A few things I’ve wanted to blog about in-depth but am just throw­ing out there for now.

• Paul over at ResearchQuest beat me to the punch to post about Carnegie Mel­lon University’s Library Arcade. This is a must-read, must-play combo for all library staff inter­ested in using gam­ing in instruc­tion. Heck, maybe we should have a leader­board on this one. I love the idea of adapt­ing an old school style game (like “Diner Dash”) but putting a library spin on it.
• When I wasn’t look­ing, Penn State turned its Vir­tual Worlds blog into a big ol’ Edu­ca­tional Gam­ing Com­mons, now with forums in addi­tion to the blog.
• Chris attended the Games, Learn­ing, and Soci­ety Con­fer­ence back in July (the one that I also went to), and you can read his notes over on LibLau­re­ate. In his reflec­tions on James Paul Gee’s open­ing keynote, Chris wrote, “When do we reach a thresh­old and go grab a walk-through or a cheat code? Is this the impor­tance of social net­works — I’ve reached so far and now I need some help?” That’s a great ques­tion, and I think the answer is yes.
• At Learning2007 later this month, they’re going to do a Rapid Learn­ing Game Exper­i­ment. While the exer­cise itself is fas­ci­nat­ing, it’s the last sen­tence that intrigues me most (empha­sis is mine).

  “We are going to push Gam­ing for Learn­ing Devel­op­ment to the max in an upcom­ing exper­i­ment. Here are the ingredients:

  • Take sev­eral under­grad­u­ate stu­dents from Cham­plain College’s Elec­tronic Gam­ing & Inter­ac­tive Devel­op­ment Pro­gram in Ver­mont and bring them to Orlando for Learn­ing 2007.
  • Give them an assign­ment to cre­ate a Learn­ing Focused Game, defined by a group of com­pa­nies at Learn­ing 2007.
  • Over the next 58 hours, in full view of 2,000 par­tic­i­pants — with feed­back every few hours — they will build an web based immer­sive learn­ing game.
  • This learn­ing activ­ity will then be reviewed, edited and released into Open Source for the entire global com­mu­nity to use.”
• The fol­low­ing video is just awe­some in every sense of the word. I laughed, I cried, and then I laughed some more. Watch the whole thing to find out who’s behind it. Not only is it an object les­son in how social gam­ing can be and how libraries could imple­ment it, but it’s also a great mar­ket­ing les­son for us. I’ll def­i­nitely be show­ing snip­pets of this one in my presentations.

orig­i­nally posted by the­gloam­ing

This is my new favorite library sign. I always think you can send a bet­ter mes­sage using humor than heavy-handedness, although in this case, the librar­i­ans are also mak­ing a great state­ment about privacy.

I’ve been mulling over a lot lately the trust librar­i­ans have built up with users just through our actions (they speak louder than words, right?). I think there’s a lot we can do here, teach­ing peo­ple (and espe­cially stu­dents) how to man­age their online iden­tity. “How to be a good dig­i­tal cit­i­zen” should also include how to rep­re­sent your­self online, in addi­tion to how to par­tic­i­pate and media lit­er­acy in general.

I’ve also been think­ing about “per­sis­tence” a lot lately, and I’ll be writ­ing more about that because I think it’s one of our biggest assets in the dig­i­tal world (from many dif­fer­ent angles, too).

In the mean­time, I’m happy to see Blog­lines has incor­po­rated OpenID, some­thing I wish libraries — and par­tic­u­larly library ven­dors — would pay more atten­tion to. To learn more about what Blog­lines is doing in this area, go to http://www.bloglines.com/about/news and scroll down to the cur­rent sec­ond item (or just try going here). (Hope­fully the folks at BL are in the process of turn­ing this page into a blog so that we can point to spe­cific news in the future, rather than one long page. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more.) Bonus points to them for adding openID authen­ti­ca­tion in the first place.

I’d like to think libraries could be influ­en­tial in edu­cat­ing Amer­i­cans about the ben­e­fits of OpenID and help folks tame some of this chaos. The more sites that use an open stan­dard like this (cough, libraries, cough), the bet­ter it is for all of us. And let’s face it, in a sit­u­a­tion like this, who are you going to trust — your local library or Big Brother?