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…