With the long Easter weekend, I left my RSS feeder untouched. A dangerous thing to do. As I'm digging out of my RSS mess, here are a few recent stories that are worth checking out.

Peacemaker - The Game
I was just talking to a middle school student tonight about a social studies project about the Israeli / Palestinian conflict. Here's a new game that allows players to experience either side and make some difficult decisions about a path to peace. As someone with a Political Science degree, I love the idea about allowing students to actually make these decisions and discover the results of them rather than just discusses them in class.

Serious Games for a Mental Workout
An overview of a few serious / educational games that are designed to increase a players attention, memory retention, and recall. Again it's another great use of expanding video games for educational purposes.

Serious Games for the Global Market Place
This is a very solid article on the current state of serious video games. The outlook may appear rosy with the increase of serious games into GDC this year, but Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen, of Serious Games Interactive, suggests that the industry could take another downturn. He points to areas of concerns and opportunities for any of us looking at using games for educational purposes should be aware of.

Notes from a New World
Leading MIT scholar Henry Jenkins has the first of a multi-part discussion about the participatory culture and learning environments. I've been reading through Jenkins book, Fans, Bloggers and Gamers, and I'm interested in his work with games and learning. Jenkins is also a keynote speaker at this summer's ALA's Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium (registration is now open, if you haven't seen already).

Practiceware
Andrew over at library+instruction+technology sent me this link. I read Clark Aldrich's book Simulations and the Future of Learning: An Innovative (and Perhaps Revolutionary) Approach to e-Learning last year. It's well worth looking at and he has two more recent books as well. His blog is a nice addition to his research and a working document for his ideas.

Strangers in a Strange Land
Susan Arendt from Wired's Game|Life wrote a fun piece for this week's issue of the Escapist about being an adult gamer, let alone a female gamer, and the stereotypes that people encounter. The Escapist and it's commentary on video games and game culture is a pretty solid read each with a few articles always worth taking time for. Enjoy


Photo via Manual of Civility

It's getting to the end of our semester which means our research and writing classes are starting their final paper. Last semester I modified a previous review activity to incorporate video game strategies into information literacy. We are using the same activity this semester, with a few additions to avoid some past confusion. The activity uses the following video game strategies:

• Encouraging inquiry
• Open ended exploration
• Context bridging from instruction to application
• Scaffolding
• Personalization

Wow, that could be the post for a dozen different self-help books. But today it was an important phrase to remember in instruction lesson planning. I spent some time this past weekend working on a public speaking instruction session about researching Supreme Court cases and the values contained within each case. The students select one case, research the case itself and the larger value that underlines the case, and creates a speech to explain both sides of the issue and advocate for the side they value. The students are able to find quality sources about the Supreme Court cases through EBSCO and Lexis Nexis databases. Given that they're looking at cases that made their way to the highest court, there is plenty of information about the case. The challenge the students are having is defining the larger cultural value in the case.

Knowing this weakness, I hoped to create some activity/lesson that was more engaging, provided opportunity for practice and feedback, and still allowed for the large degree of personalization that already existed in the assignment. I started trying to take the existing content in a power point and convert it into something based more around video game strategies, like my "Library Dusk" lesson. The more I worked with it, the more artificial the choices and paths began to feel. Helping students determine cultural values leads itself to more of a discussion rather than multiple choice. The discussion realization lead to incorporating small groups in order to discuss the potential values of their cases.

This is the direction I ended up going. After bouncing some of these ideas off my colleague this morning, we decided on creating small groups to discuss the values of the cases they found and then having the groups report out to the rest of the class on the values as well. The discussion, analysis, and sharing of case values should prove more useful for the student than my initial tutorial "ish" game strategy.

Knowing when to let go... for the benefit of the student. I teach because I want to help students learn. I use video game strategies because I know they help students learn and understand. I write because I want others to know how successful game strategies can be. But in the end, video games and game strategies are just another method to engage, motivate, and reach our students. Games are a tool in our instruction toolkit, but just one of many successful tools. Knowing when to use what... well I guess that's what they pay us for.

Happy Easter. My sons spent time today searching out Easter eggs in our backyard and I had some Easter fun of my own. I spent time over this weekend compiling a list of video game titles that would establish a video game collection. I used the video game collection at University of IL Champagne – Urbana as an initial analysis. In addition to the University of IL, I used the top 25 PS2 games from IGN.com and Gamespy.com and Metacritic and Gamerankings in order to create the core list. I also considered the following factors in creating the core title list: Relevance to curriculum; Historic and social significance; Social interaction / community building.

PS2

• Activision Collection
• Amplitude
• Atari collection
• Beyond Good & Evil
• Bully
• Burnout 3
• Civil War
• Dance dance revolution supernova
• Dragon Quest VIII: journey of the cursed King
• EA Sports Madden NFL 07
• Final Fantasy X
• Final fantasy XII
• God of war
• Grand theft auto III
• GT3
• GT4
• Ico
• Jak & Daxter
• Karaoke Revolution
• Katamari Damacy
• Kingdom hearts
• Kingdom hearts II
• Lumines Plus
• Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence
• MLB 07. TheGAME
• Okami
• Prince of Persia
• Psychonauts
• Rez
• Shadow of Colossus
• Sly Cooper 2
• SSX3
• Tony Hawk 4
• We (Heart) Katmari
  

• Medal of Honor
• Motorstorm
• Oblivion

Wii

• Cooking Mama
  Elebits
  Excite Truck
  Madden 07
  Rayman: Raving Rabbits
  Super Paper Mario
  The Legend of Zelda: TP
  Tiger Woods 07
  Trauma Center
  WarioWare: Smooth Moves

X360

• Amped 3
  Baseball 2k7
  Battle racing ignited - Burnout revenge
  Blazing angels: squadrons of WWII.
  Blue Dragon
  Civil War: a nation divided
  College Hoops 2k7
  Elder scrolls IV : Oblivion
  Forza Motorsport
  Gears of war
  LOTR: Battle for Middle Earth
  Madden NFL 07
  Mass Effect
  NCAA 07
  Oblivion: Shivering Isles
  Project Gotham racing 3
  Rainbow Six : Vegas
  Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07
  Via Piñata
  Winning Eleven

Photos:
Kotaku
Joystiq
Gotfrag
Xbox 365
IGN.com

While I started the week with some positive thoughts on the direction of library/info lit games (link), but with the stories coming out of ACRL about the troubles Cincinnati and GW are having; I am not surprised if your spirits are dampened about successfully using.

Librarians can use and create games that create educational experiences... at least with help.

There's not an easy answer. Some who I respect from the University of Iowa asked during my presention, "Is there something out there were we can jump in and create a game." I wish there was. As Cincinnati and GW are showing, gaming projects take time. Matthew Weise, designer of the educational game Revolution, said it took a group of 6-10 students at MIT over 3 semesters to build a game. Time is a major factor, but it shouldn't deter us. Yes, it's too bad the tech isn't there yet for an easy drop and play game. But the technology is there to Mod games and the resources are there as well... we work on campuses full of students who are doing modding and dabbling in game design on a regular basis. We can and should reach out to these communities to help create educational games. It's a win-win for both educators and students.

But I can't overlook the small successes. Incorporating video game strategies into our traditional instruction is beneficial and improves our teaching. While I'm starting to discuss and play around with developing and modding, I'm currently working on converting the content from a traditional power point slideshow into an open ended, branching path review.

Video game strategies work to engage our students in educational experiences both in the long term and the short term. As an educator, we can start big or small. But the reactions from those who are discouraged after starting big, suggest that small successes will be more successful in building the political capital required for the bigger gaming projects in our libraries.

Can we do it? Yes we can! And we should.

On Wednesday, I had a good conversation with Chad, from Library Voice, about the type of game that could be created to teach plagiarism. Given the struggles others are having, we talked about modding existing games. I think there is some real potential here with modding, but it is still not a quick project. Here is an summary of my ideas from our conversation, mainly on some very initial thoughts on information literacy video game possibilities. I'd love your feedback...

********

Singstar and DDR for finals week stress relief? Is there a better way to burn off stress finals stress than dancing to arrows or checking your pitch against pop music hits.. ie. making a fool of yourself and loving it? I'm hoping not.

Our library is planning a couple of snack breaks during the days leading up to finals week. We planned on snacks, but the video games are a new addition. We started to plan a video game night this semester, but ran into a few roadblocks, but we've still had it in the back of our heads.

Lisa Hinchliffe's presentation at ACRL was just the push my director needed. Here is a description of a similar presentation that Lisa and the rest of her staff gave recently. Thanks for the push!

Next up - Building a core video game collection...

photos via Flickr
Shavart
jameskun

Ohio, land of libraries, comes through with some good info on the "Muckrakers" ACRL session that I was wondering about. On Wednesday, Chad from Library Voice said it sounded like the GW librarians were questioning all the effort of the project. That thought was support by a detailed write up of the session by Kate over at Adventures in Library Land Adventures

Muckrakers at ACRL

The goal of this project - the creation of an online game to teach research skills - was to "develop virtual instruction that encourages collaborative learning, peer evaluation, exploration, and critical thinking." They wanted to incorporate 3 teaching methods: Collaborative learning, peer teaching, and exploration and discovery.

After my initial thoughts a few nights ago, I have thought more about what keeps players playing and what they are learning in the process. So I’ve gone back over my notes and the discussions from last October when the McArthur Foundation held a 3 week discussion on video games and learning (it was actually one of my first blog posts over at Bibliographic Gaming. Here are some worthwhile quotes and thoughts from the week on game literacies:

Victoria Carrington: “Computer games are the site of some of these textual practices – practices that I think many of us would agree are becoming highly valued in relation to being able to effectively participate in our communities” (October 23, 2006).

James Paul Gee: “So…the question arises about what sorts of other bumps games make on people’s bodies and minds and what sorts of other effects players have on games and how these two are transcacted (October 23, 2006).” Games can often be more lasting and meaningful experiences, because they are just that – experiences.

Jay Lemke: “… we never use just one of these resource systems all by itselft. In real life we are always using several simultaneously, even if we are not paying attention to all of them (Oct. 23).” Sound like information literacy.

Lemke: “…game interactivity involves not just our responding to the game, but the game responding to us, in ways that were both meaningful and surprising, so that gameplay could be seen as a kind of dialogue or conversation” (Oct. 23). The experience of playing goes beyond simple button pushing.

Gee: “One thing that interests me in video games is that `reading` (taking meaning from the game/text is a form of `writing` (producing meanings). (Oct. 24).” Very similar to some arguments Gee makes in his books.

Brian Thompson: “…most highly motivated, highly skilled players are trained to reflect upon… whatever game they are playing” (Oct. 24). Games provide continued opportunity for critical analysis and reflection.

Lemke: “Authoritarian approaches to learning are counter-productive because they inhibit the playful attitude of experimentation… this kind of play is essential to learning” (Oct. 25). The idea of play is something that can be created in a variety of lessons, not just games.

Linda Polin: “The types of attitudes that make an effective game player require risk taking, an active role in creating the meaning, non-linear navigation and attendance to multiple cueing systems and of course, problem solving and lateral thinking” (Oct. 25). Really, who doesn’t want students that are able to do this?

I need your help. If you have read or written any reflections/blog posts/summaries on last Sunday's presentation on the "Muckraker" game by the librarians at George Washington University - I would love your comments. I've spent time over the past two days digging around on the internet and continue to come up short. They haven't posted anything on the ACRL/TLT Learning Times virtual conference site either... does anyone?

As I've dug around, I found this nice post on Gaming Presentations at ACRL from Wake Forest University. It gives a good summary and analysis on the University of Cincinnati's game presentation, the lessons and struggles they went and are going through.

Also if you haven't checked out Scott Rice's work on his information literacy quiz game, he has posted his materials from the ACRL poster presentation here.

In addition to the quiz game, Scott's Library Games blog is also now listing other libraries that are developing information literacy quiz games:

Forsyth Technical Community College
Ivy Tech Community College
University of Portsmouth
University of Wales
University of Waterloo
University of Wisconsin - LaCrosse
Washburn University

We fill in information gaps. We help students find, evaluate, organize and hopefully use information. We usually do this with an academic (if not always a library) setting. But our hope is that the students can take those information literacy skills and apply them in a real world setting.

If that is the case, do we need to create games that are locked within that library/academic setting? The Fletcher Library’s Game Project does a nice job of setting up a fictional real life situation of a medical outbreak on campus. The students are applying are variety of information literacy skills to resolve questions around the disease. It’s a great project and I’m looking forward to hearing more next month at LOEX.

But couldn’t we go further (and wouldn’t it be a little easier too)? Does a game have to be set in a library? College campus? Why can’t we create fictional narrative spaces set in real life situations or even fantasy realms? Why can’t we create fictional narrative spaces that engage our students through gameplay? Some commercial game engines are well suited to creating these game environments.

I’m starting to look at a couple of commercial game engines that could be modded. I want to find something that allows for information seeking and evaluating as part of the gameplay. Instead of spelling out the academic educational content, I want to use the game experiences to draw comparisons and have discussions on how the skills required to be successful in the game, also make you successful in research and work. We are in a nice position with our core educational content since information literacy is a life long skill. There are a variety of potential real life situations where we can create gameplay situations that require exploration, communication, and evaluation of information in order to be successful.

Okay so I’m starting to bite off a lot here, but I’m going to develop this idea/outline/application over the course of this month and I’d love your input.

I deal in information. I help provide, evaluate, and organize information. I am all about “filling in the information gap” (Johnson, 2005). I am a video game. Switch “provide” with “find” and now I am an information literacy librarian. It’s our job to help students identify and fill in their “information gap.”

This past weekend, as my son played Dora the Explorer on the computer a few ideas started to fall into place. Dora the video game is the same as Dora the TV show. But written more accurately, Dora the TV works because it is the same as a video game. Stay with me here. Dora has a quest (to find her grandmother or get to the baseball game, etc) and there are a series of goals to accomplish along the way. Regardless if it is the TV show or the game, Dora continues to ask for the user’s input to accomplish each goal (whether through a mouse, controller, or simply their voice). Dora works (at least at certain age levels) because it requires the user the “make” choices. My son does not see the game or show as educational, but it is in the exercises required to progress where learning takes place. Learning happens for my son and the player through playing and enjoying, not because they are playing to learn.

As I’ve read through people’s reflections and reactions to the University of Cincinnati’s presentation at ACRL I realized the same thing. Cincinnati’s game, similar to others in education is focused around learning not play. Granted, this is not a bad thing and it still creates worthwhile gaming projects. But since as librarians we deal in information, couldn’t we focus on the game and let the learning happen through playing? Can we develop games that are not seen as overtly educational (granted our students are smart enough to know they must have educational use), but provide an educational experience through playing?

What do these games look like? I’ve got a few ideas, what ideas do you have?

Dora image via Amazon

Here are a few posts from the official ACRL conference blog

The University of Cincinnati's session on the game(s) they developed.
Cincinnati's progress and lessons on their gaming efforts
It turns out that they had to start from scratch do to time constraints and staff changes, this brought out some new ideas including some Google tools applications.

Here's a comment from a blog post from the session Lisa from University of IL - Urbana gave.

Since I’ve been spending my ACRL conference weekend taking care of my digital natives, rather than talking about them with colleagues, I decided to go back and read through Prensky’s first digital native article from 2001.

Prensky, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the Horizon, 9(5).
The pdf article and many others by Prensky are available on his website … here

The article itself reads like the first chapter out of Prensky 2006 book, Don’t Bother Me Mom, but that’s a good thing. The tone and content of his article still rings true today, over 5 years later. In fact, his message is even more important today because these are the students we are seeing at all levels of education. How Prensky describes these digital natives is not dramatically different than the published literature on “millennials.” But I prefer the term “digital native” because it is not just about the current generation, the term and the learning strategies attached to it apply to all generations to come that have grown up with technology.

Digital natives (ie. Our students) prefer information that comes faster, is less step-by-step, and has random access points that provide choice and personalization. Prensky points out that this does not mean that we dumb down what we teach to make it more appealing, in fact the opposite is true, it makes the content less appealing. These strategies do not change the “what” – core content, critical thinking, but it does change the “how.” Prensky encourages educators to get rid of teaching “slowly, step-by-step, one thing at a time, individually, and above all, seriously.” Start thinking about those gaming strategies mentioned before and above and a more engaged classroom.

My 3 year old is finally doing better, his appetite is back and he can breath pretty easily. Unfortunately, my 1.5 year old now has it. I had planned to post yesterday, but a toddler with pneumonia is not a fun time. I think we caught it sooner than his brother though, so hopefully it will not get as bad. Since I’ve been at home for the last three days focusing on my digital natives, I wanted to review some of Marc Prensky's work.

Prensky, M. (2005). Listen to the natives. Educational Leadership, 63(4), 8-13.

Prensky’s article ties in nicely with my suggestions of starting small in the classroom. Prensky’s discusses teaching strategies that can be successful with current students (digital natives); engagement before content, decision making encouraged, input from students about teaching process and the ability to be adaptive in the classroom. The ideas themselves are rooted in the student’s experiences with games and technology (I almost put “digital technology” but then I realized how much of a “digital immigrant” that made me sound).

Prensky makes the important point that we need to design our lessons to mirror the same type of goal orientated motivation, choice, immediate feedback, and “leveling up.” While I’m still not sure how to work “leveling up” into information literacy sessions (*cough* discussion point *cough*), I’ve been able to incorporate the other gaming strategies into traditional sessions with a high degree of success. Of course “success” is relevant and I’m still working to improve the sessions, but those “baby steps” I talked about last time work.

King, B.R. (2007). Think small! A beginner’s guide to using technology to promote learning. Educause Quarterly. Retrieved January 27, 2007, from http://www.educause.edu/apps/eq/eqm07/eqm0719.asp?bhcp=1

King doesn’t focus on video games, but does provide sound advance educators looking to start using any technology, including games, to enhance student’s learning. King focus is on four goals: small goals, smaller chunks of content, refined searches, and small classroom cases.

While this message is not revolutionary and rather practical, it provides a good jumping off point for those looking to get started using games and game strategies in the classroom. I used this message to emphasis the success that I’ve had within instruction sessions in my presentation. While I’m very excited and interested in using games to teach and experience information literacy, those are long term projects. We can be very successful starting small in our own classrooms. If we “start small” and apply gaming strategies to our existing information literacy program and classroom setting we can be successful in creating more engaging and meaning learning experiences. Start small, target a few gaming strategies, include traditional outcomes and you will enhance your students learning experience.

I’ve included three examples of how it can be successful in the “Begin your quest” section of my presentation last week.

Since I'm sticking around this weekend nursing my sick son, who is thankfully sleeping right now, I'll be finally digging back into the articles I've been using and sharing some thoughts on the. So without further ado...

Foreman, J. (2004). Game-based learning: How to delight and instruct in the 21^st century. Educause Review, 39(5), 50-66.

The article itself is a little dated, but Foreman interviewed James Paul Gee, J.C. Herz (author of Joystick Nation), Randy Hinrichs, Marc Prensky (Don’t Bother me Mom), and Ben Sawyer (organizer of the first Serious Games Summit) on a variety of topics including the challenges of traditional instruction, the benefits of video games for learning, and the development of game-based learning communities. The article is available for free through Educause’s archive.

Both Hinrichs and Gee discuss learning through context clues and information that can be directly applied to the immediate game situation. Gee draws the significance that we learn through experiences and interactions with our world. Gee states he, as he does in his own book, that games provide verbal information close to the time when you see how it works and apply it. This connection provides meaning and lasting understanding to those playing. This same concept has applied to successful information literacy sessions for years. Librarians do not want to teach research skills and evaluation strategies in a vacuum to students. We want our sessions tied to assignments where they will apply these skills and thus attach more meaning to them.

Hinrichs and Prensky later discuss how games required frequent decision makings at rapid speeds and to think critically about each of those choices. Again this is what we want within information literacy; students using critical thinking skills to make frequent decisions to evaluate the content they are reading. If we can use games to help teach information literacy, our students can learn critical thinking /decision making process through playing the game. Rather than simply walking our students through worksheets and step by step examples, games open up the experience and help our students learn not through instruction by through experience.

Yes, that's right. My hyping and excitement about going to the ACRL conference is all for naught. Okay, so I never really hyped it too much here, but I was looking forward to blogging about the University of Cincinnati's gaming presentation and GW's presentation on their info lit. game - Muckrakers.

My son has pneumonia and now on his 3rd round of antibiotics to try and stop it and is looking at a hospital stay. And so, no ACRL for me. Honestly, I'd rather be with my sick son.

So instead of me blogging about the presentations... here are a few shots (the first pictures of me on this blog since 2005) presenting last week.

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.

Welcome to everyone from today’s session at Iowa ACRL. I hope you take a few moments to explore, read, comment, & come back. You might as well sign up for the RSS feed while you are here too. Thank you for coming to the session and I hope that we can work together to find ways to integrate games and gaming strategies in your instruction sessions.

My sessions went pretty well. I co-presented with another librarian in the morning on instruction, curriculum mapping and the assessment process. It went very smoothly and we both received a lot of positive feedback. Then in the afternoon, I got to change direction and focus in on video games and education. If you haven’t checked out the power point and handout yet, please do so.

There were 33 people in attendance for my session on video game strategies in information literacy, but considering I was in the last timeslot of the day and my morning session had 38 people – the 5 person difference wasn’t too bad. The presentation went surprisingly smoothly, the branching paths worked really well and I felt I was able to cover all the key points and weave the thematic elements through each segment in order to make the progression feel natural. The attendees did jump around a little; from gaming stats to what other libraries are doing then back to educational strategies and finally to what I’m doing. But as a whole, I was able to keep them engaged, chuckling a little and still focus their attention in through changes in movement and voice. Looking back on it, I really wish it would have been recorded – so that I could share it & critique myself (always teaching afterall)

My only negative from the session was that I had a really hard time reading the audience. There were clearly times when almost all of them appeared engaged but there were other times when I could make out if they were focused, skeptical or just tired at the end of the day. So if you were there and are reading this… I’d love to get your feedback.