8BitLibrarian Allen McGinley

8bitlibrary.com is now located at 8bitlibrary.com

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3 months ago
by JP in , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

HEY 8BITLIBRARIANS,

So, you are reading this on the OLD 8bitlibrary.com. 8bitlibrary.com no longer redirects here (to blog.8bitlibrary.com). Here’s JP’s “farewell” post to the blog…but first, some nostalgia…

In 2009, JP Porcaro and Justin Hoenke met for drinks and found out they were both ALA Emerging Leaders for the upcoming year. Our bromance continued with daily IM chats until Justin one day said:

Let’s start a librarygarden of gaming.

So, we did. We really started taking off and getting hits when Justin made a joke on twitter:

Let’s all get library tattoos.

And I was like, YEA LET’S DO IT. And that’s how this whole thing happened…Justin & I would brainstorm crazy ideas, and if they were just crazy enough to work, i’d #makeithappen. So we started Project Brand Yourself a Librarian, librarians shared it like crazy, and a bunch of librarians got tattoos.

So from the very start, within weeks, we strayed from the original “library garden of gaming” idea.

We came up with other crazy ideas and made them happen:

We also had lots of fabulous contributors, almost all the top names in the field of “gaming in libraries” either wrote for us or were considered part of the team.

And then we shifted from crazy ideas to more traditional ones:

In our heyday, we were getting about 4000 clicks a day (which is BIG for library blogs), and alexa.com had us listed as one of the highest trafficked library blogs. The only blogs that were getting higher traffic at the time were the ‘official’ ones; the LJ, SLJ and some of ALA ones…

Lots of success here in a short period of time, maybe moreso than any other library blog. So why did we let blog.8bitlibrary.com “die”?

  • All of our contributors are doing other things.

We all got busy. 8bitlibrary lead us to publication deals, speaking gigs, new jobs, and new leadership opportunities. Now that GameRT exists, we have a more formal place to do our gaming-in-libraries work.

  • Blogging is boring.

We should have figured out from day 1 that blogging was not what we were about. We were a successful BRAND, but never a good BLOG. All of the successes I listed had more to do with 8bitlibrary as a brand, and less to do with blog.8bitlibrary.com.

  • WordPress sucks.

The blog was constantly marred by slow load times, login problems for contributors, and errors on the user and contributor end. Anyone who was a frequent contributor knows what I mean when i say “500 Internal Server Error”

  • We have better places to “publish”

Blogging is NOT publishing. We’ll get some game reviews actually published via GameRT hopefully soon!

SO WHERE DOES THAT LEAVE 8BITLIBRARY?!

When Justin posted this on the new 8bitlibrary.com, people FREAKED out (they though we were killing everything, the facebook page, the twitter, the tumblr (which is now the main site) and the blog) and I had to write this.

Where we’re left without the blog is where we always belonged: as the party people of librarianship. So we’re still gonna do all the stuff we used to do, like ALA DANCE PARTY, Project Brand Yourself a Librarian, and all the Think Tanks and subsequent parties…but we won’t have to worry about keeping up this illusion that we’re a “professional” library blog.

We’re still here.

#partyhard and #makeithappen,

JP

 

#makeithappen means taking action.

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11 months ago
by JP in , ,

What does #makeithappen mean? Taking action.

Action is something that you do.

Doing is different than saying. We can write, talk, make statements, chat, dish, diss, blog at blog.8bitlibrary.com or any other blog…but it’s never a substitute for action.

In librarianship specifically, I hear lots of talk. Some of it is negative complaining about the state of things. Some of it is positive ideas about how we should move forward.

Neither of those are #makeithappen. #makeithappen is saying “I want today to be Teen Library Day in my town”, then calling the mayor, and getting it officially on the books as [Insert Town Here] Teen Library Day. #makeithappen is not just THINKING outside the box, but DOING outside the box. Like having librarians influence global gaming discussions that otherwise would have been completely out of the realm of libraries. Or having local professional athletes chill in the library.

Talking about something is a stepping stone to action, but in the end, no amount of blog posts here or anywhere will amount to #mih. However, we want this blog to be the #makeithappen blog, a place to show off pictures and videos or things people have #mih’d all over the country, to provide inspiration to all in their own efforts to #makeithappen. Have you made something great happen in your library? Please email me so you can show the world; I can be reached at jp at porcaro dot info

#makeithappen never gives up, ever.

#makeithappen is professional AND personal. In many ways, it is personal first: envision what you want in your life, and then stop imagining and #mih, because the reality is so much better than the fantasy.

#makeithappen is climbing 10,000 mountains before breakfast.

An 8bitlibrary.com contributor linked me to this a few days ago. I know it is harsh, but climbing 10,000 mountians is way harsher than any web comic:

The secret to #mih: work really really hard.

 

And although we define “make it happen” in twitter-hashtag form, we all agree that nobody can #makeithappen on twitter. The real work that needs to be done is through toil and sweat and hard work, even in the library.

#makeithappen is saying “Hey, let’s help people develop video game collections”, starting up a website about it, and becoming the most influential web resource for video-games-in-libraries.

Failure, of course, is a big part of #makeithappen as well. Video Games can be a great example of this: you toil through failure after failure, repeating the same tasks you fail at, sometimes failing at the same thing for hours or days. And then you win. You fail until you win. And #makeithappen is not stopping, because once you’ve jumped one hurdle of failure, you’ve got 100s more to jump. This is why video games are the perfect fit for the #makeithappen philosophy: keep pushing through failure until you win, because luck won’t get you anywhere, experience will, and the only way to gain experience is through failure, not success.

#makeithappen is also about priorities: like, knowing when to stop writing about it, because you have to go to work to DO SOMETHING. Which I am about to do.

8bitlibrary.com‘s own JP Porcaro (me) & Justin Hoenke, as well as our friends/colleagues/movers&shakers Ed Garcia and Jaime Hammond will be speaking on “Make It Happen in libraries” at the New England Library Association Conference in October 2011. Please come out and share the #mih mojo with us.

The Sexiest Librarian Interview Of All Time

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11 months ago
by JP in , ,

National Library Unconference Day 2011 w0ot

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11 months ago
by JP in , , ,

We

WE>ME

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1 year ago
by Allen in , ,

I was listening to The Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC the other day. The guest was Lisa Napoli who was talking about her book Radio Shangri-La: What I Learned in Bhutan, the Happiest Kingdom on Earth, and how she started a youth-oriented radio station in Bhutan. Napoli talked about how she ended up in Bhutan, and ended the interview by encouraging people to pay attention to the connections in their lives that have the potential to result in amazing things. *Her* amazing thing was that she met someone at a party who ended up inviting her to go to Bhutan and start this radio station. And it got me thinking about my own social and professional connections.

I talk a lot about the problems I see with librarianship and where we can expand/improve/etc. But this area of social/professional engagement (the word networking makes me squirm) is an area where I think librarianship really excels! Librarians all around the country (world?) are connecting with each other via Twitter, Facebook, and other social web sites. And these connections are having amazing results. We’re motivating/inspiring each other, sharing ideas, planning projects, building teams, and pushing innovation. Quite simply, we’re making it happen.

So when I heard Lisa Napoli talk about the importance of these “connections” and these serendipitous relationships, I got really excited. And not excited at the thought that I might meet a beautiful stranger at a party and she would invite me to a remote country to do something that had never been done before. I got excited at the prospect of being the *connector*! I got excited at the prospect of being the person who introduced the pair who ended up going to a remote country to do something that had never been done before!

We all aspire to have positive impacts on our communities, and pursue game-changing innovations for our libraries. But I believe its equally important for us to play the role of the “connector”. Our most significant impacts could be hooking up the right people, or connecting the right person to the right idea.

Lets be honest, you are I are pretty awesome. But you and I, *together*, can do way more good for our communities than you and I, alone.

Shout-out & #buildtheteam love to Andrea Davis for we>me inspiration.

Save the Date: National Library Unconference Day ’11

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1 year ago
by JP in , , , , ,

What?

When?

  • Save the date: May 2nd, 2011, 1pm EST. More info to follow this month.

Where?

  • At your library for a staff development day. Or an unconference for a regional library cooperative. Maybe something hosted at a state library? Or hosted by your state or regional library association. A great place to hold an uncon for National Library Unconference Day ’11 is at an LIS school. It’s totally up to you!

Why?

Who?

We’ll be streaming a free keynote session to all participating librarians, libraries and library organizations. Our confirmed speakers so far include:

How?

  • Soon enough, we’ll have a link up for you to sign up your unconference to receive the FREE keynote lightning talks webinar. For now, mark your calendars, organize your group, and get ready to change the world. Once you sign up, we’re imaging you’d use a computer + a projector to screen the keynote to your local participants, then you’d get to your individual unconference. We’ll have a constant digital conversation on Twitter via hashtag #libuncon. And we’re hoping people share what they learned and accomplished via blog posts and youtube videos!

MARK THOSE CALENDARS NOW, and #makeithappen! signed, JP & the 8bitlibrary.com team.

What type of media belongs in a library? (or, Who Are We?)

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1 year ago
by JP in , , , , , , , , , , ,

I’ve been getting alot of questions lately: “what IS 8bitlibrary“?

6 months ago i would have said “it’s the gaming-in-libraries blog”! And I’m not, 6 months later, saying that statement is wrong. But we’re about a bigger issue, and that is: “we’re the #makeithappen blog“.

In libraries, #makeithappen is a taking new exciting ideas and seeing them through to the end. It’s the blog about all the really cool new stuff people are actually doing in libraries.

I had the opportunity to watch the Joaquim Phoenix movie I’m Still Here thanks to the Netflix instant queue. It was a great documentary about Joachim trying to become a Hip-Hop star. I won’t give spoilers, but the end, to say the least, “leaves you wondering”.

Tonight, again because of the Netflix Instant Queue on Xbox, I got to see the 1998 documentary Wrestling with Shadows, which ultimately chronicles the end of Bret Hitman Hart’s WWF career, with the Montreal Screwjob being the crux of the story. Everyone KNOWS wrestling is scripted, and the movie takes you through the process of how wrestling IS scripted. However, the end of the movie is the story of a script gone wrong, where the person who was supposed to win was “screwed”. In the 90s wrestling era, this was a defining moment of “OMG, wrestling can be REAL sometimes!!!”.

When the movie started, I felt that the fact that a documentary was being recorded at the convenient moment when the ultimate wrestling “real” outcome (vs the usual fake wrestling) was proof that even at the time wrestling was “real”, it was also an elaborate hoax.

I suggested to my wife that this would be a great program for a library (like a book discussion, but with movies instead of books). Show both movies and have people discuss the fictional and the factual elements of both, and maybe try to decide which told a better fictional but factual story.

My wife said “this doesn’t belong in libraries“. There’s lots of dicks, boobs, balls, sex, and drug use in the Joachim movie after all, and the wrestling movie was full of violence: everything we love to censor.

I thought back to all the books I have read since becoming a librarian. Lots worse violence. Way more sex and drug use. Much more graphic violence. They are making a MOVIE out of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, after all! As an aside, that book was set right in the same historical period as the Montreal Screwjob.

I said to myself: WHY is it ok to have certain forms of “inappropriate” expression in books but not movies? Why do we treat some forms of media as sacred, and other forms as dirty?

This, of course, is also what 8bitlibrary.com is about. We believe that storytelling media shouldn’t be judged just because it is presented in a certain media format and not another.

And so, I ask, how have libraries dealt with “controversial” content in one form of media that is less-controversial in other forms? We already know that some library board in the middle of nowhere decided to ban their library from showing the Michael Moore movie Sicko just because they didn’t agree with the argument the movie made. I’m sure they already own books that make similar arguments, and no one cares. Cranky Kong, Donkey Kong’s grandfather, would probably applaud their ban.

So, should libraries ban content in some formats and not others? And, do you feel like 8bitlibrary.com is just a “gaming blog”, or do you feel like we talk about gaming so much because we are touching on an issue that is really relevant to current libraries?

I wrote an article in January 2011′s School Library Journal along with 8bitlibrary.com contributor Beth Gallaway on the USA Supreme Court Case on First Amendment Rights and how they apply to video game content (vs, say, the same content in a Bugs Bunny cartoon). Same issue, different media format.

I would really love to get a convo going, either here, on twitter, or on facebook, about what you think!!!

Thanks for reading, true believers.

#makeithappen!

activelifeoutdoorchallenge

Gaming for Children with Special Needs: What to Play?

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1 year ago
by Allen in , , ,

Chances are, if you made it to 8bitlibrary.com, then you’re well aware of the benefits of gaming, including the development and reinforcement of various cognitive, literacy, and social skills. So the question is, what are you going to do in 2011 to enhance gaming services in your community? Our suggestion is  expanding these programs to a new audience, and there is none better than children with special needs.

For complete information on the how and why of gaming for children with special needs, see the article from the December 2010 issue of School Library Journal, “Rated E for Everyone”. Then come back and check out this list of game recommendations and get a program started for this frequently under-served audience!

Card & Board Games

  • ThinkFun Zingo is a fun, fast-moving matching game similar to Bingo in which players try to match up their picture card with tiles that are revealed by pulling on a Zinger. The first player to fill his or her picture card wins. This game is great because it accommodates 2 to 8 players, keeps kids engaged, teaches image and vocabulary recognition, reading, matching, memory, concentration, and encourages social skills such as taking turns, following rules, and sharing.
  • I Spy Memory Game is a memory game, for 1-6 players, with riddles just like the I Spy book series, which can be played three different ways to accommodate younger and older players. This game helps young players to develop memory, reading, thinking and language skills, as well as important social skills such as taking turns, following rules, and sharing. Kids that enjoy reading I Spy books and playing I Spy computer games will enjoy this board game, which has simple rules, is easy to set up, and can be completed fairly quickly.
  • Jenga is a stacking game consisting of wooden blocks that are big and easy to grab.  This interactive, engaging, and tactile game teaches kids the importance of strategy and concentration, while improving dexterity and coordination. Jenga is great because the rules are simple, a game can be set up and completed fairly quickly, and requires only 1 or more to play.
  • Pictionary Card Game is a fun, fast-moving card game that is played in teams as small as two, which combines the fun of Pictionary and Charades. Players race to act out the clues using only the simple images on the cards by combining them, building scenes with them or using them as props. This interactive game is great because no drawing is required, is easy to play, and improves concentration, while fostering imagination, creativity, thinking skills, teamwork and cooperation.
  • Sequence for Kids is a fun, fast-moving sequence game, similar to Bingo in some ways that preps kids for strategic thinking as they anticipate their opponents’ next move. This game is great because it only requires 2 to 4 players, fosters social skills such as taking turns, following rules, and sharing, and builds matching, pattern recognition, counting, and literacy skills.

Video Games

  • Wii Active Life Outdoor Challenge is a fitness game that will get kids up and moving, similar to Nintendo’s Wii Fit, in which players are actively engaged in a variety of 16 fun, energetic, fast-paced mini-games such as river rafting, mine-cart adventure, log jumping, see-saw, jump rope, water trampoline, and many more.  Using a specially-designed eight pad Active Life mat, this game will help kids will improve their overall fitness level, sense of balance and coordination, eye-hand coordination, literacy skills (reading on-screen directions), as well as foster teamwork, cooperation, and social skills such as taking turns and sharing. (ESRB Rating: E for Everyone)
  • Wii Boom Blox Bash Party is the exciting sequel to Wii Boom Blox that challenges the players’ reflexes, dexterity, and problem-solving skills. Like the original Boom Blox, players use the Wii Remote to direct objects and forces toward structures made of blocks in order to knock them over. The Jenga-like gameplay requires players to pull out blocks, with the goal of toppling over as many blocks as possible, without bringing down the entire structure, and like Jenga, kids will learn strategy skills, improve dexterity, and observe physics in action.  Wii Boom Blox Bash Party is great for all ages, is easy to play, and features quick games that foster teamwork, cooperation, and collaboration. (ESRB Rating: E for Everyone)
  • Wii Just Dance 2 is the energizing sequel to Just Dance, featuring 45 songs that can be used in four different dance modes to help kids improve their overall coordination and physical fitness levels, build teamwork and social skills such as sharing and taking turns, and work on memory, pattern recognition and following instructions.  Basically, players hold a Wiimote in their right hand, and copy dance moves presented by an animated dancer presented on the screen. Just Dance 2 is suitable for tweens and teens, but if you have a younger audience, you may also want the very recently released Just Dance Kids (ESRB Rating: E for Everyone), which will contain more age-appropriate songs and lyrics targeted toward a younger age group, which also helps kids work on similar skills as noted for Just Dance 2. (ESRB Rating: Everyone 10+)
  • Wii Party is an interactive and engaging kid-friendly party game featuring 13 different party game modes and 70+ mini-games, which provide kids with lots of variety that includes cooperative and competitive gameplay that turns over quickly to keep the game moving. This game helps kids improve their eye-hand coordination, builds literacy skills (like Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort, players can read on-screen instructions for help), and social skills (taking turns and sharing with other players).  (ESRB Rating: E for Everyone)
  • Wii Rayman Raving Rabbids TV Party is the third Wii game in UBI Soft’s popular Rayman Raving Rabbids series, and features 60+ fun, quick minigames. The “rabbids” are bunny-like creatures who communicate by screaming and occasionally hitting each other with any object that comes into their hands. The rabbids have taken over the TV stations, broadcasting a series of nonsense shows in an effort to drive Rayman crazy. Players will discover new and innovative ways to play with eight types of gameplay, which will help them improve their sense of precision, dexterity, balance, and coordination, and reading written instructions to complete the mini-games will help kids improve their literacy skills. This game also fosters teamwork, cooperation, and social skills as kids practice taking turns and sharing.  (ESRB Rating: Everyone 10+)
    Game reviews by Peggy Wong, Children’s Services Librarian, Piscataway Public Library
    pwong AT lmxac DOT org
Retro gaming display at Piscataway Public Library

Retro Gaming is Fun for the Whole Family

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1 year ago
by Allen in , , , ,

Retro gaming display at Piscataway Public Library

Retro Gaming events are great for public libraries. This program is fun, loud, and active. It presents an opportunity for everyone to connect through a shared interest. Mom is showing kids the Atari 2600 she played in the late 70s, teens are showing dad their favorites games on by-gone consoles. Everyone is interacting, engaging, and learning. Nostalgia abounds!

And a simple display can accomplish much of the same magic. Identify people in your community who have retro consoles or games and provide a secure area for them to display their treasures in the library. Between the consoles and controllers and games and artwork, these displays are highly engaging, and the conversations that result are priceless.

Public libraries are about connecting people and ideas, and the opportunities presented by retro gaming are endless.

Retro Gaming Day press release…

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1 year ago
by JP in , , , , ,

I got really excited when I got an email with an 8bitlibrary.com Retro Gaming Day press release in it! Big shouts to our own MaMcGinley & RedheadFangirl for setting this all up. Hope to see some of our readers at the event:

Saturday, September 11, 12 – 4 PM
The 8bitlibrary.com Retro Gaming Day
The first ever Retro Game Day will be conveniently located in central NJ at Piscataway Public Library!  Cool panel speakers on retro games, and open play on old school platforms like SNES, Gameboy, Xbox!  From Pac-Man to Mario to World of Warcraft, learn and play with the 8bitlibrary.com bloggers and librarians. See you there!

For more information, visit us at http://blog.8bitlibrary.com/retro or email questions to Laverne at lmann@lmxac.org.

Location:

Piscataway Public Library

Kennedy Branch

500 Hoes Ln, Piscataway, NJ

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