I love that my friend, the newly minted Dr. Stephens, devoted one of his LIS class nights to gam­ing. I’m sorry I couldn’t be there to help out, but it sounds like the stu­dents did quite well on their own. I would love to see more LIS courses play­ing and explor­ing like this, help­ing the stu­dents form their own opinions.

Games…Games…Games…

“How do you make your college-age son jeal­ous? Tell him you played Gui­tar Hero… in school…for a class…while the teacher was there. Hey, I thought it was great fun at our Wednes­day game night. I’m not totally con­vinced of all the edu­ca­tional val­ues of these games, but in terms of build­ing com­mu­nity, gam­ing really show teens that libraries are will­ing to invest in their inter­ests. I love the idea that gam­ing allows teens to get to know their librar­i­ans on a more casual basis. We might not seem so ‘scary’ when they need us for infor­ma­tional pur­poses. I’m unde­cided about the con­cept of mak­ing kids check out books before they can play games. That might be a lit­tle like hav­ing to eat your lima beans before you can have your choco­late cake. In the end, does any­one learn to like lima beans?” [Sharonlis768’s Weblog]

Gam­ing

“I def­i­nitely think there’s a place for games in libraries, includ­ing board games. From my own expe­ri­ence with strat­egy games, I know that some games require a great deal of thought and atten­tion, as well as crit­i­cal think­ing and a lot of decision-making. At my old job, the pres­i­dent and I would often dis­cuss cor­po­rate strat­egy in terms of strat­egy games, since we were both avid gamers at the time. He was the ‘con­quer and pil­lage’ type while I was the ‘research and develop’ type, so we com­ple­mented each other well. The prob­lem with some strat­egy games, though, is that you can some­times learn what it takes to beat an AI with­out nec­es­sar­ily learn­ing fun­da­men­tal strat­egy. I don’t men­tion this as a crit­i­cism of the notion of gam­ing in libraries or to say that good skills can’t be learned, but I’ve always been dis­ap­pointed by games that turn out to be puz­zles. I guess that’s a bit tan­gen­tial…” [Nat’s Weblog]

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The Annoy­ing Pro­duc­tive Guy At Work: Sham­ing Users One Color At A Time

“My new assis­tant is an 18-year-old ‘mil­len­nial,’ as I guess we’re call­ing them now. He’s a young com­puter Borg who could hack before he could walk. In a prob­a­bly vain attempt to keep him from quit­ting before I get in at least one decent vaca­tion, I’m con­stantly look­ing for ways to keep him engaged.

‘What IS all this crap??’ He guf­faws at the cas­cade of emails that greets us every morn­ing. ‘Do you really READ all of this??’

You don’t read it, I tell him, you PROCESS it. It’ll take months before he learns to fish the actions out from the dozens and dozens of mes­sages clog­ging his in-box all day long. But once he learns to man­age the broad­cast, he’ll also get a front-row seat for the epic drama of fear and heart­break that passes through our mail server every day. Our company’s high reliance on email cre­ates such a dense bar­rage that it cre­ates a per­fect means through which things fall through the cracks.…

In effect, I’ve started an ongo­ing email clinic. Some peo­ple respond to the com­pe­ti­tion: they want a lower num­ber than Lumpy in the next desk over. Oth­ers will just add me to their pile of unread mes­sages. But folks are also com­ing for­ward who are gen­uinely inter­ested in free­ing them­selves. I’m sure my approach won’t work on every­one. After all, no one gets up at the crack of dawn and tries to cram 60-plus hours of work into 40-hour work week, just so they can sat­isfy the arbi­trary impo­si­tions of some guy from another depart­ment that they hardly know. But I keep the offer out there, and even­tu­ally I’ll res­cue the ones worth sav­ing. To be hon­est though, I’m really just try­ing to save myself. It’s these mod­est checks in the win col­umn that help me make it through the work day.” [43 Fold­ers]

I totally get the whole “What is all this crap?” sen­ti­ment. :-p

I would have imple­mented this as a car­rot, rather than a stick, but I love that atti­tude of help­ing oth­ers who are ready to be helped. It’s where many of us have to put our ener­gies in order to be effec­tive. Who can you help?

See also: Five Tips for Imple­ment­ing Social Soft­ware in Your Library from Rob Coers, via Michael Stephens. I love Rob’s slide (and atti­tude), and I love Michael’s addi­tion of “focus on the pos­i­tive.” Life is too short to spend it being neg­a­tive, folks. Again, I ask, who can you help?