Gaming, not just for Millenials

There was an article in the New York Times today called Video Games Conquer Retirees that discusses how retirees are playing online games. Apparently many of them also love to play the Nintendo Wii. This article grabbed me because when librarians talk about gaming in libraries, we are usually trying to reach Millenials. This article shows that we should think bigger and focus on trying to reach nontraditional students with our games as well.

ACRL Poster Session Handouts

For those wanting the handouts and links after seeing our poster session at ACRL, here they are:
Information about the Game (Word document)
Make Your Own Game (Word document)
Game Poster (PowerPoint file)

Links:
Play the Game!
Get the Game Files

ACRL Blogging

It's late afternoon at the ACRL conference, and I'm attending the Blended Librarian session. I met a lot, lot, lot of people at my poster session this morning. We ran out of our 175 handouts in about 20 minutes, and we ended up getting cards and e-mails from another couple of hundred people.

Get Blended: Injecting Instructional Design and Technology Skills into Academie Library Jobs
Steven Bell
John Shank
Kathryn Shaughnessy
Sean Cordes

http://blendedlibrarian.org
Use Elluminate to webcast free sessions
John talking about what a BL is
Related positions include web & instructional lib, instructional tech lib, learning tech lib, instructional dev lib and electronic learning lib
Instructional design: to develop instructional tools and work on process
Instructional Technology: Work w/libs to pick appropriate techs

Qualifications: Multimedia software, organizational, project management, instructional design, communication, teaching, instructional technology
Project Management skills top need

Duties: digital learning materials, lib instruction, reference, info lit, keeping up w/ tech, assessment, training programs

Libraries adding instructional designers who are not librarians to get the skill sets

Sean
Role is to enhance lib's instructional program, identifying techs
Biggest challenge to BL: identifying what does need to be integrated with tech, bringing people together at all levels of institution, time and perseverance


Kathryn
Integrate info literacy into core curriculum
Biggest challenge for BL: libs not sure it's meeting a need, tech is beyond libs

Other stuff mentioned
Low threshold apps
Parks Multimedia studio
high end digital video editing system
Podcasts using audacity & innerTOOB
Wikis using PBWiki, Wikispaces, & PMWiki
Tutorial with captivate, blog with blogger, wordpress

Information Literacy Game updated again

Another update to the download files for the Information Literacy Game. As people download it and give it a whirl, I quickly learn where the problems are. This update includes a crucial file, the image for the gameboard itself!

It also includes a change in the CSS file and changed instructions in the gamedirections.txt file explaining how to change the URL of the boardgame.gif file.

If you've already downloaded everything and just need the board image, here it is.

To download the entire zip file again, here it is.

Upcoming Conferences

Scott and I are working the conference circuit over the next few weeks. Locally, we will be presenting poster sessions based on The Information Literacy Game at the UNC Teaching and Learning with Technology Conference on Wednesday, March 21. Then, the following week, we will be at ACRL. Our poster session there is scheduled for Friday, March 30, 10:00-11:00 AM. We're poster 32. Please stop by and visit!
I also plan on doing some blogging about all the new, wonderful things I learn while we're in both places, so check back soon.

Information Literacy Game updated

The game files available for download at http://library.uncg.edu/game/mygame.asp have been updated. Seems I forgot to include the actual sound files in the package! Also, included is a bug fix in the game script.

You can also download the files here.