Month: August 2011

Categories
Social Media for Info Pros

Immersion, Virtual Worlds and Gaming

“…I don’t think anyone could have guessed how it would evolve, and how fast it would evolve, and into how much of our lives it would actually get into. Right now you have screens in your pocket, and it’s quite common to see kids playing on a handheld, or see any of us texting. We’re constantly pulled into that space…”

Robbie Cooper discussing virtual worlds for his Alter Ego exhibit

How Do Libraries us Games, Gaming, and Virtual Worlds?

It’s always been a bit difficult for me to wrap my head around the role of virtual worlds and a sort of traditional conception of the library. In general, I believe that are two routes that libraries can take 1) games, gaming, and virtual worlds as education and recreation and 2) utilizing the social media aspect of gaming and virtual worlds to provide services.

Regarding the former idea, of using games, gaming, and virtual worlds in education or for recreation – I (nearly) absolutely wholeheartedly support. At minimum, I think that public and school libraries need to recognize games and virtual worlds as a legitimate medium for problem solving, learning, and recreation. Games and gaming platforms should be made available at public libraries, and should be maintained as a service. Games can range anywhere from a kind of online transmedia storytelling, to MMORGs, to simple two player arcade-style gaming consoles, and they can even be arranged into genres. A youth services librarian should be aware of all the different sorts of games and gaming platforms that are available, and what the appropriate age level should be for users. All that being said, I don’t support all games, and even though I am suspicious of most popular arguments that blame video games for violence among youth, I do think that games that have a certain level of violence should be reserved for those who are young adults or older. When I was at the San Diego Comic Con in July, I attended a panel titled Graphic Novels for Non-Teenagers, where the panelists discussed the benefits of having a graphic novel and comics sections for youth and adults. I look forward to the day when libraries not only  support and circulate games for youth, but also maintain a collection for adults, since many of us now have grown up with video games.

The later concept, utilizing the social media aspect of virtual worlds to provide services, is a bit more difficult for me to wrap my head around. I, of course, understand using social media to promote services, to reach out to various communities of users, and engage in dialogue with them. However, I question the effectiveness of providing links to a library catalogue or databases through Facebook, or providing services through a virtual world like Second Life. It’s actually much easier for me to wrap my head around the affordance of augmented reality tools like QR codes, to provide either a game-like experience, or simply to improve mobile access to library services, but to provide library or academic service in a virtual world? I don’t know…

After reading Rebecca C. Hedreen et al article Exploring virtual librarianship: Second Life Library 2.0, it seems that Second Life can offer various affordances for library services that are similar to real life services with some added creativity and imagination. On of the authors conclude with a consideration of the role of virtual libraries:

“Through Second Life we can begin to explore the meaning of a ‘virtual  library,’ one that does not have a physical equivalent, and, to some extent,the meaning of ‘library’ in general. Are we really about access, in which case a library with no more access than the Web becomes redundant? Are we still all about locating and searching, in direct competition with search engines? Or is there some combination, plus the personal interaction, which makes a virtual world so fascinating, that really makes up a virtual librarian in a virtual library.” ( Hedreen et al 192).

I do think that many librarians are struggling with what their roles are and what part their institutions play in todays information and media saturated world (see R. David Lankes talk on “The Future of Librarianship” or Aaron Tay’s blog post “8 Articles about the future of libraries that made me think”) and the Hedreen article touches on this anxiety around the future of the profession. I can certainly see the appeal or desire to have a library presence in highly populated virtual worlds, or to provides services to patrons who prefer communication through a virtual medium. But I have to agree with Lankes when he encourages librarians to ask whether or not these services are fulfilling “the mission of librarians is to improve society through facilitating knowledge creation in their communities”.

What Is The Role of Immersion in Learning?

After poking around again, I came across this 2009 article by Diane Carr and Martin Oliver titled Second Life, Immersion and Learning. This team of researchers spent a year investigating teaching and learning in Second Life. In this particular article, the authors call into question some of the underlying assumptions behind the use of the term “immersion” in education communities and that “it would be problematic to assume that ‘more immersed’ is ‘better’ for learning or teaching, especially if such an approach is not sensitive to the students’ expectations, contexts, and interpretive frameworks…We have no wish to underestimate, demonise or dismiss the pleasures of immersion, but we would query the pervasive and often uncritical use of this term within the Second Life and education communities”. The authors overall argument is best summarized here:

“When theorising virtual world pedagogy it is important to appreciate that various forms of participation, attention and affect may be part of the learner experience. Education in Second Life involves multiple frames of reference – personal, social and technical – each of which may have implications for learning. To further our understanding of the pedagogic potentials of Second Life, we need to be clear about which of these frames we draw on when making particular claims, and be specific about the concepts that we employ in our research.”

I do think that these authors would probably agree with me when I say that immersion, as an aspect of learning or facilitating knowledge creation, still has a great deal of potential. As game designer Jane MacGonigal argues Gaming can make a better world and as Asi Burak of Games for Change notes some games are already making a difference. Immersion, virtual worlds, and gaming can offer a great deal of potential if used well and used strategically, either as a highly populated medium with which to engage with users, and provide a more user oriented service, or as medium for learning and civic engagement. It’s understandable that traditional library institutions are struggling with their role in todays world, but to choose to avoid certain forms of popular media and technologies based on unquestioned assumptions that such forms are low brow, will only strengthen the (ridiculous and falsely dichotomous) rhetoric that libraries are technologically outdated.

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Uncategorized

Social Media in Virtual Learning Environments

“There are no natives here…you should never feel stupid in this environment, because we are all stupid in this environment, it’s all new to all of us”

~ Michael Wesch

Michael Wesch’s video A Portal to Media Literacy and Howard Rheingold’s video on the Social Media Classroom seemed to answer many of the questions I was left with last week. Both videos introduce different learning management systems or virtual learning environments that support digital literacy, or what some call, 21st century new media skills.

Rheingold’s Social Media Classroom and Collaboratory is a kind of Drupal-based virtual learning environment that includes a variety of social media tools such as forums, blogs, commenting, wikis, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets, and video commenting all in an effort “to afford a more student-centric, constructivist, collaborative, inquiry-oriented learning.” According to the website, the SMCC helps “engage students in actively constructing knowledge together about issues that matter to them, rather than passively absorbing it from texts, lectures, and discussions.” Wesch’s Netvibes Digital Ethnography personal learning environment offers similar affordances as the SMCC but is centered much more around course content. Rheingold’s SMCC is a great all-purpose social media platform, that can offer a foundation from which instructors can build and tailor their course content.

However, what struck me about Wesch’s system was the way in he structured the course content. Rather than pointing students to resources with the expectation that they will process the material and regurgitate it in another form, Wesch structured the course around open research questions that students had to answer collaboratively. Wesch is also known for his use of game structures in his course in order to introduce students to important questions, ideas, topics, and issues that are relevant to anthropology. Granted Wesch’s courses are for undergraduate learners, however his pedagogical methods are noteworthy. According to Wesch, teachers have three important avenues with which they are able to create meaning or significance for learners:

  1. Semantic Meaning: Find a grand narrative to provide relevance and context for learning, i.e. What are the big questions? What is the epistemological context?
  2. Personal Meaning: Create a learning environment that values and leverages the learners themselves, i.e. Work together to create learning. Ask how can you unlock creativity and critical thinking?
  3. Do both in a way the realizes and leverages the existing media environment and thus allows students to realize and leverage the existing media environment, i.e. push students beyond media literacy so that students can start leverage the media for themselves

To relate this to the quote above, what I really appreciate and admire about both Wesch and Rheingold is that they don’t make assumptions about students. Rather, they recognize that young students may have engaged with social media in very superficial and non-critical ways, if they use social media tools at all. Rather, they recognize that in order to become viable participants, digital denizens, or employees in the growing knowledge economy, students need to be equipped with digital literacy skills. As creativity, collaboration, and participation are essential for new media participatory cultures, both Wesch and Rheingold offer potential aggregated platforms that can support these learning activities.

Categories
Social Media for Info Pros

Creating and the Social Web

“…we are, in a sense, interactive story tellers, trusted digital guides, interpreters of facts, and experiences,…this is the new epistemology of the social web for information professionals…”

~ Dean Giustini

I found Sir Ken Robinson’s Creative Places + Spaces video titled Collaboration in the 21st Century to be especially inspiring. Author of the books The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything and Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative, Robinson is a lead promotor of creativity and innovation in education and the workplace. I had such an “aha!” moment during his talk, that I found myself taking notes, and writing down nearly every word he said. This is his initial description of creativity:

“one of the reasons  so many people loose confidence in their own powers of innovation is that their imaginations have been left to wither, but they can be revived…Creativity is a step on from imagination because you can be imaginative all day long and never do anything…to be creative you have to do something. Being creative is a process of putting your imagination to work, you can think of it as applied imagination…”

He goes on to define creativity as:

  1. a process that we can understand and teach to others, “most people start with an idea and have to work on it, and the idea evolves in the process of it being formulated and often the idea you end up with is not the idea you started with”
  2. something that is original, novel, unique or different from previous ideas
  3. something that has value, because “some creative ideas are highly original but useless…and very often people misjudge the value of a new idea, because they apply the wrong values to it, they apply their present values to it rather than seeing how they might evolve. I mean, nobody would have given much for the internet 20 years ago as an idea…”

After Robinson’s initial video, I did a bit of exploring and discovered his TED Talk titled Schools Kill Creativity, and this video doubled, maybe even tripled, my initial “aha”. In this video, Robinson argues that as a society we tend to educate our people out of creativity. Here is an excerpt from the video:

“…the hierarchy [of education] is rooted on two ideas. Number one, that the most useful [school] subjects for work are at the top. So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that…don’t do music, you not going to be a musician, don’t do art, you won’t be an artist, benign advice… The second is academic ability which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence, because the universities designed the system in their image. If you think about it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. The consequence is that many highly talented -brilliant- creative people, think that they are not. Because the thing they were good at school wasn’t valued or was actually stigmatized, and I think that we can’t afford to go on that way…”

Public education values disciplines that either support the job market or the academy, thus leaving people who are unable to fulfill these values by the wayside. Admittedly, this is a rather depressing outlook, but I must say that (based on my own experiences) I have to agree with Robinson. The costs are high for students who fall prey to this system and for students who fall out of the system and, as a result, those who drop out of the system come to conclude that they aren’t valuable contributors or good at anything.

So, following that rather depressing video I found Tim Browns TED Talk on Creativity and Play and it offered a bit of hope and a breath of fresh air. Brown’s very simple and straightforward argument is that creativity and play in the workplace is valuable, generative, important, and should be consistently supported. Workplaces should encourage and support divergent play in order to generate as many initial ideas as possible and converge those initial ideas toward the aims and goals of the project. It’s creative play within a certain context and within a few paramaters that can bring about wonderful innovations.

Now, what does all of this have to do with information organizations, information professionals, and social media? I think that information organizations and information professionals can take quite a bit of inspiration from these talks when considering the potential use of social media to support creativity in learning, and innovation in the workplace.  As Henry Jenkins mentions in Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Cultures: Media Education for the 21st Century, new media skills that can be supported in participatory cultures include play, performance, simulation, and appropriation, all skills that support creativity and innovation.

Dynamic social media has the potential to support various learning types and creative engagement. What can be taken away from Brown’s talk, is that creativity and play in work environments support innovation and creative problem solving. Can information professionals adapt his process of creativity and play in order to develop project ideas or problem-solve within the organization? What sort of social media tools could be used to support innovative creativity and play? Finally, to relate these ideas back to the quote above, what role does creativity play in the new epistemology of information professionals?

I think that these are all very important questions to consider, and I think that if we are to continue to ignore the importance of creativity and play in learning and workplace environments, we run the risk of being left on the outside of the global trend toward participatory cultures.

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