Looking back & racing forward...

Every site about good blogging strategies or articles about "How to keep visiting coming back" always state that the author should have a good core content ready after an initial visit to keep readers coming back. Well I meant to have some posts over the weekend for people who attended my conference presentation on Friday, but a 3 year old with 102 degree fever, a 1 year old getting teeth and a wife with the flu put things on hold.

So regardless if you are new here or reading for a while, now is a good time to look back and highlight some useful older posts that focus on instruction, games and our role as librarians.

Let's start off back in the fall with a post that would become the foundation for my application of gaming strategies. I followed up that post with 5 steps for using games, some of which I echoed in my presentation. The analysis and similarities about "Why Our Attempts Fail" in both research and in gaming is another starting point for gaming application.

Last fall, I wrote a series of posts (starting here) reflecting on the results of using open ended game strategies for a research writing review session. The results really opened my eyes about how we teach and how we could teach. I included some student reaction and comments in the final post as well. There are also some detailed notes on my branching / decision tree lecture and my branching "choose your own adventure" article search from this spring as well.

Finally, there are is a post on how frustration playing games can help non-gamers understand what our students might go through with library interfaces.

Take a few moments to dig back through the last few months here at Research Quest.
I'd love to get your comments on these ideas and any others you want to share.