Week 11: Gaming & Virtual Worlds

Learning Objectives

By the end of this week, students will:

• understand the significance of gaming and virtual worlds to the digital learning landscape.
• have formulated their own ideas for the affordances of gaming and virtual worlds to library services, information literacy, and e-learning.

Readings

• 7 Things You Should Know About Virtual Worlds, Educause
• Game On for Learning, Sara de Freitas
• Digital Game-Based Learning: It’s Not Just the Digital Natives Who Are Restless, Richard Van Eck
• Simulations, Games, and Learning, Diana Oblinger
• Gaming the System: What Higher Education Can Learn from Multiplayer Online Worlds, J.C. Herz
• Meet the Gamers, Kurt Squire & Constance Steinkuehler
• Understanding the Importance of Exploring Virtual Worlds, Jenny Levine
• Second Life: The Educational Possibilities of a Massively Multiplayer Virtual World (MMVW), David M. Antonacci and Nellie Modaress
• Get a (Second) Life! Henry Jenkins
• How Gaming Could Improve Information Literacy, Ameet Doshi

Case Studies

Things to do this week

• Read the articles & case studies for for this week and post your thoughts & comments to your blog (the case studies this week are a mixed bag of libraries' gaming blogs, pages outlining gaming collections and a couple of online information literacy games). Don't forget our weekly deadline for blogging is 9 am, Friday. Also, remember to check out your classmates' posts too and respond (where appropriate) in the comments.
• Have you been born in Second Life (SL)? If not, give it a try! My avatar in SL is “Amanda Matzerath” (perform a search & add me as a friend). Check out the list of system requirements first to make sure that your computer can handle the software; if it can, it’s well worth a try! If you do sign up for Second Life, post a note to your blog with the name of your avatar so we can find each other “in world”.
• Have a look at the Second Life Library 2.0 blog. This is the group that has been largely responsible for the growth in library activity in Second Life and their blog provides a great snapshot of the library programs, services, and events going on in Second Life.
• As you may have noticed, Google launched their own virtual word last week: Lively. If you're on a Windows machine, you might want to take a look at it and think about the implications of their implementation for libraries. I haven't tried Lively myself yet (I'm on a Mac and there is not OSX install yet), so I'd be curious to hear what you think of it if you do give it a go!
• Continue tagging pertinent content in del.icio.us using the lis9763" tag.