With today's opening weekend kickoff to the new NFL season, it's worthwhile to review some of the information literacy skills millions of fantasy football players will be engaged in over the next few months. This past summer I was one of the many guest videos (guest speakers) in Scott Nicholson's Gaming in Libraries online course. The brief video walks through much of what I've written and spoken about in regards to information literacy and fantasy football.

After 6 months of no activity on this blog, the growing assumption is a slow quiet internet death.

But I'm hear to say that it is not the case. I'm not dead, yet. There are still people finding the site and emailing about posts, articles, and classroom ideas. In the words of my colleague, I was on a blogcation. There are plenty of others who took planned and unplanned leaves from their writing. And we all have reasons.

Mine... the sudden death of my father. He died a few days after my last post. I am thankful to have had an open relationship with my father and we never hesitated to say "I love you." That being said, rarely a day goes by that I do not think of him in some fashion or another. In addition to this emotional tramua, as the Spring Semester wore on, the entire library began the preparation for a moving our existing collection and staff to a new library building. All in all, I was not in a mental or physical mindset to write.

I did continue to research and present. And I am back to needing a place organize, share, and shape my thoughts and ideas. Thus, I am back writing again. Over the next few posts, I will catch things up and talk more about my renewed energy and focus for video games and information literacy.

Starting up with where I stopped 6 months ago is a good jumping off point. My post on the state of video games, learning, and academic libraries was responded to by Christy Sich over at Bibliographic Games. Christy had one of the earlier articles about video games and information literacy and her experience and insight are appreicated. She ended her post with:

It's important to imbed information literacy into the curriculum - so a game-based information literacy approach should also be embedded.

Our campus is in the process of revising it's general education requirements and information literacy is currently included at the same level with writing and speaking/communication across the curriculum. Working on a draft of information literacy objectives, outcomes, course requirements has taken time away from video game research, but it has also allowed me to begin looking for games that fit these outcomes. Over the course of this academic year, I will write more about how I'm incorporating games and gaming strategies into the structure information literacy objectives and hopefully curriculum.

But for now, I'll catch myself and anyone else up on the last few months. There are also some new projects that I will be writing about, researching, and reflecting on.

Hello again to anyone who hasn't updated their RSS feeds in a while. And hello to anyone new out there reading.




image from Pythonline