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!

We’re happy to announce that libraries can now register for National Gaming Day 2010, which will take place on Saturday, November 13.

Registering will also get your location on the national map we’ll be promoting to both the public and the press. Does your library plan to participate in the national Rock Band and/or Super Smash Bros. Brawl tournaments? Be sure to register so we can work with you ahead of time to get everything in place and tested.

National Gaming Day needs your help!!!

Please visit this link for the full post. Help us help the gaming-in-libraries cause!

Hi, Everyone –

I’m happy to say that we have more international libraries signing up for National Gaming Day this year. Unfortunately, we can’t ship the free donation to them, but they still want to participate (hooray for international libraries!).

Right now, a foreign services librarian with the State Department named Elenita is working with libraries worldwide that are partnering with U.S. embassies. She’s asking for our help to give them ideas for games they can play on NGD (Saturday, November 13).

“I would like to suggest free games that they can find on the Internet to play on NGD. Do you know any paper-based games, such as crossword puzzles or word games for them to try? Anything that is low-tech or no-tech based is preferable. Many participants are learning English as a foreign language.”

Does anyone have suggestions to help with this? TIA!

HAPPY GAMING, 8BITLIBRARIANS.

We’ll start here. This is an old old 8bitlibrary post that leads to a video of James Paul Gee, one of the world’s experts on using gaming as a teaching tool. His idea that the traditional schooling structure now has “competition” was one that resonated with librarians. By competition, he meant this: in the past, if you wanted to learn something, you had to go to “school”. NOW, you can go lots of places; I’ve managed to get things like “Login with Facebook” and mobile “touch” integration on this site without ever going to school to learn it. Gee goes on to list LIBRARIES (along with the internet) as one of those “competitors” to schools.

But what does this “competition” mean for the traditional educational system?

This leads me to something I shared on Facebook a few days ago. It is just a short article from the New York Times that suggests cheating in K-12 schools isn’t just a problem, it’s an epidemic. We had a lengthy discussion on the topic, which was launched with the comment I made:

As someone who was a HS student just as the internet rose, we  never thought of it as “cheating”. IRL, you use all the tools at your disposal to accomplish a task, including working with others (aka “sharing answers”), using multiple information sources (aka “pasting from the web”), and choosing the fastest means to solve a problem (aka “texting”). All of my post-HS accomplishments (like 8bitlibrary.com) were partly because I employed the same “illicit” skills I learned in HS.

While in the traditional, 19th-century notion of “school”, these things might be considered cheating. But let’s analyze the skills that these students are learning in this process: they have learned to solve problems by communicating quickly and effectively (in their case, via txt message & sharing answers). File that under working with a group, team building, and effective communication skills. They are learning how to think outside the box. You know who else thought outside the box? EVERY INNOVATIVE HUMAN BEING, EVER. When Pink Floyd sang “we don’t need no education” on The Wall, they didn’t mean they didn’t need to learn. They meant they didn’t need that traditional learning structure. Our students are learning valuable life skills in many cases despite of the education system, rather than by it.

That leads me to the next link. It is another article from the NY Times that summarizes research on the relationship between student achievement and access to a computer at home in low-income households. The results were (seemingly) pretty dire, with a noticeable achievement gap by the low income students at school when a computer was introduced at home. One of the findings was that the students spent their time playing games, which is presented as a negative in the article. Our readers are here at 8bitlibrary.com because they know games are not bad, and this leads us back to the first link where James Paul gee suggests that using games to teach is the wave of the educational future. I could link you to my School Library Journal article on using Pokemon as a Teaching Tool, but I won’t, because I’ve done that already.

So in that NY Times article, there’s just negative comment after negative comment about low-income students who have computers at home (and, let’s not forget that old basic rule of comparisons “Correlation does not imply causation“). So in one of the studies, there were strict filters put on the computers so the students could only use them for what was deemed “educational” by those performing the study. What the most interesting line in this article says is:

When devising ways to beat school policing software, students showed an exemplary capacity for self-directed learning.

That line was buried all the way in the last paragraph of the article. The sentence that follows it is:

Too bad that capacity didn’t expand in academic directions, too.

This is what is wrong with the education system. When teachers have students who show “an exemplary capacity for self-directed learning”, if they can’t direct that capacity into “academic directions”, we have a system of failing teachers, not failing students.

And this is what Gee talks about in that original link. If the education system doesn’t “reform”, these learning “competitors” will constantly put the education system in deeper and deeper irrelevance.

File this under “We don’t have all the answers.”

And, of course, librarians across the country are wrestling with this same question, albeit for other forms of media. How can we distribute digital music when iTunes (& to a lesser extent, Amazon and the like) have already taken away our ability to do that? While there are some very expensive (and, in my opinion, very clunky and not-iTunes-like) vendor-controlled options such as Overdrive, Naxos Music, & Freegal, this is just a “patch” that we have while we, as a library community, decide to either get serious about digital distribution or continue to tread water.

A current trending topic of concern in libraries is eBook distribution. How can we loan an eBook on an eBook reader if that content is closed and controlled by a large corporation?

Along that “we don’t have all the answers” line, I decided to go to an expert on the topic, Mr. Libraryman Michael Porter. He has wrestled with the larger distribution issue, just as we are on the smaller (albiet still gigantic) issue of game content distribution. So I asked him,

• How do you feel libraries will be distributing digital media in 2015?

He gave this well-reasoned response:

I imagine two most likely scenarios with little gray in between the potential outcomes.  For both, the lynchpin is either succeeding or failing to develop a new electronic content access and distribution infrastructure via libraries.  If we can develop that new infrastructure and make it a truly effective, competitive, well used and well liked place for people to get what they want, when they want it, in the format they want it *through the library*, then our future will be more secure and on-target than ever before.  If we fail to do this though, libraries will fade in use, funding and relevance.  This would eventually lead to the demise of the library as the hub of content access and community engagement and turn many of those functions over to for profit business and institutions that have mission statement tied to profit rather than the health and wisdom of the community and country they serve.

This is a call to action for all of us. We shouldn’t just wait for a vendor to develop a platform for us. We shouldn’t let something as simple as a library’s ability to loan a book be taken away by corporations in the digital age. We need to raise this issue. If we want libraries to continue to exist, we need to let go of our comfort and get on the front lines of this issue.

So there is no confusion, I am not anti-corporation, per se. Corporations can be our partners in it the future. And, so my last words will be positive, we can do it.

Thanks go out to Michael Porter from us at 8bitlibrary.com. Check out his Library 101 project, if you haven’t yet.

Some of my favorite librarians, the ones with an eye on how information is communicated in our digital age, have told us to get on twitter. We are.  They’ve told us to get on facebook, and you can now logon to 8bitlibrary.com with your facebook name. You can fan us on facebook. They’ve told us that the mobile web is growing, so we’ve set up 8bitlibrary.com to work beautifully on an Android OS or iPhone mobile browser.

What are we missing? We are trying to continue to move forward. What are you doing that we aren’t? Librarians in the 2010-2020 decade need to be asking that question: what are our users doing that we aren’t yet doing?

Libraries, for the sake of our very existence, need to stay relevant. Not only for advocacy efforts, but for our future place in the information landscape of those we serve. Sure, 8bitlibrary.com is about “gaming in schools and libraries”. But we what we really care about is keeping the library and educational (information) communities in the same place as those we serve.

So, what now?

Also, I would love those of you surfing this site via the mobile web to give us a shout-out, via our comment box, from your phone.

Signed,

JP & the whole 8bitlibrary.com team.

This debate was inspired by recent comments made by film critic Roger Ebert, who claims that not only are video games not art, but that by their very nature they cannot be art.  Ebert cites a TED talk given by the lovely lovely Kellee Santiago, who inverts the film critic’s argument by saying that not only will video games one day become art, but that they already are … art.

Roger Ebert’s comments have ignited many responses from people in the game community, including such luminaries as Yahtzee Croshaw and Gabe and Tycho of Penny Arcade. (see below)

At the heels of this online debate, comes the news that the US Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a case this Fall involving the First Amendment protections of violent video games.

This is not the first time that video games have come under scrutiny for issues relating to free speech.  It seems like only yesterday that the ultra-violent video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas came under fire for a secret modification that incorporated a fully nude sex scene into the game.  The double standard did not go unnoticed by the media.  Here was a game that allowed your character to steal cars, murder cops, and beat prostitutes with a baseball bat.  But one scene of completely consensual sex was enough to get the moral guardians in a tizzy.  More recently, the game: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 became the target of controversy for the inclusion of a mission that allows the player to commit an act of international terrorism on some unsuspecting Russian civilians. (warning, contains really disturbing imagery)

Whether or not video games should be considered “art” is only part of the question.  The broader questions are: “Where do video games fall with regard to First Amendment protections?”, and: “Why does it seem that people automatically assume that the only people who play video games are 4 – 12 years old?”.  Recent (and even not so recent) studies have already shown us that the average gamer is actually between the ages of 25 – 30, yet public opinion still seems to link “video games” with “kid stuff”.  This is why violence in video games has become such a First Amendment issue.  Not because they are more violent than your basic Tarantino flick, or that they are more sexually explicit than a Friday-late-night Cinemax movie, but because they’re games; and most people still parse “games” as: “child’s play”.

So where do libraries make the distinction?  As self-proclaimed First Amendment warriors, we as librarians have an obligation to preserve the availability of certain materials that others may find objectionable.  Yet if we’re hosting game nights for young teens, we might not necessarily want them to orchestrate a terrorist attack on Russian civilians in our children’s section.  So how do we reconcile these issues?  We can start by recognizing that the medium of video games does not necessarily define the audience; and that not everything with a health bar is family friendly kid stuff.  Librarians will defend to the death our right to provide the public with Mapplethorpe, Salinger, and Anne Frank, but that doesn’t mean that we intershelve them with the Doctor Seuss books. ;)

Personally, I would defend video games, even violent ones, as an art form, but only under a very broad definition.  Ordinarily, I think of art as something to be enjoyed passively, rather than interactively.  In video games, the observer guides the action, and becomes an accomplice in the creation of the art.  This does not make video games any less valid than the more discrete forms of art.  A masterfully executed level of Tomb Raider can be every bit as beautiful as a perfect game of chess, a Baryshnikov fouetté jeté, a Salvador Dali painting, or a Hendrix solo. But I feel that the interactivity of video games places them into a different sphere of aesthetic appreciation. It is a hybrid of visual art and performance art that defines the participant as collaborator.  For this reason, I feel that video games as art form deserve every protection that our Constitution provides. I eagerly wait the foundation of entire galleries devoted to the art of the video game.

Maybe we can get some eccentric billionaire to give us a grant. :)

click for the story on the cancellation...

While this idea is not original and ALA has hosted similar events, I still feel like the time is right for an annual Gaming in Libraries conference. There are so many issues to address: Collection Development, Literary elements of gaming, diversity issues, how gaming can be used as an advocacy tool, gaming & information literacy, gaming across the curriculum (and gaming as a teaching tool), gaming as way to boost circulating materials collections, gaming as a marketing tool, LoFi gaming (board & card games). There could also be lots of related technology elements: mobile phones & library service (make no mistake, foursquare is a game), implementing gaming into your Library 2.0 program (think Farmville), QR codes in schools & libraries (a scavenger hunt game), texting as a teaching tool. We could also expand it to Gaming in Schools & Libraries Conference, which would more than double the opportunities for both conference programs and attendance. The issues are there, and the thinkers/presenters are there. This would probably also be one of the more fun conferences around, because at its root, games are fun.

Here’s my questions: Is the time right? Would you attend? If your library didn’t sponsor your attendance, would you still be interested? How pumped would you be to play Xbox Live’s 1 v 100 with a roomful of teachers and librarians? (YOU KNOW we’d take top score)

Gaming: All Libraries & All Ages

Gaming: All Libraries & All Ages will be a webinar highlighting collection development and advocacy issues that all libraries deal with when implementing (or planning to implement) video games into library collections and services.

Attendance will be fun and free. There will be an interactive chat box for the entire session, and the event will be presented as an un-conference collaboration.

All you have to do to attend is go to URL tinychat.com/8bitlibrary on March 13th at 1:00pm EST. We’ll have about 45 minutes of webinar time, with plenty of time after for chatting and collaborating. We hope you can be there.

An RSVP is not necessary, but there is a Facebook event which you can RSVP to here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=10150110150540521

Also, don’t forget to add 8bitlibrary.com’s feed to your RSS Reader, and during the webinar be sure to follow the hashtag #8bitweb on Twitter.

PLEASE help us get the word out by tweeting about it / sharing on facebook / word of mouthing it / posting to listservs. In a time of shrinking budgets, free education for librarians is good!

Almost all of the content on our twitter is independent of the stuff you will get when you subscribe to our RSS or fan us on Facebook. While 8bitlibrary.com is all about gaming and new-media advocacy for schools & libraries, @8bitlibrary will keep librarians and educators updated on the latest breaking new stories from the video game community. We follow all the hot video game sources so you don’t have to.

So, be sure to subscribe/follow/fan, and thanks for your continued support! You all have made this little blog the hottest new edulib source around!

JP: Hi Jennifer, tell us about yourself!

Jennifer: I’m 32 and I’ve been teaching for 10 years now. I got my BA from Texas A&M and my MLA from Houston Baptist University

JP: How long have you been gaming, and how often do you game currently?

Jennifer Field

Jennifer: I’ve been gaming since my brother got an Atari for Christmas in the early 80’s. I fondly remember Pong. Depending on what I have to take home to grade or work on, I average about one to two hours 3 to 4 days a week, and usually on the weekends.

JP: Favorite console?

Jennifer: XBOX 360!

JP: You are a teacher who uses gaming as a tool during lessons. Can you give some background on how you do it/your methods?

Jennifer: You have to be able to connect books, themes, and other literary elements to current events and situations that students will understand. From my experience, the current generation of students play games more then they watch movies. I’ve found that by connecting those games to the literature that we read and to the elements that we teach, the students understand and apply themselves more.

JP: Do you have an specific examples of using video games in a lesson?

Jennifer: One example is my teaching method for the Journey of the Hero.  I teach British Literature, and almost everything those classes study follows this “Journey”. I used to use Star Wars as a modern example of the Journey (since Star Wars is “based” on the Journey), but not all of my students have seen the original Star Wars movies. Instead, during discussions on the different parts of the journey, I connect Journey elements to the different games that students are playing. Students don’t realize just how much literature affects the games they play, because the teaching community isn’t making these valuable connections for them.

JP: Can you share some game titles you use in classes?

Jennifer: I frequently use Gears of War, Halo, Too Human, and Mass Effect during our Journey discussions. The students then take the next step and make literary connections to other games as well! It’s great to see students connecting Beowulf’s journey to a game’s plot device, or in the middle of a lesson realize Beowulf’s “worth” by connecting it to a familiar story line from a game.

JP: Do you have any plans to expand the use of games in the classroom?

Jennifer: I’m currently planning to use clips from Bioshock to incorporate propaganda and dystopian themes into my next novel unit on Brave New World. If I taught Ayn Rand, I would have a field day, but it’s not on our approved list for Seniors.

JP: How do students feel about having a “gaming” teacher? I know in the library field, avid readers love librarians who are avid readers, and gamers love other librarians who game.

Jennifer: I’ve found that when students know you are a gamer, they feel more free to talk about games with you and they are more excited to participate in class, so there is a bigger personal connection than you get in a traditional educational lecture setting. I’ve even had students that will notice literary things in games and bring them to my attention (JP’s note: an example of students as content providers and creators, vs students as “blank slates to be lectured to”) . For instance, the achievement The Merchant of Venice in Assassins Creed II. I had a kid who actually realized that it was an allusion to Shakespeare!

JP: How do parents and school administration feel about gaming as a classroom tool? Do you encounter problems over content?

Jennifer: I don’t really think they have thought about it much. It isn’t a media that has made its way into the classroom, at least not at the High School level. I do remember reading a few years ago about a school that was using Dance Dance Revolution in their classrooms to combat obesity and get the students active.

I’d love to see games used in school, but I think there are so many questions raised that administrations will be wary of it for a while.

It also depends on the parents. Some parents are all for getting their child to learn no matter the method, while some may not want their children gaming in school. This creates a fine line for implementing it in the classroom.

JP: You have definitely showed us that gaming connects with your students and is a tool that makes learning easier for them. What do you think we can do as teachers and librarians to change the perception that “games are toys for kids?”

Jennifer: Educating the parents, school boards, and administration is the key. I think it would start with a study on the effects of gaming in the classroom. Taking one class and using games and showing the growth of the student’s abilities as it relates to the curriculum standards of the state, and then compare it to a traditional classroom.

JP: In the library world we call that “advocacy”. Speaking of gaming advocacy, would you be interested in sharing gaming-in-the-classroom tips, tricks, or lesson plans with the readers of 8bitlibrary.com?

Jennifer: Sure!

Don't you wish YOU had her as a teacher for High School English?!

JP: Great, I am totally looking forward to that! Any closing words on the connection between literacy & gaming?

Jennifer: Games tell a story, which is literature just in a different media. I believe strongly that teachers have to adapt to the current times to effectively help their students learn. As teachers we are taught to teach to all different learning types; visual, auditory, etc.  Because of this, gaming becomes a tool that hits all the learning styles of our different students.

JP: Thanks so much for sharing! See you on Xbox Live ;)

Jennifer: :-)

IF YOU ARE a teacher who uses console games in the classroom, please get in touch with one of us here at 8bitlibrary.com! We want to share your stories and experiences with others!