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Week 11
I really enjoyed this weeks readings, and was again not surprised to learn that I knew almost nothing about gaming and/or virtual worlds. With that being said I'm also not totally blind to their existence, I understand the concept, and can even appreciate how they might be a good time and or a valuable learning tool. I like many people roughly my age learned geography from Carmen Sandiego. I've recently even had friends go so far as to show me their games of warcraft, encouraging me to take it up... Even though it looks kind of fun there has always been something about how rabid they are when discussing their "habit/fix" that I've been put off... Plus the looks they seem to get from their partners in my experience borders on murderous.
I recognize that if implemented correctly these games could and in some cases are being harnessed as incredibly powerful learning tools. By getting students to really engage with the material you've already won half the battle. This will become especially true given the reality of youth today, as the Van Eck article suggests youth today have in large part grown up online. "they require multiple streams of information...". I know personally although I'm by no means a technical expert I'm a lot more comfortable working in an environment with multiple media devices on the go.
The Herz and Squre articles brought up some interesting point about the sheer potential of networked and collaborative learning that were actually almost shocking to me. The idea of Apolyton university in particular was crazy. Here is a learning environment that youth are actively and voluntarily engaging in, where they happily learn form peers and each other. If this power were to be harnessed by libraries we would have quite the tool. The idea of this social learning community was also quite appealing in that it did not exclude based on identity, age, race gender, class or nationality. Truly this is a model that has some value.
Granted I don't think all games are valuable, I would merely suggest that games are a tool with a lot of potential, and one that should be considered as a legitimate avenue for information sharing, learning, and dissemination. If and when learning can be made fun, it should be made fun !
Grant
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Grant the “Apolyton university” sounds quite familiar as most strategy games have a similar part of their community. They generally grow from guides developed by beta-testers who help others when the game in question goes on sale. Similarly, youth may be encouraged to research a topic of interest and write a report that will be kept in the library for a time. Youth would likely work harder if they knew their work would be on display instead of simply marked by a teacher.
Greg
Hey Grant
A couple points you make I agree with. First, I really like how you point out the inclusiveness of gaming and virtual worlds. These spaces give every person the chance to be themselves without biases or stereotypes. It has the possibility to make the entire world a community, not just the local community. Values from this virtual community can be implemented into our own community value systems.
I also agree that not all games are valuable. I quickly looked up the most popular games, and of them were games I consider "bad" for lack of a better word (grand theft auto, halo, unreal tournament, doom). I know as a librarian, especially if these games are targeted toward our youth, I would not want them included in my community collection. I guess the only thing we can do is evaluate these games just as we would books and online sources, determining its relevancy, usefulness etc...
Hi Grant,
Re: motivating kids to learn through games, I've read some interesting articles about that lately. In a recent study http://www.ifets.info/journals/8_2/5.pdf researchers looked at learning outcomes for students working with educational software that had a gaming/virtual world interface vs. a more simple, traditional interface. The study showed that high acheiving students will do well no matter whether they use virtual software, more traditional games, or nothing at all --- however lower achieving students showed marked improvements in performance through their use of games/virtual software. The conclusion was that these students probably found school boring or otherwise unappealing, and that games provide for them a more intrinsic motivation. Another article said that there are 4 factors involved in intrinsic motivation: challenge, curiosity, control and fantasy. Anyways - just thought it was interesting - appologies for hijacking your blog to talk about one of my other LIS projects!