Gaming and Virtual Worlds

Creating an Avatar was pretty fun – though I was slow to figure out what was going on in Second Life and how to move around. It seems to me a great way for librarians to pass a few hours in the middle of a workday! I would be interested to see some usage statistics in Second Life, relating to the ratio of librarians to non-librarians visiting some of the special collections and services that have been created. Are people using them? As for Lively, it also looks fun and I may have to introduce it as a replacement for a now little-used family website.

I was impressed with the way in which some of the case-study libraries had incorporated gaming into their services.  As I’m sure I’ve said before, anything that brings users, especially teens, into the library seems to me to be a good thing. AADL in particular has created what looks like a fun gaming community with a lot of participants. It’s great that there is a dedicated website with a permanent moderator. I was surprised to see a gaming community at a university library, but the University of Illinois is also effectively reaching out to at least one department by creating a gaming community. In this case it is encouraging academic discourse along with the fun of competing with peers. As will AADL, I think that for a community like this to survive there needs to be a dedicated moderator.

I’m a little skeptical of bibliographic instruction in the form of modules like Find it! It seems that some learning objectives may have been sacrificed here in an effort to make it quick and saavy. Although there is a lot of potential for technology to bring bibliographic instruction to students in timely and accessible ways, I don’t think that this is a particularly effective model. The “mystery of the rare book” game that Doshi talks about sounds more fun and more effective, incorporating the game idea without the technology.

What was most interesting to me in the literature this week were the discussion of learning objectives and whether or not games and simulations meet them.  I have spent some time with online resources and games for studying French as a second language. Language learning is one area where e-quizzes and games have flourished, however in my experience, for every question or activity that I found useful, there were another four that did not quite match my skill level or objective. Although it is a cheap and accessible way to squeeze in some extra practice, it is certainly no replacement for face-to-face conversation or instruction.

 It seems that there really has not yet been enough research into the effectiveness of gaming and e-learning in meeting learning objectives. Organizations like the Alliance for Childhood http://www.allianceforchildhood.net/ emphasize a lot of the negatives associated with gaming and e-learning, focusing on repetitive stress syndrome, problems socializing, and health issues associated with too many sedentary activities. People like Richard Van Eck, on the other hand, focus on the new generation of learners that require multiple streams of information, want quick interactions with content, and have very high visual literacy skills. I fall somewhere in between these two – and believe that there is room for some gaming and e-learning in the library and at school, but am not sure that there is really a new generation of thinkers. We all need a range of activities to develop and sustain strong minds and bodies. I know that after spending a good stretch of time wandering around in Second Life I felt much like I feel after watching a lot of television. The question is, whether resources spent in research and development of e-games for the classroom or library might be better spent on more traditional tools. But… I certainly encourage gaming and virtual worlds in libraries, simply for the fun of them.