Ambience

Early in the semester, Lee Rainie talked about the “always on” or “ambient” quality of technology today, especially in the lives of young people. Lately I’ve been thinking about this idea and how it applies to other library and educational issues. For example, in a library, reading should be ambient. Right now, learning seems to be ambient for me. By this I mean different aspects of my life keep crossing over, informing other aspects of my life. The boundaries of personal and professional are blurring. I used to think it was unprofessional to talk about family, children, and also about a career, but for me, these two broad arenas keep overlapping – even when I try to keep them separate.

Here is an example. In reading Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media (Ito, Mizuko, et.al. published by the MacArthur Foundation,2010) for my resource review, one of the studies included focused on Neopets. This was of no particular interest (interesting, but not compelling) until I discovered that my eleven-year old was spending a great deal of time on Neopets. These two things – my reading and his interest, took place in the span of the same two week period. Coincidence? The study talked about three very different reasons that most children use Neopets: 1) social (interacting with their friends) 2) creative (inventing pets, dressing them, decorating their houses, taking care of them) or 3) economic – by playing different games and making investments, children “earn” more points. Those who are focused on the earning usually don’t spend all of their points. Capitalist, yes. Certainly not violent. I pictured my son – why would he play? My guess was #3. So I asked him if he liked playing the market and he responded very enthusiastically. But is this a good way for him to be spending his time? So, I also checked on Common Sense Media (a site we have looked at in this class and I have used before) to see what they have to say . . . and yes, it’s not too bad. They also note the commercial nature of the site and recommend avoiding the chat rooms and discussion boards, which my son was very dismissive about when I asked him – that part is just not interesting to him. Still, he gets so involved that it does seem addictive at times . . . so I can understand the concerns that parents have about too much media use and gaming. Where these lines are, how much is too much, what is appropriate? . . . I’m not sure, but I’m still learning.

In another part of my life I’m involved with a parent educational group. At the April meeting a school administrator talking about an exciting new program she is implementing to help teachers learn how to differentiate in the classroom. What planning method did she refer to? Backwards design. A concept that makes great sense, but I was not very familiar with before just a few weeks ago. This week’s article by Wiggins and McTighe, “Put Understanding First”, about using backwards design in designing school curriculum was excellent for me as a parent and well as a librarian. Learning is ambient.

Another example: Comics. We’ve recently analyzed the conventions needed to interpret comics, issues surrounding comics and reading, visual literacy. And the same week we discussed it in class, a comic book exhibit at The Works, a local science museum, opened: Stories in Four Colors: Cartoon Art in Ohio. This coming Saturday, May 1, our local library is hosting a comic book day with a workshop for youth in the afternoon. Ahh . . . because it's National Comic Book Day. Thanks to Carol for tweeting this NPR resource as I'm blogging! Cool! Other recent comics news include a graphic novel version of A Wrinkle in Time. One of my favorite books, so I’m both excited and a bit worried – so is the artist, who is at least aware that L’Engle didn’t want illustrations for her book. But if it will introduce the story to new readers, then that’s a good thing . . . And what about the movies? I haven’t heard much positive about the Kick-Ass movie, but this article asks whether graphic novel heroines are different when written by women, instead of men (think Wonder Woman)? I think she’s on to something here . . . will graphic novels written by women appeal more to girls than traditional comics do?

Does this kind of coincidence happen for the rest of you? Where one aspect of your life informs another . . . in sometimes unpredictable ways? It’s exciting . . . and there is always more to learn.

Video Games and Literacy: More Than Meets the Eye

I've been doing a lot of thinking about video games and literacy, and I just want to put a couple of ideas and questions out to the group to both extend my own thinking, and maybe to frame the conversation a bit, moving it outside of the "video games are not as good as books" argument that I hear a lot.

First, I think that it's really important to define terms in a discussion like this one. One central term is literacy. Are we thinking of literacy as being able to decode symbols to create meaning (functional literacy) or are talking about literacy as the ability to understand, critique, and question text, media, or other things interacted with (critical literacy)? Or are we saying the ability to read and comprehend books (print literacy)? Another central term is video game. Is the discussion around "mini" games such as Tetris, MarioKart, BrainAge, or around "complex" games, games that require players to take on a new identity, play for more than 10-100 hours to complete the game, problem solve and face consequences for their decisions, such as Final Fantasy, Spore, Sims, DragonQuest, etc? (BTW, I borrowed these terms from Marc Prensky, who talks about them in his book Don't Bother Me Mom, I'm Learning.)

From the reading and studying that I have done, I think that complex games can probably improve critical and perhaps even functional literacy. James Paul Gee makes a case for this in What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, in which he argues that educators can study games to observe extremely effective teaching techniques. (Whatever you think of the content of games, they are very good at both motivating people to keep playing them, and teaching them an internalized implicit set of rules so that they can understand and play the game.) One example of Gee's arguments about how games can support even print literacy (there are many, and I really encourage you to check out his book if you are interested!) is that games teach players "to learn about and come to appreciate interrelations within and across multiple sign systems (images, words, actions, symbols, artifacts, etc.) as a complex system, [which is] core to the learning experience." To paraphrase, learning to read at its most basic is really a process of learning how to decode and understand a symbol set. While games may be teaching players to understand a different kind of symbol set (not the English language), they are honing the same underlying skill.

In addition games provide a unique chance for players to immerse themselves within narrative structures, becoming part of the story creation itself. Some games have better stories than others, true, but they also do something that books can't (even Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books!): they give the "reader" / player agency and power over shaping the story line.

Finally, I'm borrowing from Steven Johnson's book Everything Bad Is Good for You to make this little chart about the differences between books and video games. While books do many things very well, and we have invested them in Western culture for hundreds if not thousands of years because of the things they do well, video games do other things very well, and I don't know that it has to be an either/or dichotomy. Maybe print literacy is not the main benefit of video games, and maybe it shouldn't be. But perhaps there are other, just as valuable, skill sets that video games have to offer. Take a look and see what you think.

Walking into a Desert

"Watching a Digital Nation in Action" is the title of today's post on Digital Education, one of Education Week's blogs. It previews Digital Nation airing on PBS's Frontline next week (Tuesday, February 2 at 9 p.m. EST). You can also watch a preview and much of the work in progress on the PBS web site. Some of the quotes seemed particularly pertinent to our class discussion last week, especially this one on multitasking:

"Virtually all multitaskers think they're brilliant at multitasking," Sociologist Clifford Nass says. "And what we're discovering is that they're really lousy at it."

I have a very ambivalent attitude about multitasking. Some things I can do quite well together, and it just seems more efficient -- listening to a podcast while doing dishes, listening to a book on CD while driving . . . but for other tasks I end up not doing any of them very well. Or at least not as well as if I was only concentrating on just one task.

Another compelling quote is "Walking into a classroom without media," one educator says, "is like walking into a desert" for students these days. Wow. This description seems very apt. If media is ambient, flowing in a stream all around us, then no technology must be like a desert. If media is part of children's environment and life outside of school, then it needs to be part of their learning environment.

I missed another episode of Frontline earlier this year that focused specifically on children and the digital world, Growing Up Online, but that too is available to watch online. Sometimes it's pretty convenient to be living in the digital age!

Tools to Help Manage Learning

Feeling overwhelmed by what you're learning in classes? Need new ways to manage, create, and share information for assignments and projects? Just want to try something different? Check out some of these tools...

Cacoo is an online collaborative diagramming tool—make a floorplan, a chart, or something else and share it on a blog.

ColorSchemeDesigner can help you make your webpages and other documents hold together better aesthetically (plus it's a lot of fun to use!).

Mendeley is a research management tool that you can use to sync notes, citation, and other content among computers. You can also add a bookmarklet to your browser to import websites and other resources to your Mendeley database. This tool also allows you to sync/import your Zotero (see below) sources.

Readability is a browser-based tool that strips out clutter (and ads!) from webpages on the fly, allowing you to read things with much greater ease and clarity. 

Scrivener is a useful tool if you do lots of writing and are looking for an innovative way to manage your notes and create your drafts in chunks. It's a $40 download (and for Macs only).

ShowMeWhatsWrong is a free web-based tool that allows you to do a brief screen capture to send to friends in order to get help trouble-shooting computer problems.

SlideFinder searches publicly available PowerPoint presentations. Why would you want to do this? Well, you might find a great new way of presenting information!

SlideRocket is an online presentation tool (i.e. like PowerPoint). The advantage? It's web-based and available from any location with Internet access. You'll find a free option available along with various paid ones.

37Signals offers a host of collaborative tools such as whiteboards and task managers to aid group projects. Most of their tools require a modest monthly fee, but many also allow you to sign up for a 30-day free trial. 

Zoho offers a wide variety of collaborative tools including wikis and word processors. Individual users can sign up for free.


Zotero is a Firefox extension that allows you to manage, annotate, and cite resources from within your browser.