Gaming culture, libraries

Open ‘note to self’,
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read if you want to.
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just thinking out loud
abt instruction, libraries, and “digital natives” (ha!)
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Suddenly
The kids who were born in 1990 (BORN in 1990!) are in our library… many “grew up” online… and watching teevee that referenced “online life”… You’ve Got Mail… that Sandra bullock movie abt ‘the net’, Hackers in 94? many better examples. Et.c. These are webby people. And they’re still learning and growing…. Developing (RIGHT NOW) more advanced critical thinking faculties, we hope…
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they’re on that myspace and that e-mail, using them world wide webs, on that zwinky and facebook, and trading mp3s and mp4s, and e-mailing Craig Ferguson and e-mailing tha RZA fan mail. They’re frustrated when the web isn’t easy to use, and they don’t understand that there’s a wider Internet of which ‘tha web’ is just a subset.
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for them, sadly, books are dusty dead-ends. We’ve got to show them how the web opens books. How our webby tools behoove them… get them the grades.
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so,
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virtual environments even as CRUMMY as myspace are their turf.
Video or virtual games is how they learn to solve probs.
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There must be ways to exploit their fascination with the virtual, to teach them information literacy skills, cyberliteracy skills, critical thinking, for their own benefit. There be many good ways, yah.Â
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All learning is distance learning once they step out of the “2.5 hrs in desks” – profs using that time to push info to attentitve listners? Hopefully, hopefully, but real learning is independent learning. Real learning happens when you make the connection for yourself, you open the book for yrself, you seek that key bit of gov’ment statistics in the NIH database yrself.Â
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It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea. …