Competency 5: Tagging

For this competency, I searched Library Thing for the book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy by James Paul Gee. The tag cloud associated with this book included:

*held; *wjs; 50; 103458; 52/4 r; academic; communication; communications; computer games; design; education; Educational Technologies; eecs; exploration; future; game studies; game theory; game-based learning; games; games en onderwijs; gaming; home; identity; included in the present classi; information literacy; it; learning; lib ILL; libraries; lingustics discourse; literacy; media; media literacy; new literacies; nf; nieuwe generatie; non-fiction; nonfictionm visual culture; on wishlist; pedagogy, pajobbet; research; research institution; school; serious games; society; subculture; teaching/learning; technology; theory; thinking person; to read; torture; unread; via:acrl07; via: gills2007; video games; video games literacy linguisti; video games literacy theory edu; videogames teaching literacy

The Library Thing link to this book is: here.

I notice from this tag cloud that some of the tags are subject concepts like "game theory" and "literacy." Some of the tags would probably correspond to fields in a database, if there were a Library Thing database, like "non-fiction." And some of them apply to the person who tagged them rather than to the book, like "unread" or "wish list." At least one person seemed to be trying to coordinate search terms by including all of them in one tag, like the "videogames teaching literacy" and "video games literacy theory edu" tags.

I've heard Gee speak on the subject of video games and literacy and it made me really want to read his book. While some people study how to make educational video games, Gee looks at ordinary video games that people play for fun and asks what kind of learning they promote. And he believes that ordinary, supposedly non-educational video games promote the kind of learning that we need to be able to navigate the media-rich world of the twenty-first century.

As Gee says, people from the era before video games are used to knowing the rules and objectives of the game before they start - you wouldn't walk out onto a baseball field without knowing what team you're on, what position you're playing, or what you have to do to win. But people who play video games are used to starting a new video game without knowing anything - not where they are, what they're supposed to do, or how to win. Players find all those things out by experimenting in the game world. It's very similar to the scientific method and promotes a willingness to try new things and not be daunted by the fact that they might not work the first time. This is part of the reason the military now uses video games to train soldiers!

Competency 3 - Podcasts

To fulfill this competency, I used Everyzing to search for podcasts and found the podcast of a Sirsi Dynix Institute class called "Engaging Youth on Their Own Terms: Instant Messaging and Gaming in Libraries."

I found Everyzing to be very helpful and easy to use. When it retrieves the podcast, Everyzing labels the points where your search terms appear so you can start listening at those points. On the right side of the screen it provides a transcript of those points of the podcast so that you can read to see how your search terms are used.

The podcast itself was intriguing - especially the idea of providing reference services over instant messaging. According to the presentation, the casual atmosphere of IM and the ability to add the library to your IM "buddy list" means that virtual reference over IM gives youth a real feeling of connection to the library. I would love to try this myself!