee was talking about foundational learning that helps you handle more complex situations in the future, I realized that Brent started playing the more rudimentary “Army Men” computer games at age 7, and now he’s moved on to “Age of Mythology” and “Runescape.” He played, learned, and mastered the Yu-Gi-Oh rules a couple of years ago, too. He turns out to be the poster child for that whole session.

Brent really has learned a lot playing these games, even beyond just the reading. We have him do homework sheets on weekdays during the summer, and you should see his face fall when it’s time to do them. That must be the face his teacher sees every day, because I think he’s pretty bored in class. He does well enough in school, he’s smart, but he gets marked off a half point here, a half point there because he answered the question but not in the exact way the curriculum wanted him to answer it. If they actually examined his answers and assessed if he was learning, he’d be a straight-A student. Instead, he fills in the blanks, circles a choice, and underlines words, and he’s bored.

But what if he was engaged by this new type of learning instead? What if evaluative assessments were based on tests where he could demonstrate he acquired the knowledge by applying it? I really want that world for him (and for Kailee, too). So part of my goal now is to try to figure out how I can help that happen. My mind is still running fast, processing everything I heard.

So thanks to the organizers for putting together this conference (it was very well done), and thanks to Alice Calabrese (my executive director) for letting me go! I heard there was one other librarian there (from an academic library in Arizona), but I never found her. Maybe next time (and I hope there will be a GLS 2.0), more of us will be there.

Addendum: Welcome, Slashdotters and others! You might also be interested in my notes from the sessions, which can be found here and here.

Deborah Shorley: Power to the People: the People’s Network in U.K. Public Libraries

The People’s Network (TPN) – http://www.peoplesnetwork.gov.uk/
an initiative backed by the government to provide internet access in every public library in the U.K.
– knows we’re at 90–whatever-percent in the U.S., but they are at 100%

TPN was delivered by the end of 2002
cost approximately $217 million from National Lottery revenue
provided 30,000 PCs (number given to a library was determined by population)
provided training for all public library staff; had a standard that had to be met (sort of the European Driving License for IT)
– for every person under age 25, there were probably 5 over the age of 45; ambitious learning curve, but they did it
came in on time and under budget

in 2003 in England:
– 44 million internet hours were made available via TPN
– 11.7 million user sessions were recorded
– 26% of people using TPN opted to join their library

“and it’s worked”

social impact:
learning
– 23,600 people have started a formal education course
– 62,400 people reported gaining a new skill
IT training
– 105,600 IT training sessions were run in public libraries in 2004
finding work:
– 8,000 users have found new jobs thanks to TPN (an impressive figure for the U.K.)
personal identity
– 20,000 people have been able to keep in touch with their families
– 20,500 have made new friends
community enrichment
– 52,500 people have used TPN for activities supporting their local community
culture an dcreativity
– 13,500 have started a new hobby

what next?
– sustainability: to charge or not to charge?
– electronic licenses: access to electronic resources, in the library and from home
  – want to blow apart the whole licensing scheme; looking at new ways to do this

Barbara Scheilhagen: Germany’s Library 2007: Innovation and Networking

showed a measuring stick that won a reading award in Germany; actually measures the reading level of a child

innovation and networking in libraries (noticing these shifts in Germany):
– open to new developments in IT, media culture, education, management methods
– creative combination with existing services
– from isolation to networking
– from cultural institution to education institution
– from media provider to educational partner
– learning place

service to new demographic trends; personalized service

so priorities are:
access to digital services
reading promotion
social inclusion

Multimedia Learning Studio – City Library Wurzburg
coordinates closely with external trainers and local adult learning centers
courses are held IN the library
now part of PLOS (model for an open learning center)

are targeting services for new groups; customer-oriented services

started asking what do we need to do this across Germany?
these questions became the foundation of “Library 2007” – a national strategy for libraries in Germany

project components:
– qualitative interviews
– SWOT analysis of German library system
– international best practice research

did a study in 5 countries and found international success factors:
– consensus among all stakeholders on common goals and mandates of libraries
– anchoring of libraries in the educational system
– legal framework (library law and library strategy); including government commitment
– cooperation and networking (also with other partners)
– central coordinating institution

in Germany, libraries are not mentioned in the educational debate; no national body; 4 members in the national library association

Library 2007: BEA (the strategy they developed)
– identifying and spreading innovative ideas through advice and support programs
– coordinating collection of best practices
– drafting of national strategy and library development plan
– defining of quality standards and benchmarking
– lobbying politicans
– networking institution

Medien@age Dresden
a branch library that they turned into a “profile” library targeted at young adults
uses SMS to alert patrons of new media acquisitions

Rob Bruijnzeels: Libraries 2040: The Netherlands Public Library Association

the extrapolated past = the probable future
their project is about what they themselves want in a chosen future

basic principles & components:
– books will not cease to exist
– the traditional library will disappear
– design and realization of new concepts of libraries
– developed the first 7 libraries of the future

1. alphabet hotel – “the memory;” books everywhere; the library is the memory, so it now becomes a hotel lodge; actually combined a hotel and a library; was the first 24/7 library in the Netherlands; was staffless - just books; books weren’t stolen, but the bookmarks were
2. bibliotheque d’amis
3. hormone library – a library designed by young adults; asked them about the future; the kids said they are changing second by second because of their hormones; so created several spaces in the public library that express those feelings; no books in these “emotional interfaces;” it’s where you “love to go”
4. partisan library – library designed by even younger kids at a special event; libraries would replace the attraction of prohibition with the excitement of discovering hidden treasures; had wonderful librarians; they designed the library as a landscape
5. survival library – the idea of a hidden library; largest library in the Netherlands – 45 square acres, all outdoors; only has 30 books; could only find them by solving puzzles; book was related to the place where you found it; goal was to find all 30 books (which takes 3–4 days);
6. virtual library of the future - collective memory of all of the people, organized
7. the brabant library – MVRDV; like Seattle Public Library; will it still make sense to hold on to the existing concept? or is this the right moment for something new?

sell all of their branches to make something new – a new library landscape
- envision libraries in supermarkets, the gas station, etc. network of hundreds of libraries to make one huge public library
wanted to create a library that would compete with DisneyLand and IKEA

came up with a spiral tour of shelves, sort of like what SPL did

what did they learn:
- libraries do have a future, but it will change dramatically
– in the future, the library is part of a network; can assume all kinds of appearances, in digital or physical forms
– no longer bound by geographical limitations
– have to involve the users in designing the future public library

“the library of the 100 talents”

“youth is ‘programmed differently’ ”
– adults and children no longer share the same culture
– the library of today no longer matches children’s perceptions of the world; as a rep of a past generation, the librarian has suddenly lost her way
– best way to remodel the library is to work with these kids

use:
– multiple intelligence: word, number/reasoning, picture, body, music, people, self, and nature “smart”

have to create new interfaces for these kids
– a place in the library where children can work in a “multiple intelligent” manner, reflecting about and facilitating access to books, other media, and the library
– a place where children can get involved in new forms of physical and digital media

starting to build libraries that incorporate all of this

http://www.2040.bibliotheek.nl/
book about the project, but is only Dutch and German

anything is imaginable and everything is feasible

government is paying for the project now

it was difficult to tell what was real and what was imagined in this presentation, but it was fascinating

Bob Moore

researchers are striving for “omniscience” in real life
– PlaceLab (MIT): attempting to capture near-total behavioral data through hundreds of sensors in the home

omniscience in virtual worlds is much easier – far less expensive

PlayOn – http://blogs.parc.com/playon/

mixed methodology in PlayOn
1. Virtual Ethnography - main focus is the virtual persona of the participants; the person at the keyboard
observe —> field notes —> pictures; can access the “field” from any PC
focus on identifying critical episodes; can use virtual cameras;
is it too easy to capture this data?

Star Wars Galaxies – first major game to have combat– and non-combat-oriented professions
– doctors, dancers, musicians, architects, droid engineers, chefs, tailors, mayors
team created a combat player and a non-combat player to explore the game
as sociologists, they were interested in the “hot spots” – turned out to be starports and cantinas

cantina practices: seedy places where players seek “mind healing;” game developers did motion captures of real dancers for the virtual ones
you have three kinds of health, one of which is “mind;” you have to spend a few minutes in a cantina to rejuvenate your mind health
“a mind buff” – temporary mind boost that you pay dancers and entertainers for
“xp grinding” – entertainer & medic
best way to level up is to join other entertainers; can even set your character to a macro to loop it so it keeps dancing, playing music, etc.
get varying degrees of socializing/role playing around all of this; even though it’s an RPG, users don’t “play” as their character, they play as themselves
the game is so complicated that there is lots of knowledge sharing
cantinas have different reputations
“ooc” = “out of character;” they’ll mark their conversation when they’re speaking out of character

2. Going Deeper: Conversation Analysis
a “microscope” for examining conversation; recordings of naturally occurring interaction (face-to-face and technologically mediated)
record —> compress (MPEG-2) —> transcribe
can use screen capture software, but there are problems with file size; use a video camera connected to the computer
then digitize them and annotate system logs

showed a “mind healing” sequence; self-serve model of service delivery with very few opportunities for social interaction because you just click on a dancer to “watch” and mind heal; the player that needs the mind heal initiates the game command

showed a “mind buff” sequence; player has to ask others if they mind buff; dancer has to direct their attention to that player; provides opportunity for social interaction (convention is to sit down to watch them dance), so they end up talking; takes about 8–1/2 minutes; “it’s like when you go to get your hair cut” – you don’t have to talk, but you generally do; full-serve model because the entertainer has to initiate the command

Nicolas Ducheneaut

3. Going Broader: Analytic Software
what kind of social spaces are SWG’s cantinas?
– a virtual “third place”
– what are the opportunities for interaction and learning

Studying sociability in online communities
– they placed “bots” in key game locations and recorded activities 24/7
– they wrote software to format the data prior to analysis
– they wrote applications to compute key metrics and visualize patterns of activity

had to program the bots to do something periodically or else they’d get “kicked out”

program bots —> capture logs —> process and visualize data

“Beggar Bot” – when you get more data than you planned for; they had collected 300,000 credits in tips after just one month (enough to buy three starships)!
some people came up to the bot saying they’d seen it in the corner all alone for months - don’t be afraid, come join us

Putting It All Together
nothing replaces immersion

did some hands-on data analysis
one group had lots of advertising spam instead of socialization

Kurt Squire and Levi Giovanetto: Apolyton University: The Higher Education of Gaming

Civilization 3 – http://www.civ3.com/
can use real maps to play or not; most gamers don’t use real maps because they need more novelty

elearning systems are not particularly compelling content; we can rethink this and do better
Apolyton University IS a compelling model – http://www.Apolyton.net/; the university is just one part of the community
a self-organizing learning community; it’s international

games change how we interact
there’s a need for critical reading of simulations
need a design level of understanding

1. predictive simulations – predicting the weather; build many models; political discourse
2. “idea” simulations – gives you ideas; lets you see what could happen and then change things

setup and debrief are important in any simulation

Civ3 shares a lot with Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel”
“Civilization III as a world history sandbox” – article by Squire

study game communities as models for next generation learning communities

Apolyton – “a school of strategy, where students sharpen their Civ3 skills and share their experiences in a series of thematic games…. Participants are encouraged to share their strategy after the game….”

Example course: AU102: Give Peace a Chance - have to play the game without militaries

Kurt and Levi used cognitive ethnography to study Apolyton – participant observation, played games

a site of collective intelligence; one player used the site to get better and gain knowledge before the multiplayer option was released

after about 300 hours of playing Civ3, the pattern is that you get bored, which is where AU comes in; rejuvenates the game by offering new ideas, new strategies, new scenarios, etc.

“documenting mistakes helps prevent repetition, recording success helps recall the best practice….” – player
“During Action Reports” (DARs) – turn by turn transcripts written by players
provides reflection on actions, accessing expert cognition
also offers an interpretive frame of what happened and provides a recap of specific moves; can also put up screenshots
can ask questions – “what should I do next;” experts answer
showed one example: expert replies yes, but also explains why person should consider upgrading their military units and how to plan for the future; tries to promote flexible knowledge rather than just one answer
these players have a design-level understanding of the game

Conceptual Tools
– emergence of technical terminology (REXing, Settler Pump, Alex’s archer rush, “culture flipping”)
– ideas, learning have a history

large lurker community just reading the posts; fewer people posting now, but more lurkers than in the past

AU actually evaluates its learning structures; when one is no longer useful, they’ll eliminate; if they see a need, they’ll add one; will modify existing ones

success depends on players’ goals
– newer people gained mentorship
– old players sharpened skills
– developed a community of expertise
– a design level understanding of game simulations

interviewed players and asked “do you ever draw comparisons between current events and a civ game?”
“Yes – culture affects occupation;” found that players use terms from civ to describe current events (golden age, flip, cultural victory); now understand cultural outposts, American ideology; “I actually learned a lot more history and geography through Civ3”; is trying to convince teachers to let him use it in class (kid was in college)

AU functions as a way to move users to become designers; users even interact with the designers

AU participation is lessening becuase they’ve completely explored Civ3; moving on to Civ4; everyone is participating in the beginning of the Civ4 site, not just the experts

“Movement & Supply” section has more words than the New Testament!

Is Civ just a special case? Yes, and that’s why they’re studying it, but it’s a great model

can also look at Madden, Quake, etc. to note how complex the games are but how many sites have sprung up online to meet needs and bring players together
on the Madden site, users have started creating rules for play calling – showed the long list (that would be a lot to track in a game)

AU serves as a powerful model of a self-organization learning system indigenous to an age of simulation. Driven by participants’ desire to learn as a natural extension of pleasurable game play, participation in AU requires “students” to start becoming designers. …a quintessential example of how contemporary pop culture operates
– this is what schools need, this is the model

http://adlacademiccolab.org/gapps.html http://www.academiccolab.org/gapps.html

Richard Halverson: Leadership for Games, Games for Leadership

theories of expertise are too generic
Aristotle: expertise is particular, moral, and gained over time; practical

games provide just the right level that professionals need to help them learn
however, computer and console video games are our generational rorschach test (!)

doesn’t think schools are broken; teachers can change practices in loosely coupled systems, but…
leaders need to organize systemic changes outside the scope of teacher
leaders have resisted games and gaming as the enemy
the new porn; No Child Left Behind prevents games in some classes - constrains curriculum

leading to integrate gaming
rewarding curricular innovation
social and technical transfer systems – creation and maintenance IS the point
biggest issue is that gaming is alien to them; they have no context for it at all

GAPP: what if we created a game that they would actually use professionally to help illustrate all of this? = Instructional Leadership Game
capturing the practical wisdom of school leaders; used a case study of someone changing her school
the representations were dull and “thick” to the school leaders because there was no narrative
investigated simulations, but other examples had too much detail or too little, so the mix was wrong
they haven’t been able to build something with the right mix yet

what they would like to build during the next couple of years:
what’s the right level of representation?
goal of school leaders is always to improve school learning, so their goal is to help school leaders implement systemic change to improve student learning?

Design principles
context authenticity - how to represent practice at the right level? (not just “here’s your plan and here are the outcomes”)
expertise – how to communicate achieved wisdom and strategies?
verisimilitutde - how to make sure research-based practicies actually pay off legitimately

Game Design
players establish resource pool
players engage in mini-games in monthly turns, committing resources

have goals which are tied to strategies that are open to you using resources

your moves affect parents, teachers, and the community, not just the students
building social networks into the game in order to use professional development, friendships, how long the teacher has been at the school, etc. as components that influence the game
want the play to track several years to view consequences of decisions

Questions:

how have you attempted to model counter-implementation?
Richard: that’s the key problem; if you provide professional development that doesn’t require a lot of time, you don’t get a bump in expertise of your teachers - their sociability and expertise will go down

what they hope to show in the game is that real change is expensive and difficult, but POSSIBLE

Kurt actually mentions libraries in the context of gatekeepers, but only in passing as part of a list  :-(

know of any games that are meant to help students perform better on standardized tests?
James Gee: it could be done, but that’s like using a Ferrarri to go afoot; it’s what else you get from this that goes so far past standardized testing
Kurt: “Standardized Test: The Game” – subvert the whole thing! “Pick which answer is the typical WASP one….”
Richard: it’s the assessments that are the issue; schools are adapting to what NCLB requires - could get them to adapt to gaming as assessment

have you thought about how to get parents to understand the effects of gaming? can you build a game for the community?

from a practical standpoint, how do we reward curricular leadership?
Richard: there are migrations of talent in urban school systems – good teachers end up teaching under good principals; problem is not enough leaders try; they feel constrained

JUCCO in Johnson County, Kansas has a gaming curriculum and is doing outreach to the community; finding that parents aren’t the problem - they find it invigorating that kids are interested in this
GameMaker program - use it to teach kids

David Shaffer, Kelly L. Beckett, David Hatfield, Alecia Magnifico & Gina N. Svarovsky

David Shaffer:
the problem is that Star Trek is a world where people can communicate across vast distances, has the holodeck, etc., and yet in this world, education looks the same as it does now
– a failure to imagine

because the power of school is so well-documented; it’s a very well-evolved system
little ball in the little valley metaphor (can’t go backwards or forwards)

distinction of game engine vs. game (dice vs. craps)
recruits skills, identity, knowledge, and values – a game is always a culture
all tied together by an epistemology
you see the game through that epistemology
every subculture has an epistemic frame

anyone who works in an area of uncertainty, where they have to make judgment calls and requires autonomy is a candidate for an epistemic frame
requires reflective practice; gets created in a practicum (doing to knowing); cycle of action and reflection-on-action
gives the opportunity to create a simulated practicum (built on needs, abilities, interests)

mediation as an example
xenotransplantation as one example – players take on the role of a stakeholder in this arena
players get a confidential score, which you want to maximize; if you win your mediated point, you get the points associated with it
tested what students learned using a concept map before and after the game; see more lines after and they can explain why
compared a student’s answer to what should a specific patient do, before and after; much more in-depth understanding after
students are cast in a specific role (which ends up affecting their perspective) - gives them identity

there are 45,000 after school programs, and 100,000 home schoolers – fertile ground for change?
— Jenny notes to herself that David is not even considering libraries  :-(

2nd game: digitalzoo: sodaconstructing the next generation of engineers
Gina N. Svarovsky’s slides, but she couldn’t attend so David presented them

the engineering design process - taking things from idea to market
design—>build—>test model

kids design things in sodaconstructor and can test them – http://www.sodaplay.com/constructor/
they solve the problem first, and then they’re given the knowledge (opposite of school)
can create stuff that is hard to build in real life

an “exploratoid” – a brief snippet of exploration (like an explanatoid); eventually, they add up and provide a foundation

David Hatfield & Alecia Magnifico: Science.net

Alecia:

science journalism – an epistemic game they’ve created; epistemic RPGs (in this case, of a profession)

students do journalistic interviews, stories (write and then receive copy-edits), get peer review, and “power up”
copy-editing is very different from the spelling and grammar correction you see in school
the kids understood that school was all self-editing to see how good a grade you can get, whereas copy editing wasn’t about grades and it’s not a contest - it’s about improvement
Alecia compared an initial storydraft (personal voice, no facts, no balance, no sourcing), showed copy edit comments, then the student’s edited copy (much-improved, had neutral voice, a source, and a balanced perspective)
stories end up being published on science.net – http://www.science.net/ http://coweb.wcer.wisc.edu/science.net

binding is tied to identity development (felt like a journalist, did what journalists do) and journalistic epistemology

David:

“Byline” - the game engine for science literacy (the one in science.net)
a web-based editing, journalistic tool; has special tags, similar to HTML ones, for journalistic terms (lead, byline, jumpline, etc.)
as kids wrote more stories, they began using the tags more often and sooner

James Gee: Respondent

you’re not just learning facts about x; you’re learning about the practices of x, and along with that comes facts

have you thought about other contexts other than professional? eg, participating in a democracy, how to be a good parent, etc.?
David S.: any subculture has a potential epistemic frame, so sure; we’re choosing the professions for pragmatic reasons that are valuable in the real world; “what is in fact worth being able to do, learning to think as?” – journalist, historian;  “this whole approach is a giant cheat;” others have already figured out how to make a good journalist, so they’re just copying it (it’s harder to figure out how a good neighbor makes another good neighbor)

is moving the little ball from one place to another done by enculturation?
David S.: each of the games we’ve seen today is a possible red ball, they’re not how to get there; the point of the exercise is to step out of the school environment and all of the baggage it brings; they show you a place you could be, but not necessarily how to get there

David S.: ultimately, identity and values are not separate, but the kids come to this with these things disintegrated; the challenge is to link them all for the student

David S.: having seen yourself as an expert once, it radiates through everything the student does afterwards, especially when they go back to the rest of school; you’re always an expert in something now; these are valuable ways of thinking, too

physics teacher in the audience agrees with this approach (we already do the one-on-one coaching for graduate students), but it costs a lot of money
David S.: can’t get rid of “school” because someone has to babysit the kids; would mean a massive change in our educational system; would have to start small; let’s see what this could do and then decide what we’d have to compromise on

as a precursor to using one of these epistemic frames, they would have to meet my abilities; what kinds of preconditions are you looking at in terms of accessibility?
David S.: yes, what if there are things kids really have to know and do in order to be able to do this?
the teachers have done architecture, engineering, urban planning, journalism; with middle, high, elite school, and charter school students, all from different backgrounds
– no indication from any of this that there is a systematic reason kids can’t participate in this; has scaled well enough so far, and it seems to work for everyone

(Note: sorry about the length of these posts on the home page, but MT is still messing up extended entries.)

Pop Cosmopolitanism, Collective Intelligence, and Participatory Culture: What Educators Need to Know about the New Media Landscape

see over time a span of skills learned from gaming that are applied to law, etc.

Yoyogi Park, Tokyo – a “fan district”
8–story comic book store!
showed costumes in Toyko Park = “cosplay” which happens every weekend; mostly girls who spend most of their time taking pictures of each other with their cell phones

showed a video of a 17–year old girl who was motivated to learn Japanese and how to sew in order to participate in CosPlay
they go to conventions to be recognized as the character they are dressed as; whole point is to be recognized and photographed
then go on the internet afterwards to find pictures of themselves

— not just consuming popular culture but generating it as well
these kids are integrating this into their identities

showed a clip of the “Yankees” who dance rockabilly dressed as Elvis in the park; one person wears the “red jacket” (James Dean, “the only thing that trumps Elvis”)
see “silent dancing” all over the park; eg, practicing boy band moves

not just Imperialist culture, but integration; see a lot of hybridity; goes both directions

organized reenactments of scenes from The Matrix in Japan

“Pop cosmopolitanism” – contra cultural imperialism; a hunger to escape parochialism

media literacy we’ve been teaching in our schools hasn’t changed since the 1980s – need to rethink this

mass culture is taught as something we consume but don’t participate in; “buy nothing day” leaves us with the option to opt out only – “just say yes” or “just say no”

noted Steven Johnson’s book “Everything Bad is Good for You”

see complexity everywhere in media
– see visual complexity (comic books)
– narrative complexity (Lost)
– paradigmatic complexity (Pokemon)
– cognitive complexity (video games)
– cultural complexity (mixing and matching cultures)

we’ve now reached the point where we feel inadequate to pop culture; now there are people that don’t “get” pop culture, whereas in the past it would have been high culture

distributed cognition: things we would normally offload – example is Tivo, manages TV for you

collective intelligence – we pool knowledge; no one knows everything, everyone knows something; mix and match that information – example is Wikipedia

showed a flowchart of the Zion Underground hierarchy in The Matrix that was created by users; see this in Survivor Fan sites, too

“i love bees” example from halo community - had to work together to solve problems

new kind of competency

corporations are now taking advantage of this – eg Coke lets you participate in many different ways

have to start thinking of children and youth as media generators – grassroots participation; young people will be critical to the change
— eg Joshua Meeter, who created a claymation Star Wars film
— Peter “TheSidDog” Medina, a Sims Moviemaker

“they live across media” - it’s not just digital production

they’re not biased towards any one form

often called “the Napster Generation” because they’re “stealing,” but they are expressing themselves via this mixing; they’re using what’s out there

interesting hybrids of high tech and lo-fi modes — scanning print in order to distribute it digitally

overwhelming number of these kids are home schooled; those that are in school are doing poorly because schools are failing them
— home schoolers use digital technology much more; they’re no longer “cut off from classmates” when being taught at home

Kaiser Family Study:
children under 6–years old spend nearly two hours a day using screen media
83% use any screen media
83% play outside
— study doesn’t ask the right questions, though; what do these numbers actually mean? what do they represent?

parents are given no advice on how to help or shape these kids’ digital tendencies at home
media literacy begins in the crib

Five Key Questions that Can Change the World:

1. Who created the message?
2. What creative techniques are used to attract my attention?

— all based on kids consuming, not shaping, media

21st century learning needs: effective communication, high productivity, digital-age literacy

media literacy should be:
the ability to critically assess information gathered from multiple sources
the ability to appreciate works from many different aesthetic traditions
— give them vocabularies for what they’re already consuming
an understanding of the contexts within which media are produced, distributed, and consumed
the ability to express your ideas through a range of media (which kids already do)
the ability to assess which media is most appropriate for a given purpose (cell phones vs. text messaging vs. camcorders, etc.)
the ability to meaningfully participate in collective intelligence community
the ability to think in multimodal terms (multiple levels of interpretation; the videos of Tokyo Park show more than just sound, audio, or text would)
an ethical framework for thinking about our freedoms and responsibilities as communicators

the participation gap - need to worry for several reasons

the digital divide has been largely closed in terms of access, because most kids have some access through schools and libraries
— not really, though, because you can’t participate in this culture in 15 minutes on a public library computer, so now there’s a “participation gap”

also have the group that doesn’t do this at all and doesn’t even know about it

need to create space where the two groups can interact and learn from each other

media literacy should begin at the crib and should occur at every level of the culture:
– parents
– churches
– organizations (YMCA, etc.)
– schools
– media

Jenny note: libraries aren’t listed  :-(

all of this should be taught across the curriculum, which is a major paradigm shift - same as multiculturalism; integrated this into the curriculum, not just as an add-on module
– media literacy should be the same way

what are we doing through our classes now to build this into instructional curriculum?

two crises that are relevant to our schools and our society

1. “the 4th grade slump” - there are certain ways you can teach young children to read, but by 4th grade they can’t read to learn so they struggle after that
2. “the college slump” – we’ve outsourced a tremendous amount of our work, every commoditized job (everything that can be standardized) because other countries are producing very smart people; so we’re left with those jobs that can’t be standardized and we hope they’ll keep doing the rest for us, but that’s not happening anymore; instead, they’re producing people for the non-commoditized work — everyone EXCEPT THE U.S.; this will be very destructive to us within 20 years; we have to be able to innovate and create, not just get a degree; that’s not enough anymore

the solution to these crises is in our face: it’s popular culture and games; this is where it’s getting solved, not in our schools

the 4th grade slump is caused by the fact that what is so hard about school is how hard the language gets; textbooks are NOT recreational reading; unless kids, starting at home, get ready for this language early, they will be lost; it’s like changing the language to Greek in mid-stream; it’s not the english you speak at home - it’s a technical language

interestingly, this language is being reflected in popular culture; eg, Yu-Gi-Oh cards (http://www.YuGiOhCardGuide.com)
gives kids incredibly complex culture by age 7; eg, showed a YGO card that had 3 straigtht conditional clause statements as explanations of powers
as an adult, Gee would rather take physics than figure out the YuGiOh rules! :-)
no failure rates, either – no research has found a failure for a minority group to understand this
where is the one place these cards are banned? SCHOOL

cutting edge assessment: the college slump problem

have to teach students to innovate and create; popular culture already represents a space that is solving this problem and we can learn from it

assessment is important - am I making progress, and why did I just fail? a multiple choice test is not fun and it’s useless  it doesn’t tell you anything or help you figure out what you did wrong; this is a different view of assessment

“Rise of Nations” as an example - showed screenshots, especially of online competitions against others
14 pages of statistical graphs of what you did, and kids read it for pleasure!
creates a lot of multimodal skills with graphs and numeracy
informative assessment - tells you what happened; helps you form strategies by telling you where you failed; assessing to create new strategies is part of the game; gives you ideas for how to do it better; you couldn’t get a better score – but shows where you could do better, which is an ideal assessment; the biggest assessment isn’t those graphs, it’s what you did with them – did you learn from them?

what if a kid got these kinds of assessments in school for science?

afffinity groups:
1. common endeavor, not race, class, gender, or disability, is primary
2. newbies and masters share common space
3. players produce content, not just consume it
4. content organization is transformed by interactional organization
5. encourages intensive and extensive knowledge
6. encourages individual and distributed knowledge
7. encourages dispersed knowledge – everyone (the help) is there somewhere
8. uses and honors tacit knowledge
9. many different forms and routes to participation
10. different routes to status
11. leadership is porous and leaders are resources

“Age of Mythology” – gets them reading more about mythology and planning

told story about his son in 2nd grade who said he and his friends were playing it; Jim didn’t believe it, thought they must be playing it with their parents; an  hour later, his son was explaining to the Jim how to play it; kids totally know it at a very early age

Jim decided he would print out all of the information that flows through the site in one day, but finally stopped on the 2000th page
all of this exists because people are creating content, not just consuming it

these communities speak to the college slump

learning principles: consider all of this as a way to organize a knowledge community (do this in the school!)

in schools, the kids aren’t building content; no dispersed knowledge; only one leader; one mode of learning and one format

incorporate the best of cognitive learning principles

the fun of the game is learning; once they’ve mastered it, they move on and buy a new game

our schools no longer support these principles

Learning in Games:
1. produce (nothing happens if you don’t do something)
2. customize (can totally mod the games; to your learning style; could even try a new style)
3. identity (no learning is done without a strong identity; games give you an identity, schools don’t)
4. interact
5. well-ordered problems (they aren’t liberal or progressive; the problems you face early set up good hypotheses for future play)
6. pleasantly frustrating (which is what keeps them coming back)
7. challenge (don’t get to move on until you’ve solved something; “cycle of expertise”)
8. “on demand” & “just in time” (info when you need it or can use it; don’t have to read things ahead of time; walking up to kiosks in games)
(my side note — ** librarians!!)
9. do, not just talk
10. system thinking (putting many elements in relation to each other)
11. encourage risk (games don’t tell you you’re worthless at the end)
12. explore, think laterally, rethink goals (new view of intelligence; faster isn’t necessarily better – eg, FPS games; want you to explore everything and rethink your goals; virtually every good thing you can find is off the beaten path)

produces learning where you MUST innovate and have to master what you do; you don’t get credit for nothing

we have on the plate models that have to be transferred; it’s not did the kid transfer it to algebra, it’s will we?

Questions for Henry and Jim:

one way of thinking about schools is that school is a game, too. certain ways of thinking, certain things across each area, certain identities – it’s just not a good game; but you’ll get a bad game if you try to change a game quickly or arbitrarily; since it’s already well-designed to do what it does, how do we change the game school?
Jim: for the first time in our history, our kids have genuine competition, which is the biggest crisis we’ve faced; the paradigm for schooling will have more competition than ever before; science and math is so poorly retained because you never got the roles and meaning; have to get a new game
Henry: if current school is a game, it’s CandyLand or Chutes & Ladders (go in a circle no matter what color you pick or slide down if make the wrong move by luck); poor games to prepare kids for the future; doesn’t know if we can reprogram our schools; need to become more open-ended; we widen the participation gap if do this outside of the schools; there ARE teachers fighting to make this happen

this discussion has been about what some kids do, but it’s a minority
Jim: that’s the participation gap; we’re not producing enough of these kids, whereas the rest of the world is; need research on who these kids are; the college slump is the first crisis that crosses class lines - can affect rich and poor; now there is going to be a price when they all grow up
Henry: need statistical information about the level of participation; our studies are asking the wrong questions – eg, the Kaiser study lumped all screen media together and didn’t ask what they’re actually doing;  have to recognize all of the different forms of participation (Will Wright’s chart of participation in The Sims); invariably, there’s a parent who cares behind these kids; plenty of roles for parents to enable and encourage this

what transformations have you made in your own programs to incorporate these ideas:
Jim: boomer retirement! the new faculty being hired “get” all of this; Jim has switched his style to teach how to enter the world, not how to read; “I’m on my way out”
Henry: hasn’t gotten into elementary or grade schools as much as he’d like to; trying to break down the barriers between media at MIT; integrating a range of media in every class (sound, vision, text, etc..); combine theory and practice in the classroom; all students are required to do some actual production in addition to theory; creating “creative opportunities;” don’t teach the skills, they use what they know for final assignments, so they don’t just make something in isolation; integrating theoretical and participatory work; collective problem-solving

what would a curriculum of the future look like, and are these examples really about relevance? what does a curriculum that addresses this look like?
Jim: liberals make the mistake of basing education on who you are; conservatives base it on stuff that’s irrelevant; future is giving kids strong identities; you’ll “become an urban planner,” which helps you learn facts and theories because that identity requires you to know those things; if you had learned a bunch of algebra to pull off an identity you really wanted to have, you would have learned it and been prepared for future learning
Henry: when developing games for classroom use, ask “what’s the knowledge used for” – gives you roles, etc.; MIT is finishing a game called “Revolution” now – you decide how far you will go for your freedoms, etc.; kids struggle; each kid has a different perspective based on their roles; kids are creating diaries where they mash what they’re learning in textbooks, in the game, etc.; kids are bringing things to the game to shape their interactions; told the story of a kid who showed up at a protest and was shot by her own side (“How could they do that to me?) – really brings home the history; understand history much better, make choices, gain context for them; the role of voices; these tools open up history and make it more relevant

Cory Ondrejka (Second Life developer): Brace for Impact: How User Creation Changes Everything

MMORPGs: a consistent and persistent place that allows many simultaneous users to interact

10 million people playing these games right now; $1 billion market

why Second Life is different than other mmorpgs and why it’s suitable for education:

user-creation: atomistic construction
this is a big transition – to let users create
example of guy who created the best gun available in the game right now – sells them to other players for $8 each
users added alien abductions into the game and would go around abducting characters every couple of weeks
users figured out you could stack multiple things to make something look like a piano because they wanted one; but it just looks like a piano, it doesn’t do music
users added skateboarding – no code in the game for “skateboard”

game relies on broadband because of the rendering

today is the game’s 2nd birthday
now at 1,000 CPUs

user-creation: collaboration
interaction and creation are synchronous and collaborative
people stand next to each other and do things together or for each other

community: demographics
SL community is older and more gender balanced than most games

see a lot of amateur-to-amateur learning and helping

economics: model
it’s a virtual real-estate model, not a subscription one
buy only what you need to do what you want to do

economics: market
in the last month:
20,000 customers
50,000 distinct items were sold
1 million p2p transactions (player to player)
$2 millions in internal economy

30,000 user hours per day
30% of time each day is spent creating
9,000 user hours per day spent creating = 4.5 user years per day
becomes a team of 1600 creators — a $175 million rate

economics: property rights
residents retain their intellectual property rights to their creations
residents can license their property in the real world

innovation and inevitability:
transportation and communication
real world connections (encouraged) – users create external web sites to sell stuff
property rights
capital – can exploit real world sources like real credit cards
marginal costs in the online world
gameplay – no required RPG elements; so is it a “game?”

games are being built within Second Life

amateur-to-amateur:
a basic building class in the game; they teach each other how to script, how to run events, etc.
knowledge spreads out to the web
abbott’s aerodrome – users added skydiving; started giving away parachutes (you can pay for better ones); they teach skydiving in the game
vertu – people are very free with their virtual currency; evangelizing in the virtual world to donate money in the real world to charity organizations

advertising has appeared in the game

tringo: over christmas break, this australian built a game that mixed tetris and bingo; has a betting component, no twitch responses, can taunt each other while playing, very social; just licensed the game to a real world company for mucho [real] money to put it on cell phones

shared learning environment for AI

James Cook on motivated users; James is a doctor

don’t have to be a programmer to create in the game

virtual hallucinations:
Peter Yellowlees simulated hallucinations in SL of a real schizophrenic
did it to show other people what it’s like – medical students, families and caregivers
did an in-world survey tool; paid 75 cents to get listed as an “interesting place”
asked for spontaneous feedback
whole experiment cost about $100; no transaction cost

wilde cunningham
9 physically disabled people sharing an account with the help of June-Marie Mahay
they decide what they want to do - go skydive, etc.

brigadoon island:
John Lester, founder of Brain Talk Communities, migrated Aspergers patients and families to Second Life
bought an island in SL for them to talk to each other; it’s consequence-free, text-based, they set up the space however they like; designed their own meeting spaces; had to decide how far apart the benches would be

live2give
an island where these wilde cunninham and brigadoon players meet

Megan Conklin on research

sociology research
business experimentation
collaboration experimentation

she doesn’t lecture very much at Elon University; use other multimodal methods
taught a technology and society class using Second Life

at the session, she provided a handout for how to create a “safe lab” environment and research ethics

when the class started, she immediately got questions about identity – great for anthro, socio, philosophy studies
can rate other players and there are economic benefits for doing that
can have students compete to come up with a business idea
in-world marketing and advertising; intersection with the real world
intellectual property issues
the business of gaming - how do you make money
there have been some sweatshop issues that came up

social sciences:
class and status issues
subcultures
religion, marriage, health issues, evangelization, how do you treat death
race, gender, criminal justice issues – how is punishment doled out in this kind of a world
terrorist groups
avatar and identity
nascent democracies
legal and ethnographic studies

Linden Labs is adding foreign languages to SL
politics, public policy

the gap comes in applying this to your classroom - the practical issues

Cory: Linden offers a campus second life
college classes can utilize SL to augment their curriculum - tend to have 5–6 classes running per semester

life drawing:
can upload audio clips, animations, and textures; the textures allow users to hold life drawing classes in the game
MST3K - users stream public domain videos into the game and sit around and watch them together, MST3K-style

building with bits:
what happens when there are no limits on creativity?

leverage:
you don’t have to build the technology
you don’t have to build the content - can pay someone else in the game to create content
don’t reinvent the wheel - there are worlds and communities waiting to help
developers are working with a bank to create an area where they’ll teach kids about money
take advantage of these communities - don’t have to create your own in order to add this to a curriculum

where to go slide includes 4 blogs!

Questions:

is there a way to guarantee that a class wouldn’t be exposed to adult content
Cory: technically no, because they can’t control what those students will say and do
Megan: tips for managing this are in the handout; in her class, she walked around and saw where the students were; instituted rules
Cory: social conventions for what can be created in the PG worlds; can restrict users to them; the communities police themselves

lab/equipment issues trying to run the software?
Megan: can definitely encounter issues; have to check for this ahead of time; not all students could run the game on their laptops; students wanted to stay and play the game in the lab after class ended; you’ll need most modern graphics card and as much memory as you can afford

are there tools to build 3D wireframes:
all of the modeling is done real-time, in-world; not uploaded from the outside; it’s all done server-side; Linden brings as many tools as possible into SL, but they don’t duplicate PhotoShop; textures tend to be done outside and brought in

noted that patches require admin level access on Windows computers; how do I get my students through the first week of “what the hell is this?”
Megan: watched The Matrix and read “Snow Crash” first; tried other virtual communities first; didn’t do it on the first day; the fact Megan is a woman helped the females in the class

Cory: SL is increasingly becoming a final question for law students because of the legal issues, particularly intellectual property

how long and can SL avoid the commercialization and centralization we’ve seen on the web?
James: first web browser (before Mosaic) was an authoring tool AND a browser, but Mosaic left out the authoring tool; SL’s focus is on providing the tools to create
Cory: major difference is the collaborative aspects; get a lot of ad-hoc amateurism because it’s all live; reduction in costs to do things normalizes and levels the playing field; developers are trying very hard to make good decisions that avoid this scenario

what’s to prevent Coke from dropping $250,000 and taking over SL?
Cory: the community would back out of the world pretty quickly, would create compromising images of Coke that would appear on the web; could set Coke Island on fire; they wouldn’t tolerate this and it would end up hurting Coke in the end

request to centralize info about SL classes for academics in one place
hook up academics who want to do this, coordinate efforts, get away from the idea of isolated teaching
Megan: has a wiki where she’s trying to do this

James: SL has mature regions; communities police themselves

are there any kids in this game?
James: theoretically, no because have to confirm you are 18 and have a credit card; creating a second world for younger users (14–17); it will be interesting when the two worlds begin interacting - Linden has to decide how and what will go between worlds (goods, services, etc.)

David Squire: Learning Game Design: Creating Links – RPG, Identity, Characterisation and Learning

noted there’s no entry for “avatar” in Wikipedia (I’m counting down how long it takes before someone adds it)

Gee’s 3 forms of identity:
– virtual
– real
– projective

transference
introjection

showed pix to illustrate the evolution of avatars from Pong and Pac-Man to the Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (2005)

need a safe place to play and be in control of “self”; evading the commands – RPGs provide this

predefined or prerendered characters don’t impact on player’s identification
role playing is a natural way to learn
is fantasy more interesting than fact?

interesting question to him is what happens when you strip out fantasy

doesn’t think you get attached to the character if you don’t see it (eg, FPS where you don’t see the shooter)

Diner Dash game where you’re a waitress

Betty Hayes: Gendered Identities at Play

issues now circle around what kinds of games women want now that we know women do play games

girls are horizontal competitors; boys are hierarchical competitors
problems with this perspective (the stereotypes) include presenting attributes as intrinsic, static, & immutable; social context is treated as irrelevant; differences are rendered invisible or deviant

her research starts with the assumption that we’re affected by gender belief systems

did a case study of two women learning to play the game Morrowind: The Elder Scrolls III
both were in a class where they were required to play a video game; chose this one; neither was a gamer
Hayes interviewed them and observed their game play

in Morrowind, you enter the game not knowing your role; a lot of exploration; find out you’re the saviour of this world

both women spent a considerable amount of time creating their avatar/character

ended up enjoying the fighting; both were successful and enjoyed the experience, although both experiences were very different

one wanted to be a healer, but there just weren’t that many opportunities to heal
one started out as a potion maker, but it was too much like “cooking” so she changed roles

women gamers want:
modelling
to be forgiven
to benefit others

men gamers want:
expository explanation
to be punished
to win

gendered play is situated in personal histories and social context
women “play gender” differently
can gaming serve as a site for new understandings of gender and identity?

Lisa Galarneau: The Power of Perspective: Games and Simulations for Transformative Learning

has been closet gaming for 20 years; is the daughter of a closet gamer
is also a former dot-commer

can motivate Millennials to learn using gaming, but it’s only one thing games are good for; it’s not the main thing

the sweet spot for games and learning:
– flexible environments that allow for infinite possibilities and points-of-view (“going meta”)
– allow learners to form connections by experimenting with knowledge in context
– learners learn by doing, discovering and through failure
– allow learning designers to foster authentic learning experiences
– facilitate transformative learning

why learning must be transformative:
– no longer sufficient to know stuff or do stuff, learning is about being/becoming different

modernism, postmodernism, and identity play:
– hyperidentities
– digital media allows us to manipulate our “selves” and multiply them indefinitely
– “narrative of the self”

transformation is the natural by-product of experience:
– transformations can be positive; reflection becomes key (classrooms?)
– without guidance, experiences without reflection can result in unconscious judgment (stereotypes, etc.) – Gladwell’s “Blink”
- they are often abrupt shifts in perspective enabled by “disorienting dilemmas”

“point of view gun”

“September 12th” game about terrorism
shooting the terrorists just creates more of them

MIT’s Replicate game that helps you understand the human body, in this case the immune system, from the perspective of a virus

The Oregon Trail – player takes on the role of a pioneer

MIT’s Revolution game – what if you could change history?
replaying history shifts one’s perspective (Civilization 3)

SimSchool - professional development training for teachers (“FPS for teachers without the gun!”)
what if you could turn this around and be the student, too?

BT’s Better Business Game - what if you were CEO? would you make environmentally and socially responsible decisions?

Magellan’s Understanding Diversity - how does experience contribute to our sympathy for others? a CYOA type of model
explore a situtation and have to decide what to do

Simulearn’s Virtual Leader – how do we learn to handle the complexities of business relationships?

guidelines:
– consider using games and simulations to allow a point-of-view that is unexpected; don’t tow the party line
– allow learners to play at being - encourage them to try on different identities
– remember that simulations are well-suited to practice that is impossible or impractical in tthe physical world
- don’t forget to add fun, challenge, and stickiness
– keep in mind that transformatioin is the goal, but it only comes iwth experience; design authentic learning experiences, not just materials or resoruces
– don’t forget the importance of guidance and reflection

Questions:

how do you measure transformation?
Lisa: focus on short-term assessment is prevalent, but you can’t measure this short-term; need to use profoundly qualitative and very subjective measures; no good answer yet
audience member: lets other learning happen, will lead to other things
Lisa: one of the things transformative learners become is better learners, better collaborators; means future problems are solved more easily; could do more formative assessments in other areas

design implies a controlled, intended response; what about the unintended transformation?

Doug Thomas: Teaching (not so long ago) in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: Using Star Wars Galaxies in/as the Classroom
new journal coming out – Cultures in Games

taught 14 students in this class

the game is profession-based, half of which have to do with social interaction rather than exploring, killing, etc.
provides a significant social basis for play

showed a video invitation he received for a party to celebrate a one-year anniversary for entertainers – a LOT of dancing
– all of this has nothing to do with the game itself or Star Wars; build their own cantinas for parties
“biggest party in the galaxy”

course goals:
– three distinct points of view – designer, player, and critic - in order to look at the way communities are created
– games as objects to think with

one student got married 4 times in the game over the semester

challenging assumptions:
– fun/learning binary; we tend to hold those terms in opposition; we usually say it’s okay to have fun as long as you’re learning; flip this to say it’s okay to learn as long as you’re having fun
– play/teaching dichotomy

Thomas went from being in a class to being in a game
– traditional assumptions about classroom roles and behaviors
– the idea that people are having fun in the classroom makes it suspect
– course material as primary
– most interesting transformations came from experience - watching students become players

if you give people groups, they will view everything through them
play as expertise
blurring the binary distinction
– fun and learning as indistinguishable
– student anxiety: “we didn’t want people to think we were just playing games.”

students who weren’t the “best” students turned in the best midterm papers he’d ever read

from teacher to ???
– forced him to rethink the role of the teacher
– was anxious about the class throughout the semester because it was so unfamiliar; “but they aren’t learning anything;” the students “got” it right away, though, and knew exactly what they were learning
- theory testing and theory breaking
- read Murray’s “Hamlet on the Holodeck”
– haflway into the semester, the students started saying, “What would Murray say about what just happened to me in the game?”

conclusions:
– play creates expertise
– taking play seriously violates everything we know (or at least feel) about student and teacher roles; it’s uncomfortable when you’re no longer the leader with all of the knowledge
– principle barriers are faculty, not students; they immediately understood what was important about the experience (gender, social networks, embodiment, etc.); readings gave them something to push back against – they dialogued against it, which was very different and was engaging

Joshua Fouts: Public Diplomacy and MMOGs: Rethinking Foreign Policy, Cultural Understanding, and Peace through Play

Why MMOs?
– one ot many networks (developer to community)
– many to many networks (networked communication systems)
– one to many networks (player to community)

Stephen Gillett: Guild Building is Skill Building: How guild building leadership & management skills learned in MMORPGs transcend into the real world of a startup company

represents the 20something specimen of all of this
grew up around games

mom & dad didn’t know he had a 200–person guild or that he was learning basics in ten languages in Ultima

was told that the things he did might seem totally normal to him, but they’re not normal business practices
noticed that the skills of the guildmaster were the same as being a CEO
– raising money/funds
– had to incorporate
– had to come up with a mission statement
– had to keep the talent
– recruitment of talent
– ceremony and rewards systems were very similar

entering the workforce with several years of managing a guild workforce gave him an advantage

worked at c|net and now Yahoo

Connie Yowell: Respondent, (a non-gamer) from the MacArthur Foundation

response to Stephen:
we don’t have much understanding of adult learning
don’t have much on how all of this transfers, but Stephen just noted how this transferred for him; preparation for future learning
the concept of “stolen knowledge” – is it enough to have that knowledge without knowing you have it?

response to Doug:
role of the teacher is to be able to move the student from concrete experiences into a body of knowledge; it’s a continuum
“are they learning anything” is a fundamental question, and we need to understand those moments
games allow us the opportunity to rethink all of this

response to Joshua:
how do we maintain these communities through conflict?
the notion of trust and security; the role of “soft power”
as you become a member of a community, you gain “collective efficacy” – can we get this in public policy?

Doug: thinks players see race as a user interface issue
thought it was great that the game included the full range of “colors,” but once they got into the game, they didn’t see a single person of color
no discussions about this are happening

Today and tomorrow I’m at the Games, Learning, and Society Conference in Madison, Wisconsin. I’ll post my session notes tonight, but suffice it to say I’m being blown away, and we’ve only gotten through the first session! LOTS to ponder. You’ll be able to watch some of the sessions later, because they’re recording them to be webcast. Highly recommended watching already.

There’s a lot of “places” where your library could shift to meet your users in their space. Here’s another one from the brilliant mind of John Wohlers, he of the library FireFox search extension.

Microsoft® Office 2003 Research Pane

“The Todd library now offers the ability to search our library catalog directly from within most Microsoft Office 2003 applications. To activate this new feature you will need to install our Research Service….

To use the service you will need to access the research pane in a Microsoft Office 2003 application. First select the ‘Task Pane’ option from the ‘View’ menu. Once the task pane is displayed you will need to switch to the Research pane by selecting the drop-down at the top of the task pane. After you have switched to the Research pane you will need to select ‘Todd Library: Online Catalog’ from the drop-down box located below the search box. You may now perform keyword searches of the Todd Library Online catalog any time from your Office 2003 Application.”

Emphasis above is mine because that’s what I’m talking about! I even mentioned this exact type of product at last year’s Illinois Library Association conference as the type of web service libraries need to be moving towards. And maybe we can all move there a little faster, because John noted the following in an email to me:

“This service will ONLY work on windows computers with Microsoft Office 2003 installed.  There does not seem to be a comparable feature in the Macintosh office suite.
 
Once I do more a little more clean up (yes I'm a messy coder...)   I will most likely make the source code available to the world via a project on source forge.  It is my hope that in doing so others will be able to contribute to this project and make it something the library world as a whole can be proud of.”

Suh-weet! Now if I just had a copy of Office 2003 so I could see this in action for myself….  ;-)

I’ve finally been able to post a few things because for the first time in about three weeks, I’m not spending my nights working on grants. In Illinois, 2006 LSTA grant submissions were due Friday, June 17, so it’s all over but the waiting now. Which is a killer, because I’m very excited about both of the grants MLS is involved in.

1. MLS submitted a grant to create an online, statewide book discussion group for audio ebooks called “One State, One Listen” by adding simultaneous use titles from netLibrary/Recorded Books and OverDrive to ListenIllinois. Of course, I think it would be totally cool, but we’ll see what the grant reviewers think.
   
2. MLS is also mentioned as a supporting agency in the big gaming grant I mentioned last month. Aaron submitted the grant under the Thomas Ford Memorial Library, and we ended up with 23 participating libraries out of 35 applicants. Response was incredible, and I’m truly sorry we couldn’t take every one of them. Everyone that read the grant loved it, and we have some mighty big plans if we get it. This will truly be something never before seen in the library world.

So now we wait until September to hear back. I don’t want to say much more until then, so light a candle for us!

Our competition

Oh, and thanks to Su Bochenski for driving all the way to Springfield to make sure they were there on Friday before the deadline!

So last week I was lucky enough to have dinner with the Scan 3 – Alane, Alice, and George of It’s All Good fame. If you read their blog, you know how dinner was. Lively, fun, entertaining, and most interesting. They’re exactly like they seem in their writing, which I’ve found to be true of most bloggers who give good voice. If you have the chance to be in the same room with the three of them, I highly recommend it. I can’t say enough about the level of understanding these folks have about libraries, where we need to be, and how we need to get there.

Then I was given a whirlwind tour of the OCLC Research team’s digs and even their actual research. They’re working on some very cool stuff, some of which we’ll start seeing out in the wild very soon. I wish I could have spent more time with every person I met there and heard more about their various projects, but I had to catch a plane home.

It was a most interesting experience for me because I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with OCLC. They’re the 800–pound gorilla in the room for me, kind of like libraryland’s Microsoft. But over the last couple of years, I feel like I’ve been watching a transformation, an evolution of the gorilla. It’s not that they didn’t have smart or dedicated people in the past, because they did. From the sidelines, it looks to me like OCLC is finally looking outwards instead of inwards, that they’ve noticed there’s a whole web thing going on out there and that ultimately, they (in particular their member libraries) need to be part of it.

This is best exemplified by Lorcan Dempsey, his blog, and his mantra that OCLC needs to make its data work harder, the way Amazon and Google do. I first took this new attitude seriously when they released the Environmental Scan, even more so when Open WorldCat was released. For years I was mad at them for keeping WorldCat so closed and isolated, so this was a most welcome change. It seems like now all of those smart and dedicated people are thinking bigger, more collaboratively, and just more expansively than they have in the past. That’s a Martha Stewart good thing, bolded, italicized, and underlined. Last week they announced the e-serials pilot project to expose full-text electronic journals in WorldCat and the just-announced ‘Ask-a-Librarian’ pilot in WorldCat, and just wait until you see the WorldCat wiki (it’s too-damn-cool, and it should rock hard).

While you’re at it, check out Thom Hickey’s blog Outgoing, and you’ll see the rest of one of the two best employee blog implementations in libraryvendorland (the other being the Talis employee blogs). I can’t believe more library vendors aren’t doing this, but they’ve got two great models to help get them started. In addition, employees from both companies often leave comments on my site or send me email asking questions or further exploring issues I’ve raised, and I know they do this on other sites, too. I feel like they’re really listening (not just to me because I’m not so egotistical as to think they need to be, but just that they’re listening overall) and thinking about what’s being said about their products and services out in the big, wide world [web]. If someone takes the time to write about something your company did or said (or didn’t do or didn’t say), it says a lot when you respond to them on their own site. All library vendors (and libraries) should be tracking what’s said about them in the blogosphere via RSS (another point I stress in my presentations).

So, why am I telling you all of this? For a few reasons. This post is aimed at several different audiences.

1. The marketing/PR folks at OCLC: I have no idea how or why the Scan 3 were able to start blogging outside of OCLC’s site, and I have no idea how you feel about it, but hopefully you know that their blog is worth its weight in gold several times over. This one blog has done a world of good to rehabilitate OCLC’s reputation and humanize your organization. More people talk about OCLC, point to what OCLC is saying, and follow what OCLC is doing (and give you free advertising for it) because of the honest and direct voices on It’s All Good. I actually use them as a case study in my blogging presentations. I have no evidence that you plan to change the setup but just in case, don’t. No one has indicated to me any problems or grumbled anything, but it never hurts to note how things look from the outside. After all, there’s a reason I was invited to tour Research, and there’s a reason I’m writing this post of praise for what they (and the Scan team) are doing. It worked for everybody.

2. Libraries: if you watch It’s All Good and Lorcan’s blog, you’ll notice all of the things I’ve observed in this post. Voice, authenticity, humanizing a used-to-be-faceless-organization. Blogging can give you all of this. Even if you don’t need to rehabilitate your library’s image, let’s face it, library web sites could use a little personality. If you’re not already blogging, you should consider it, especially if you already have a “what’s new” page. That’s where you want to start. Bonus points: starting a blog automatically gives you an RSS feed.

3. OCLC Research (and really the whole staff): keep up the great work! It’s really refreshing to see this change, and I look forward to even greater things from you.  No pressure.  ;-)

The Importance of RSS

“Unfortunately, Google’s well of good data is being poisoned by the likes of comment spammers, trackback spammers and adsense mongers. And while Google, the other search engines and the blog software community have been fighting the good fight with ideas like nofollow, Typekey and stop gapping, I think Google knows that when it comes to blogs, they’re losing the semantic ground. And I think they’ve known this for a long time, because for the last year Google has been resting their hopes on a new medium of information—really simple syndication. The technologically capable know it as RSS.

If you think about it, rss feeds are a librarian’s wet dream (and make no mistake that Google is essentially a library, check that mission statement out again). An RSS feed is a blog distilled to its core essence. If you look at the output of an RSS feed in a reader, you’ll see no comments, no trackbacks and (for the most part) no design. It’s the better blog. It’s pure data.

And so RSS feeds provide Google all the goodness of blogs without all the semantic garbage that might come with a system open to users that are not the content provider. RSS feeds provide Google clean data, good data and thanks to wide-spread adoption by companies and the major blog software entities, lots of it….

…If RSS is getting face-time at the expense of search, Google has something to worry about. And it makes sense. From personal experience, I know my daily routine to keep up with the information overload doesn’t really involve searching anymore, but subscribing. Thanks to services like Del.icio.us, Technorati and Digg.com, people are spending a lot less time actively searching and more time passively reading what’s being updated in their readers….

…In the race to find what deserves face-time, services like Del.icio.us, Technorati and Digg.com in combination with the rapid adoption of web apps like bloglines, newsgator, feedster and kinja are making Google’s search seem very, very slow. And it’s all being accomplished with RSS technology….

Let me give a concrete example based on our experiences here at Particletree. When we launched this site, we knew that the tutorials and information we were gathering and creating were good—that they would be somewhat valuable to the web development community. The problem was that we didn’t want this useful, time-sensitive information to sit around for days (or even weeks) waiting to be picked up by search bots and then found by people accidentally or when they were desperate for a solution.

So I proposed that we turned to Del.icio.us to expand our readership. Every time something went up on the site that I felt would be good enough for a wider audience, I added it to my Del.icio.us account with the appropriate tags and descriptions. Our goal was to try and get a feature on del.icio.us/popular by the end of July and to our surprise, we accomplished it in less than a week. After two weeks of diligent posting and tagging, Google gave us a little over 50 referrals while Del.icio.us gave us over 700.

I think the reason Del.icio.us is so successful at bringing the appropriate audience to good material is because they track the changing web by using people to calculate what is essentially ‘page rank.’ They get access to decent fuzzy logic for a fraction of the cost and the democracy of the system allows anyone to get their idea of what deserves face-time into the system almost immediately.” [particletree, via Dave Farber’s Interesting People mailing list]

Kevin Hale makes some really interesting observations in this essay, so you should read the whole thing, especially if you don’t understand the all of the hoopla about these sites. One thing I think he missed noting about the del.icio.us vs. Google traffic example is the disparity in the number of users between the two sites. Far more hits from the site with far fewer users helps illustrate his point even further. And I certainly agree that Feedster and the like make Google seem slower.

And if Hale is right about all of this, it makes you wonder if this isn’t just one more place librarians and our expertise aren’t going to be found, even though we should be. And don’t we already have goldmines of data that could be found in these services if we just started tagging them (in addition to the structured searching we already provide)?

Oh, and someone already left a comment about the whole “Google as library” part, although no one called him on his assertion that there are no comments in RSS. Especially good since Hale ends the essay by referring back to the “why” of all of this for Google – Adsense revenue.

What Is RSS?

“The Seattle Public Library provides three types of RSS feeds. The first type is a feed of items checked out from the library. This allows you to keep track of your library books through your RSS reader. Several days before an item is overdue, you will get a new story alerting you that the book will soon be due with a link to the catalog so you can log in and renew the item if you want to hang on to it. This feature is especially useful if you want to keep track of several peoples’ items out at the same time, for instance for your children or other family members.

A feed of your items out is available at a URL of the following form:

https://catalog.spl.org/rss/itemsout.jsp?barcode=<your barcode>&pin=<your PIN>

You should replace with the barcode number that you type in to log in to your account in the library’s online catalog and with the PIN you use.

For instance, if your barcode was 1000123456789 and your PIN was 1234, the URL that you would use to get the RSS feed of your items out would be:

https://catalog.spl.org/rss/itemsout.jsp?barcode=1000123456789&pin=1234

The second type of feed is one of the items you have on hold from the library. This helps you keep track of when your holds are ready for pickup. Please keep in mind that you may get a notification that a hold is ready for pickup before the hold is actually waiting for you. This is because the new story is generated when the hold makes it to your library branch, not when it actually gets put on the holds shelf.

A feed of your holds is available at a URL of the following form:

https://catalog.spl.org/rss/holds.jsp?barcode=<your barcode>&pin=<your PIN>

As with the items out feed, you want to substitute <your barcode> and <your PIN> with your actual barcode number and PIN. For instance, if your barcode was 1000123456789 and your PIN was 1234, the URL that you would use to get the RSS feed of your holds would be:

https://catalog.spl.org/rss/holds.jsp?barcode=1000123456789&pin=1234

SPL also offers feeds based upon nearly any search you can do from within our catalog. This allows you to be notified when a new item on a topic you are interested in or by your favorite author becomes available.

At the bottom of every brief summary screen of search results in the catalog you will see an orange XML button which will give you a feed of the search that you just performed.

You can also construct your own feed. For instance, the following URL will give you a feed of the last 10 items containing the term "film noir" added to the catalog:

https://catalog.spl.org/rss?term=film+noir

Every time a new item containing the term "film noir" is added to the catalog, you will get a new story in your RSS reader.

And the following will give you a feed of the most recently published 100 items in our catalog containing the name Stephen King:

https://catalog.spl.org/rss?term="Stephen King"&index=name&npp=100

More complex feeds are best constructed by doing the appropriate search through the catalog and then taking the RSS feed provided as a link at the bottom of the screen.” [Seattle Public Library, via a crank’s progress]

Pretty damn cool, although completely buried. I couldn’t find this page, so I don’t know how Paul Beard did. No press releases, no announcements on the front pages, nothing. Come on, SPL, show us what you’ve got! Then let us know if this is your homegrown solution or if you’re using Sirsi’s Dynix’s code.  :-)

(other than Greg’s podcasts, of course!) - it’s Who said? A Literature Game!

“What it is: an audio literature trivia game, delivered as a podcast, if you want it that way.

Every other day or so, I'll make an audio recording from a novel. It will be short passage, always something a character says. Your task will be to guess the character, book and author.

Two ways to play: on the web site, and as a podcast. We are experimenting with the process a little.

1. All on the web site:  Go here, listen to the clip, then submit your guess using this form.
2. As a podcast:  If you are set up to receive podcasts you can listen via the RSS feed, then submit your answers via the guessing form.

I'll post hints on the discussion forums.”

I’m also very much enjoying the Make podcasts, along with Greg’s, of course. Sadly, no MLS libraries have subscribed to Make: Technology on Your Time, which makes me think they just don’t know about it. If your library “just doesn’t know about it,” check it out, because it’s a pretty unique title and I’ll bet you’ve got an audience for it. I follow along at home via the blog, podcasts, del.icio.us links, and Flickr pool.

I’m in Dublin, Ohio, at the TechConnections conference to give three presentations tomorrow (blogs, RSS, and social bookmark managers), but I arrived just in time today to hear Gary Houk present on the topic of “Connecting Users to Library Services in an Amazoogle World: Trends in Information Discovery and Delivery.” Here are my blognotes:

“10 things Google has found to be true”
5. You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer.

The Amazoogle user environment:

• For many, it’s the first and last resort of research
• Available at the point of need
• Comprehensive?
• How does it compare to libraries?

netLibrary is waiting for Apple to add DRM to the iPod so that their ebooks will work on it

“Digital Natives” = Millennials
— Online gaming (compete, collaborate, create)

OCLC’s response is Open WorldCat (OW)

• Functionality is changing almost weekly
• Search engines called OCLC (?)
• “Connect library users to library services on the open web through syndication… at the point of need….”
• No money is changing hands between OCLC and the search engines
• 9 million searches from these sites (although not all were click-throughs to library sites; that number is in the hundreds of thousands)

Have started to display the FRBR algorithm in Open WorldCat! Will deploy FRBR throughout OCLC services later this year

OCLC now has a Google toolbar?

Experimenting with Google Maps to display the libraries with holdings in Open WorldCat

On the “landing page” for a specific title from Yahoo or Google to OW, you’ll see a display in the upper right-hand corner of the databases to which the library subscribes

Issue of mobile devices – OCLC hasn’t done a lot in this area yet, but they plan to do more

Gary wants an icon on your device for the “global library channel”

Mentioned Google’s SMS functionality - should work for libraries, too!

OCLC’s focus for moving forward:

• Expand WorldCat to better represent library collections, particularly international
• Improve discovery by broadening partner base and enhancing the service
• Improve fulfillment through registries, authentication and new methods of service (e.g., the ejournal space)
• Make the data we have work harder

One of their key objectives for the next fiscal year is to help libraries manage their electronic collections as well as they’ve helped libraries manage their physical collections in the past.

Showed FictionFinder in the research section of the OCLC web site

• Showed a search for Ohio Amish mysteries that uses FRBR
• Stars aren’t ratings – they’re how many “manifestations” there are of the title; shows number of library holdings in parentheses

Top sets for fiction records are classics

• 1,296 for defoe, daniel
• 1,267 carroll, lewis
• 971 cervantes

When click on one, get navigation options by publisher, language, date, type

Wiki in WorldCat

• Want to capture user input in structured ways; will be a pilot test this summer
• User will be able to enter comments, recommendations, reviews, etc.
• Side note: this is exactly what I noted they could do at NEASIST in May!

Highlighted Google Scholar, which OW is part of

Highlighted Google Print, which OW is part of; metadata is available from OCLC; feel they are keeping libraries at the forefront of this

The implications of Google Libraries:

• Potentially covers about one third of print books in WorldCat
• 60% of total Google 5 (the 5 beta libraries) books held by only one of the G5
• Less than 5% held by all of the G5
• 20% of total G5 print books out of copyright
• There’s a paper coming out of their research

“Last Copy”

• 23 million WorldCat records have only a single holding attached

Data-mining study of Vanderbilt holdings in WC:

• Identified 23,000 items held uniquely by Vanderbilt
• 60% are print books
• 60% produced prior to 1950

OCLC/Ithaca collaboration:

• 32 million print books, representing 26 million distinct works
• Only about 120,000 works had both print and ebook manifestations
• Half of print books published after 1977, more than 80% still “in copyright”
• Rareness is common! Only a third of print books have more than 5 holdings, half have 2 or less
• This kind of intelligence helps establish digitization priorities and inform preservation planning

Need to factor in the habits of these “digital natives” when you’re planning your services and the delivery of them

If you’re spending a lot of money on your portal, is that the best use of your money? Most likely your users aren’t starting at your portal.

These companies are using metadata to connect people looking for stuff with people who need stuff – they’re innovators.

I asked when we’ll get RSS out of Open WorldCat – Gary wasn’t sure; “it’s a technology that OCLC is definitely looking at”

Kailee’s on Runescape this morning, exasperated at an offline friend’s actions online. A few days ago, she told me about her Runescape boyfriend. Seems she was talking to someone in the game, and he asked if he could be her “bf.” She thought that meant “best friend,” so she said sure. Only when he dumped her did she find out that “bf” means “boyfriend.” She took it pretty well, though, considering she didn’t know she was dating him to begin with.

Today, however, she’s frustrated. She’s on Runescape chatting with a friend who lives a few blocks away. Apparently the friend has Kailee’s login and password (red flag!) and has been logging in as Kailee now and then. At some point, the friend was on as Kailee when the ex-bf came back and wanted to be her bf again, so the friend said sure, not realizing Kailee didn’t care. Now, though, the friend is upset that Kailee has a bf and she doesn’t, even though Kailee doesn’t want a bf and the friend is the one that said “sure” in the first place. Even worse, she won’t interact with Kailee on Runescape because she thinks Kailee is “on a date.”

I asked Kailee if she knows the friend’s login and password, and her response was, “One of them.” I don’t know why I expected the answer to be “yes” or “no” in this day and age, but I did. She went on to say that the friend has several accounts, and it’s just too hard to remember them all.

Some interesting life lessons going on here, but the scariest part is how freely Millennials trade identities without a care in the world. We’ve repeatedly told Brent not to give his Runescape password to his friends, but they all know each others’ accounts and log in as someone else. It must make for interesting conversations when you don’t know what you might have said before.

Time for another family meeting….

Popular Science magazine gives us the following five things You Didn’t Know You Could Do with RSS:

1. “Package Deliveries
2. Library Books
   “ Avoid late fees and fruitless trips to the library with ELF (libraryelf.com), which generates a feed to inform you when books you've requested are available at your local branch (including a link to operating hours) and when your checked-out books are almost due.”
3. Local Weather
4. TV Listings
5. Yourself” [via del.icio.us/merlinmann/43folders]

I love the ELF and even subscribe to the service myself, but how does it make your privacy-loving, patron-protecting, librarian self feel that a company in Canada is providing this service that gets highlighted in PopSci instead of you?

At MLS, we've decided to podcast Stephen Abrams' presentation on the 22nd, but we don't really have a suitable, portable setup to grab the audio. We'd like to start doing more podcasts in general, so can anyone recommend an inexpensive, portable setup for optimal capture of sound from someone who is speaking to an audience? I know at worst we could set up a second microphone attached to an MP3 player, but I'd like to hear other thoughts on the subject. TIA!

With everything else that’s been going on, I didn’t have a chance last week to announce that the RSS feeds for the MLS web site are finally up and running! They’re not dynamic, but you can syndicate every category/subject on our site. On the home page, you’ll find a feed for the last 20 items added to the site, plus a link to a list of all of our feeds.

Alternatively, if you’re browsing through a subject, there is an XML button at the bottom of every page just for that subject. For example, if you want to track what we’re highlighting about Video Games and Libraries (including our grant), you can view everything related to that subject, and at the bottom of the page is a link to the feed for what we’re posting to it.

I’ve tested the feed in a couple of different aggregators without any problems, so please let me know if you encounter any issues with them. Thanks!

I’m still pulling together an announcement so I don’t have a detailed write-up yet, but I wanted to note that I’m putting together the-most-incredible-offer-ever for audio ebooks for Illinois libraries (not just MLS libraries). It’s one of the other Really Big Projects I’m working on right now.

If you’re thinking about signing a contract for digital audiobooks, DON’T commit to anything until you hear this offer. If you’re dying for more info, call or email me at MLS, but I should have some info up here soon. I promise you won’t find a better deal anywhere else!

Yesterday, Larry Sloma, who (along with Troy Swanson) helped Moraine Valley Community College get all bloggy and RSSified, sent me an email noting that he’s running a pilot project on his new library’s web site. Check out the Highland Park Public Library’s blog, which you can now have read to you.

“Inspired by Gary Price's recent post about Speakwire, we thought we'd try to add a voice to our pilot blog. Works like a charm!

Look for the button labeled ‘Want this blog to read to you?’ near the bottom of the right hand column at http://lishost.org/~hpplblog/.”

That wasn’t enough for Larry, though. Today, I got an email from Troy, saying that Larry had also helped MVCC set this up for their blogs, too. Check out the “Click to Listen” link on the right-hand side of their Library News blog!

Here’s the weird, spooky, serendipitous part. I’m reading my work email tonight (yeah, I’m that overwhelmed at work that I’m doing email from home these days), when the following message from David Mattison appears on the WEB4LIB mailing list:

“I spotted a Google Adsense ad on my blog for a new service called Talkr.com (http://www.talkr.com) that offers conversion of text-only blogs into podcasts. I haven't tried it, but it sounds like (pardon the pun) there's a library application in there somewhere. The company has a revenue sharing program if they select your blog as one of their podcasts. Jenny Levine's The Shifted Librarian blog is one of the blogs already available as a podcast.”

That’s news to me! But, I guess if you’d rather listen to my posts than read them, here’s your chance.

I am pleased as punch to announce that MLS is bringing Stephen Abram to our Chicago office right before ALA for a special repeat presentation of one he gave at the recent PLA Symposium!

Finding OZ: Discovering a Bright Future for Libraries
Date: Wednesday, June 22, 2005
Time: 5:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.
Location: MLS Chicago office
Cost: zero, nada, nothing

“The MLS Zephyr Innovation Program invites member libraries to a very special June evening event! Canadian Library Association President and SIRSI Vice-President for Innovation, Stephen Abram will take us on a day trip to the future. New technology challenges are hitting libraries faster than a Kansas tornado spins out cows. Hear Stephen Abram share his insights into which trends are near and clear and which are the ones about which we can take a more wait-and-see approach. Technology trends aren't just about the wires and software - they're about how we can improve our users' lives. Let's think about it together. Please join us in welcoming Stephen Abram at a reception at 5:30. The talk will begin at 6:00 p.m.”

Register here, as there is limited space. One of our hopes is that our directors will bring their trustees or other decision-makers to come hear what Stephen has to stay, because he has such a strong message.

More on Zephyr soon, because this is another very exciting project I am involved in!

I’m totally snowed under writing grants and dealing with some medical stuff going on at home, but I just had to post about this. Someone forwarded to me Innovative’s June 2005 newsletter (PDF). See if you can spot why from the following list of just a few things they will be introducing in upcoming releases:

• A program registration module that uses the patron database to let your users register for events.
• Spell-check for searches in the catalog (let’s add auto suggest, too, eh?).
• “Patron materials rating,” which is an ugly way of saying user ratings and you can see how others are rating titles. You can also add a reading history module that lets users track what they’ve already read, all of which integrates with the ratings piece.
• WebBridge “smart” linking, which highlights resources you’ve designated for specific searches when the user runs that search.
• The ability to link to ebook and audio ebook vendors from the 856 field in AirPAC.
• Sympsoia, a digital repository module.
• RSS.

Yep, you read that right – RSS! So the good news is that they are currently beta testing RSS feeds with Yale University, and Innovative seems to understand what they need to offer in terms of feeds.

“Now, Innovative’s RSS (Really Simple Syndication) development will make possible new time-critical features for both anonymous and logged-in users of the online catalog. RSS is an XML format that allows organizations and individuals to feed news data directly into news readers or webpages as it is updated. The XML feed can be converted to HTML for use in a wide variety of contexts.

It is already possible to add these HTML portions with feed data into any library-customizable page in the Web OPAC. With Release 2006LE, available late this year, Innovative customers will have the ability to convert feeds to HTML without using third-party solutions. Also, the library will be able to generate its own feeds of new titles acquired by the library….

Innovative will use RSS to support one-to-many communication, but in Release 2006 there will also be one-to-one support. Patrons will be able to get RSS messages as part of their My Millennium suite of personalization features. Timely messages such as ‘Materials due tomorrow’ or ‘New item on hold shelf for you’ will let patrons know about their interactions with the library more quickly than ever before.”

I am thrilled to hear about all of this, but you also just read the bad news – 2006. That means my SWAN libraries really will lose a minimum of 924 hours of staff time this year after all. Still, they’re heading in the right direction and doing lots of cool stuff, so I tip my hat to III and say job well done!