My post on the game/toy Line Rider, appropriate titled line rider appears on the first page of results for the google search for, you guessed it, line rider. How did i figure this out? After a number of random comments from young peopke appeared on the post, I figured the post had to have a fairly high ranking.
There are a few small lessons to be gleaned from these comments. First, the fact that so many kids have left comments should indicate just how normal it is for them. It is totally standard for them to participate in a conversation on a blog they’ve never seen before. Second, and this is no surprise to us, some kids need serious help with their information literacy. A few of the comments thank me for making the game. Isn’t it fascinating that they make this incorrect connection?
I’ll let you draw your own conclusion from this comment:
Line rider is the coolest game on the net….its so easy and fin to play…here at school, they blocked it, but now i just save it on my computer at home and bring it in on the flash drive!!!! its amazing!!!!
Steffen P Walz, a game designer and cultural anthropologist designed a great navigation system for his website. There are four mini games, each an archetype of a game genera: Achiever, Killer, Explorer, and Socializer. When the website viewer/game player completes a small task, the content on the web page changes. There’s also a standard navigation bar.
The first librarian to implement something like this as the interface for the the YS/YA portion of their website will get the “walking paper seal of approval” and a big handshake from me. And importantly they’ll get more use of their website.
If you check out his site, Playbe’s Place, you can try the game based navigation and read his ideas about the “military entertainment complex,” pervasive computing, “suvelitainment,” and the game generation.
This afternoon I drove to Salem to meet with State Librarian Jim Scheppke, and some of the state library staff to talk about the future of the Oregon School Library Information System. OSLIS is, among other things, a resource sharing cooperative for school libraries across the state. We generated some great ideas for “OSLIS 2.0,” and if things come to fruition it has the potential to be BIG.
After lunch I got a tour of the library, which has reference service, internet stations, and a reading room open to the public. I snapped some pics of the neat stuff, including a huge card catalog, and it is all in a flickr set called visiting oregon state library.
Please don’t mistake this post a bit of schadenfreude, but I was very interested to read an article titled “a spam filter for questionpoint” the other day. In it, Caleb Tucker-Raymond, the Statewide Digital Reference Coordinator for the L-net project, describes the issue of spam coming through QuestionPoint. He also does a great job describing the measures he considered implementing, and the one he actually has implemented to (mostly) stop the arrival of virtual reference spam. Regarding IM security, Caleb hits the nail on the head:
I haven’t used Meebo or other web IM clients much, so I’m not sure if embedding and HTML image or movie or piece of malicious code would be a problem, but something tells me the IM people have it figured out already.
What interested me most about this post, and others about patrons changing font colors within QP by (perhaps) writing some HTML and leaving tags open, is how vendor driven VR products are seen as safe and instant messaging is seen as insecure.
There are a number of reasons why librarians started believing this, but one reason I want to bring up is the not so subtle ageism I see present in many libraries. Because of their age and associated lack of power, it is easy for libraries to manage their behavior. Even though both groups might be participating in the same activities, librarians can much more easily act on biases they have about young people than they can act on the the biases they have about other people. There’s no difference in one patron emailing friends, and another IMing friends. Both are legitimate library activities, and should maybe even be encouraged. “Libraries? Oh yeah, that place where I connect with my friends.” That has a nice ring to it.
It is only possible for librarians to take issue with web activities like gaming, IM, blogging, and MySpace because these things are (incorrectly) seen as the territory of kids. If these things were introduced to the library world not as things that “those crazy Millennials are doing” but rather as new information trends, I doubt librarians would have been able to take such objection. Just because younger people were among the early adopters of these technologies does not give libraries the right to treat them as illegitimate.
You don’t get many plain links from me here, so listen up! Folks at the YALSA blog have been highlighting positive uses for teens and social networking sites over the past 30 days. They’ve compiled it into a big pdf titled SOCIAL NETWORKING AND DOPA.
The ideas presented point out how libraries can engage not only their younger users but general community as well. They are a great illustration of how libraries can reach out and, dare I say, be proactive. School librarians can read this and get inspired, and then use it to combat the fears of admin.
Thanks to the bloggers at YALSA for this resource!
The title slide for my presentation about MySpace and libraries.
In my SirsiDynix Institute talk with the Librarian in Black this morning I mentioned that putting our users in control is a good idea. Sarah gave the concrete example of how power-enabled teen advisors can invigorate a YA department. We weren’t advocating letting the inmates run the asylum (or maybe a better phrase would be “vacationers steer the cruise ship” – let’s not compare our patrons with inmates – behave!), but rather being as user-centered as possible when appropriate.
Then I came upon this article from Fast Company: The Catalyst: How open-source design (and a big shot of fashion) saved Puma, and invented an industry . There are a few good ideas for libraries in the article that echo our sentiments from the morning.
Puma has since become the fourth-largest athletic apparel company in the world, a transformation that testifies to Zeitz’s vision and willingness to roll the dice. After spending several years kicking the company’s bad habits…he decided to put an unrestrained 21-year-old skateboarder named Antonio Bertone in charge of a new division.
When Bertone was put in charge he was probably more like the demographic that Puma was hoping to reach than a retail exec. I’m sure it took some trust for Zeitz to put him into place, just like it takes trust and for us to open up our institutions to contributions from patrons. As Puma did, libraries benefit from it.
One text for my Admin of the School Media Center class this quarter is Information Power: Building Partnerships for Learning which is put out by ALA. The opening chapter forwards the idea of creating a “learning community” in schools:
“This new learning community is not limited by time, place, age, occupation, or disciplinary borders but instead is linked by interest, need, and a growing array of telecommunications technology” (p. 2)
Isn’t that a nice notion? Because there can’t be community without interaction, this concept provides a useful framework for thinking about school libraries in the age of the two-way web. It even expressly states that people are linked by technology. This should provide some evidence for school librarians trying to utilize social software to engage their students. It also presents a non-hierarchical view of student-teacher relationships. Inspiring!
As we try to port library services to mobile devices, or actually try to create new services for mobile devices, we should be encouraged by news of increased battery life. Hybrio rechargables allegedly last 4 times longer than regular alkaline batteries and can be charged 500 times. According to some MIT micro-jocks, batteries might soon be a thing of the past. See the article “Engine on a chip promises to best the battery”. I can’t really get my head around the idea of having a fuel burning engine inside of my laptop, but if it gets me 10 times the life of a charge, I’m all for it.
Meanwhile, how are teens using their cellulars? They’re not using them to tunnel in to Unix servers or even watch live doppler radar loops. A study by online cell provider LetsTalk says that teens are all about texting. No surprise, really. Think there’s a service opportunity there? [hint: yes]
We’re all aware that some academic and public libraries have been using MySpace (see Jenny’s post about the recent US News article too!) to remain relevant and market themselves, but what about school libraries?
It being a hot-button issue and certainly blocked in 99.999% of schools, I imagine school librarians would have a heck of a time getting any sort of admin approval for this. I can hear the conversation. “If we have a MySpace, that’ll *condone* kids visiting the site and it will connect them with molesters!” Right. Because they’re not using it anyways. God forbid there’s any positive influence or education by example going on.
But I digress. Please let me know if you know of any school libraries (or schools in general) with a MySpace account. Thanks!
