GLS 2005 – The Shifted Librarian

Our GLS talk – Games for Thought: The Future of Education & How We Can Get There – was recently summarized in Jenny Levine’s blog, The Shifted Librarian. She also talks a bit about what she learned at GLS, and what she’s hoping to apply to her library and her kids’ future learning:

The most obvious, glaring thing is that librarians (in general) have absolutely no clue about what is going on in this area [of gaming and education]. Academia is only now starting to do more than just study it, but it’s not even on our radar. I’ve noted before that I talk about Millennials in the context of serving them where they are (rather than making them come to us), but I hadn’t really thought through all of the implications of the gaming side of it. If you have young children or grandchildren, you can see how gaming affects them, and in turn how they interact with information and multi-modal interfaces…

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As a librarian, I was already buying into the whole video games in libraries meme, but what also struck me was how I filtered everything I heard as a parent, too. Having a 9-year old, male gamer at home informed much of what I heard, and there were many times I thought to myself, “That’s Brent,” during the presentations. I fully realize now how much the games are content for him and just how much learning he’s actually doing…

Epistemic games and the Digital Divide

A widely read paper/blog on Playing the Digital Divide looks at whether and how video games can help close the gap in information technology skills. The paper suggests that epistemic games can play an important role in this process:

The group’s key contributions to gaming studies discourse has been the notion of video games as ‘epistemic frames’ and as a vehicle for literacies.

Epistemic video games provide educators with a potentially revolutionary teaching tool that can advance multiple new media literacies (Flanagan’s RAPUNSEL project is but one such example). These new literacies, with the right pedagogical support, promise to arm students with the critical tools necessary to engage both canonized and popular texts alike, and not simply regurgitate rote information for the purposes of passing standardized tests.

Conference Presentation – Games for thought: The future of education and how we can get there

Shaffer, D.W.; Hatfield, D.L.; Magnifico, A.M.; Svarovsky, G.N. (June, 2005) Symposium presentation at Games, Learning, and Society 2005 conference. Madison, WI.