Digital Immigrants Bringing the Message to Digital Immigrants

Back on June 14th (I know that was a year in blog terms), I co-presented on assessment at an Information Literacy Forum hosted by the Des Moines Area Community College (DMMAC). That's all well and good, but the interesting piece for those reading here about video games and education was the presentation by Lynn McCartney of Heartland AEA.

McCartney is a curriculum and technology director of K-12 schools and spoke on "Digital Literacy, Inquiry, and the Millennials." While the presentation itself was nothing new to those in the field, this was a room full of high school, community college and college librarians and only a few had heard of the technologies she mentioned. Her content was very solid with many of her resources coming from Marc Prensky's work. Even her introduction about students "powering down" was directly from Prensky. Here focus was good and she really connected with the audience (same generation, demographics, experiences as the majority of attendees). It was good to hear the message about the value of gaming and video games strategies out there in a variety of formats. And good to know that she brings that message to high schools and middle school year'round.

She made an interesting distinction between video games and the Wii, separating Nintendo from the Wii. Her comments were a sign of the Wii's mass market appeal and acceptance. My thoughts on it were even picked up by the video game site Infendo. Check out my thoughts on their most recent podcast
I'm about 29:26 minutes in.