Gaming, Learning, and Libraries

It won’t come as a surprise that libraries are getting into gaming, whether to support game studies by making games available as they do books, or using games to teach information literacy. I came across na nice conference video report by Tom Peters of the American Libraries Association (ALA) TechSource Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium in 2007. I like how the video report is edited. It is a bit short of content, but it shows the atmosphere and people.

I’m less convinced by games to teach library and information skills. Here are some I’ve found:

Quarantined: Axl Wise and the Information Outbreak is from Arizona State and lets you play a student, Axl, who works for the student newspaper and who has to figure out why the university is quarantined. It seems rather a lot of irrelevant puzzles for a little bit of simulating searching for information, but could be fun enough.

I’ll Get It and Within Range are two games from Carnegie Mellon, neither of which are much fun, but that may not be the point.

I’ve been talking with Kevin Kee at Brock about the logic of serious games or educational games. I’m tempted to say that games can’t by definition be both playful and serious. I gave a paper to that effect at Playing the Gallery, but Kevin is convincing me that games are sophisticated enough a phenomenon that there can be all sorts of planned learning. I think the National Film Board The Cyber-Terrorism Crisis site (which Kevin was involved in) might be a good example of a playful web site for learning, though parts of it are no longer working. I’m certainly convinced that designing games can be serious work through which learning happens. I also accept that there are things one learns through playing like “problem solving”. I just find games created to teach certain skills, like how to file books, are neither games nor particularly good at teaching.

Stay tuned, Kevin and I are writing a dialogue where I will get to be a curmudgeon on this issue.

Addiction to internet ‘is an illness’

According to an article in the Guardian Observer, Addiction to internet ‘is an illness’ (David Smith, Sunday March 23 2008). The story mentions research by Dr. Jerald Block and case studies from South Korea. Internet addiction has these components:

  • Excessive use, often associated with a loss of sense of time or a neglect of basic drives;
  • Withdrawal, including feelings of anger, tension and/or depression when the computer is inaccessible;
  • The need for better computers, more software, or more hours of use;
  • Negative repercussions, including arguments, lying, poor achievement, social isolation and fatigue.

Is blogging an addiction?

FlowingData: 17 Ways to Visualize the Twitter Universe

Twitter Visualization

Peter sent me to a neat blog, FlowingData that is partly about visualization. Nathan, the author, posts longish notes like 17 Ways to Visualize the Twitter Universe. He also has a good one on 21 Ways to Visualize and Explore Your Email Inbox which has some creative ways to handle spam like Alex Dragulescu’s Spam Architecture that takes spam and generates “three-dimensional modeling gestures”! (I want to be a 3D modeling gesture!)

Ong: Secondary Orality and Secondary Visualism

Wandering some more through the Notes from the Walter Ong Collection blog I came across an intriguing note on Revising Secondary Orality and Secondary Visualism. The Walter J. Ong Collection at Saint Louis University has PDFs of lectures including one on Secondary Orality and Secondary Visualism (PDF). In the lecture Ong seems to be thinking about virtual reality as a form of secondary visuality just as radio and television are a secondary orality. If secondary orality is orality which is scripted (while appearing spontaneous like the oral), secondary visuality would be planned while being visually spontaneous. Perhaps the scripting or planning in this case would be the code that makes virtual spaces available rather than the scripting of the humans in the space.

Image of VRML Dream

Secondary visuality might be like the VRML Dream – a performance of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream that was streamed over the Internet with VRML. According to a student who participated when he was younger, they had two sets of performers – the voice actors in one room and the VRML body actors in another. Or secondary visuality could be visualizations that transcode data from one sensory modality to another (from text to the visual.)

The Progress & Freedom Foundation: Digital Economy Factbook 2007

Thanks to jill/text I discoverd The Progress and Freedom Foundation’s Digital Economy Factbook, Ninth Ed. (PDF) on their Issues & Publications page. The Factbook is full of facts and graphs for everything from Internet hosts to spam. From the PFF blog I also found a compilation of media metrics charts on Flickr like this one of Information Creation and Available Storage:

Media Metrics Chart

As jill/text (where I read about this) reminds us, we have to be careful with this Factbook – it is put out by an industry advocacy group with a lot of powerful sponsors from Google to AT&T. They have an agenda to advocate for protection of digital content.

Harvard and Open Access

Peter Suber in Open Access News has reproduced the text of the motion that the Faculty of Arts and Science at Harvard passed requiring faculty to deposit a copy of their articles with the university.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles.

According to another post by Peter Suber, Harvard is the first North American university to adopt an open access policy. He calls it a “permission mandate” (granting permission to the university to make research open) rather than a “deposit mandate.” It has the virtue that the university takes responsibility for maintaining the access, not the faculty member.

More on this can be found here (another Suber post) and here (Chronicle of Higher Ed.).

Notes from the Walter Ong Collection » Blog Archive » Defining the Humanities for Congress

I came across a long quote from Walter Ong in 1978 when he was president of the MLA – Defining the Humanities for Congress. It is interesting to look back at this and how clearly Ong saw the humanities and technology.

The humanities depend on writing and on print as well as, less directly, on newer media and although oral speech, on which all verbal communication is always ultimately based, is not a technology, writing, print, and the electronic media are all technological developments. The printing press constituted the first assembly line. The humanities need technology.

However, if the humanities need technology, technology also needs the humanities. For technology calls for more than technological thinking, as our present ecological crises remind us. Technology demands reflection on itself in relation to the entire human life world. Such reflection is no longer merely technology, it includes the humanities even though it needs to be done especially by scientists and technologies.

See also the Technology category of this Notes from the Walter Ong Collection. I particularly like the quote “Nothing is more human than artifice.“