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.