more on Everything Bad is Good for You

If everything "bad" is indeed good for you, what does this mean for the world of Libraries and/or Educational organizations?

I think this just means that libraries and other educational institutions will have to learn to adapt and embrace new things, just as they have done for decades. There was a time when people felt that novels weren't appropriate materials for libraries, but in this day and age no one even questions whether or not the public library will have the new James Patterson or Nora Roberts. At this point, we say "as long as they're reading."

So it will go with gaming. We'll say "at least they're in the library" and "at least they're learning something" (if, indeed, everything bad is good for you and they really are learning something). We already offer magazines that embrace pop culture like US Weekly, Electronic Gaming Monthly, and Lucky, and we circulate DVDs and VHS and we have computers available that people use to keep up with their Facebook pages. Gaming is just the next step in library adaptation and staying relevant to users.

After all, I don't think it's really for libraries or librarians to make value judgments, but rather to provide the information resources that people want (and in the "everything bad is good" context, I think we can call video games "information resources"), just as we would when checking out a book we find personally distasteful.

Second Life

I felt more comfortable in Second Life after going through the exercises on Orientation Island, but overall, it wasn't my thing. I guess I just didn't get the point. For me, it wasn't useful or entertaining. I guess if that's where the patrons are, I should get used to it, but...it's just an uncomfortable medium for me. I'd even prefer a video chat where people could see actual-me, rather than avatar-me.

As we've been reading in the Farkas book and elsewhere, a lot of people use these online social tools primarily to interact with people they already know. I'm totally one of those people and so spent a lot of my time in Second Life feeling concerned that a stranger might try to interact with me and that I wouldn't know what to say or do. For one thing, don't these things always have complicated social rules and their own vocabulary and whatnot?

SCILS 598 do's and don't's

I think the only change I'd like to see in this class might be difficult to implement due to the nature of the course. I feel like a major aim of social software use in libraries is collaboration and the whole, y'know, social aspect, so I would've liked more synchronous chats or collaborative projects like the week we did the wiki. However, I realize that my classmates and I are spread around the country, living in different time zones, and that many of us work full-time and that is part of the reasoning for our online course participation. These factors, and others, make synchronous and collaborative efforts difficult.

As for my general review of the course, I liked it. I really feel like I learned a lot and I'm much more confident with wikis and with the sound of my own voice in recordings, in particular! I had a lot of fun (I think the video week was my favorite!) and I've also already started implementing some of these tools into my work life. I did really struggle with keeping up with the constantly growing number of tools we were using each week, though. At this point, I'm checking the three e-mail accounts we created, Facebook, Bloglines, MySpace, Twitter, and I don't even know what else...it's very difficult to manage.

Slingo!

Here's a screencast of me playing Slingo! Check Slingo! out at Yahoo! Games.

Is pop culture making us dumb?

From what you've read (read first), is Popular culture (games, tv, film) just a method to "sophisticatedly deliver stupidity" (Steve paraphrasing George Will)?

I can only assume that Steve is paraphrasing this George Will. If that is the case, then I find Will's stance quite interesting as he is a consumer of one of American society's oldest and most profitable forms of popular culture: sports.

Now, before I continue with this line of thought, let me give the disclaimer that I, too, am a huge sports fan. Like Will, I am especially fond of baseball and am actually sharing my desk with a bobblehead figure of the Red Sox announcers on the New England Sports Network right this moment and just counted over 30 sports memorabilia items in my office.

And yet, I can't help but think that if there ever was a field of popular culture that was dumbing us down and generally being a negative influence, it would be athletics. First on the list of negative effects of our love for sports: the fact that athletes make millions of dollars a year and teachers don't even bring in six figures. Second is the fact that athletes behave just as badly as any other type of celebrity and are just as easily influencing fans to behave badly (hello, baseball steroids scandal; professional athletes that get slapped on the wrist for drunk driving; and men who brag about having slept with thousands of women). And of course, the aspect of athletics that may actually be making us dumber as a society: the tradition of passing athletes in their academics that starts in middle school and continues right through college.

Anyway, I'm with Johnson that popular culture may actually be making consumers smarter in some ways and I'll go back to the example of baseball. Baseball is a game that is easy to enjoy even if you know very little about it, but it is actually a very complex game. Understanding baseball to a point that you can comprehend strategy and statistics is actually quite difficult. Baseball can teach a person a lot about numbers just as television can teach him or her about interpersonal relationships in Johnson's example.

To Wii, or Not to Wii

(Sorry about the title, I just couldn't help myself!)

I work in a medium-sized public library (though definitely on the smaller end of that range). We were fortunate to win a Wii for our library at a CTLS event, but if we were planning to purchase a video game console my selection criteria would include: price, ease of use and set-up, availability and price of games and accessories, and user interest.

Researching the first three would be pretty easy. There are several Web sites I could use for price comparisons and video game reviews, some of which were cited on the SCILS 598 wiki. There are several methods I might use to determine which console would be most desirable to our patrons. First and foremost would be asking the users through surveys available in the library, on the Web site, and in local electronics stores and other places where gamers might be likely to see them. Another method would be to ask local electronics stores and rental stores like Blockbuster which games and consoles are most popular with their customers.

My choice would be the Wii and for my reasons, look no further than the Library Garden post on gaming consoles. It's the best bang for the buck, essentially.

And, you can play Rock Band and Guitar Hero on it.

Screencasting 101

Here are the two most important things I've learned about screencasting this semester:

• Rehearse your screencast prior to recording. A few dry runs will help you to find any snags such as dead links, changed pages, etc. and will make you more comfortable with the topic and the idea of speaking aloud into "thin air."
• KEEP GOING even if you make a mistake. If you stop and start all over every time you say "um" or make some other minor mistake, you'll never get through it.