Atom Feed Available: Liblog: A Library Weblog
Welcome to Liblog 1 - a weblog of current web sites and stories dealing with the interface between technology and libraries. Sometimes the connection to the sphere of the library is tenuous... but in today's world, everything has an impact on libraries, on librarians... and on library users. If you find this weblog of interest, you may enjoy these other library weblogs as well.
Friday, November 02, 2007
Liblog @ IL2007 - Day 3
Closing Keynote: Gaming, Learning & the Information World
Elizabeth Lane Lawley, Rochester Institute of Technology
First off, she's my pick for the costume contest winner - she's dressed as her World of Warcraft character!
The boundaries between virtual worlds and the real world are blurring. "Gaming" is becoming a venue for networking, for learning, for many of the things that used to be confined to "professional" lives.
Why has gaming become so popular? Because gaming makes things fun! One of the things we can learn from games is how to make things fun for people:
- Collecting things - people like to get stuff, particularly if they can show it off to others
- Points - people like to "know the score"
- Feedback - people want to know that they are doing the right thing
- Communication exchanges - people like to be able to share with each other
- Customization - people like to have some control, to be able to add their own touches to the game
She plays World of Warcraft, and believes that ones of the reasons for its success is that it is did a live demonstration of the first five minutes (or so) of WoW, and compared that to the first five minutes of Second Life (by creating a new character in each). She likes WoW better, in part because SL doesn't give you the same ways to succeed that a game does.
In a game we happily do repetitive tasks, because doing so builds expertise, which in turn will make us more successful playing the game. Perhaps by adapting gaming techniques, we can make learning equally fun? Notes some ways that this is already happening:
- Tupperware parties, where people get rewards for selling to others
- Super Sleuth: solve a weekly puzzle at a school, student gets a reward of some type
- Summer Reading programs: after reading so many words/books, you get a reward
- Ebay feedback can be viewed as like collecting points. So too can collecting friends on social networking sites like Friendster or MySpace
Showed a slide of Nick Yee’s MMU Player Stages:
- Entry: newcomer euphoria, playing with someone
- Practice: ramping up, progression, solo to group
- Mastery: staying for friends, casual guilds, high end content, social/community leadership, competition
- Burnout: grind burnout (where the gap between levels becomes so great that it seems like you have to do things thousands of times to move to the next level), social/raiding burnout, restarts, nothing left to do
- Recovery: end-game casual, some do come back
How can we make the library a game, and make it so people want to come back? What can we streamline, or what can we add to have our customers avoid burnout? Recommends looking at Raph Koster's A Theory of Fun for Game Designers for some ways that we might be able to improve the Library experience, and make it fun for people to use.
Labels: Elizabeth Lane Lawley, Games, IL2007, Libraries, WoW
0 Comments:
Create a Link
Other web logs with links to library issues:
- Lori Bowen Ayre's Library Technology Musings provides "Hopes, dreams, wild ideas and practical solutions for libraries."
- Marylaine Block's Neat New Stuff I Found This Week (and her Ex Libris E-Zine for librarians.)
- Tara Calishain's Research Buzz, "news about search engines, databases, and other information collections."
- Blake Carver and Steve Galbraith's LISNews.com, focuses on (as the subtitle puts it), "news for information professionals."
- Steven M. Cohen's Library Stuff, provides readers with information on the wonderful and exciting world of librarianship.
- Gary Frost's Future of the Book, looks at "preservation and persistence of the changing book."
- Michael Gartenberg (an analyst with Jupiter Research, a market research and advisory firm focused on emerging technologies and the Internet) is one of several Jupiter researchers producing an Analyst Weblog.
- Brend Hough and Liz Rea's NEKLS Technology Weblog, "50 Feet From the Cutting Edge in the Northeast Kansas Library System."
- Sarah Houghton's Librarian In Black, has "resources and discussions for the 'tech-librarians-by-default' among us..."
- Jenny Levine, the original bloggin' librarian, is back with the Shifted Librarian, working to make libraries more "portable... to serve our remote patrons."
- Alex Soojung-Kim Pang (one of the Institute for the Future's research team) is producing Future Now, which looks at emerging technologies and their social implications.
- Gary Price and Shirl Kennedy's ResourceShelf has "resources and news for information professionals" (including the latest scoops on what's what with the invisible web).
- Michael Stephens' Tame the Web includes, "current technology uses in libraries, training tips and various other interests concerning library settings."
- Sandra Stewart at San Jose Public Library is producing a Library Tourguide to Blogs and Technology.
- Jessamyn West's librarian.net, keeping track of the nifty reference sites - and library references - she finds.
- Stephanie Wright's TechnoBiblio, where librarians and technogeeks speak the same language.
Not a weblog, but a very funny look at libraries:
- Unshelved - Bill Barnes' and Gene Ambaum's library comic strip (formerly known as Overdue.)
Powered By Blogger, a web service we're using to maintain Liblog.
Liblog is produced by staff of the Redwood City Public Library. We welcome your comments.
