Innovation and Learning in Libraries

YouMedia is an innovative new learning space at Chicago’s Harold Washington Library designed to engage teens with library resources and connect them to the city’s educational and cultural communities through the use of digital technologies. YouMedia houses thousands of books, more than 100 laptop and desktop computers, and a variety of media creation tools and software that allow users to create and repurpose content from the web.  By working in teams and individually, students engage in projects that promote critical thinking, creativity, and skill-building.

From Library Journal:

“Games and literacy? That’s a stretch.” So said a school librarian last year when I broached the American Library Association’s (ALA) “Libraries, Literacy, and Gaming” initiative.

It’s a surprisingly common sentiment. Many consider games faddish, despite their proven longevity: board-game playing goes back to the dawn of time, miniatures wargaming starts with H.G. Wells’s Little Wars (1913), and console games have been around since the 1970s, the same time that role-playing games (RPGs) exploded. In the future, I expect, we won’t be asking ourselves “What were we thinking?” so much as “Why all the fuss about gaming in libraries?”

Games and literacy—which I’ll here define as the ability to read and write—go hand in hand.  more

See more about this video at Edutopia:

http://www.edutopia.org/no-gamer-left-behind

From Examiner.com:

From the Poughkeepsie Journal, July 3, 2009:

While most 11-year-olds’ camp experience consists of kickball and arts and crafts, Witman creates video games.

Witman, a Union Vale native, is enrolled in “3D Game Design-Role Playing Games,” one of 14 week-long courses offered at Vassar College by iD Tech camps.  see more

The New York Times reviews the new expansion pack for the hit computer game Spore. 

They say: “The strength of Galactic Adventures is in the rich pool of tools it gives players to create their own scenarios. The basic visual style is goofy and kid friendly, but there is nothing stopping you from creating an evocation of the infernal regions. Players can shape the landscape and place buildings and creatures.

For every creature the player can set up a hierarchy of behaviors like ‘mind your own business, but once a hostile creature gets close, make defending the nest your prime objective.’ Galactic Adventures’ strongest suit is how easily it explains how to create such behaviors and environments.” see more

From DigitalOcean to an urban WildLab, see the MacArthur Foundation web site for Innovative projects being funded through their Digital Media and Learning initiative.

Innovation awards support projects that demonstrate new modes of participatory learning, in which people take part in virtual communities, share ideas, comment on one another’s projects, and advance goals together. Young Innovator awards — designed to encourage young people aged 18-25 to think boldly about “what comes next” in participatory learning and to contribute to making it happen — will aid recipients in bringing their most visionary ideas from the “garage” stage to implementation.

Want to host a game design program or build a collection of games to bolster a program you already host? Check out this article by Kristen Mastel and Dave Huston, from infotoday.com to see their excellent recommendations.

Think that all video games are the same?  Not so!  Here are the most popular categories of video game:

Action (such as Super Mario Bros.)

Action-Adventure (such as Legend of Zelda)

Adventure (such as King’s Quest)

Music (such as DDR)

Role-Playing (such as Final Fantasy)

Simulation (such as the ever-popular Sims)

Sports (such as Madden NFL)

Strategy (such as Civilization)

See Shawn McCann’s full article on this topic at School Library Journal

Computer simulations are natural learning tools for a generation of video game players.