February 19, 2008

What Do Games Have to Do with Literacy?

I’ve been telling every­one who will lis­ten about Paul Waelchli’s work map­ping the ACRL Infor­ma­tion Lit­er­acy Stan­dards to skills used to play pop­u­lar videogames. I’ve been wait­ing for some­one to do the same thing for school libraries, and now we have our first step towards that goal because Brian Mayer has mapped New York State’s edu­ca­tion stan­dards to some mod­ern board games.

Gam­ing, School Libraries and the Curriculum

“Games engage stu­dents with authen­tic leisure expe­ri­ences while rein­forc­ing a vari­ety of social, lit­er­ary and cur­ric­u­lar skills. When an edu­ca­tional con­cept is intro­duced and rein­forced dur­ing a game, it is inter­nal­ized as part of an enjoy­able expe­ri­ence and fur­ther uti­lized as one aspect of a strat­egy to attain success.

Games also carry other ben­e­fits. They help stu­dents con­nect and build social skills, work­ing as part of a team or nego­ti­at­ing the most advan­ta­geous sit­u­a­tion for them­selves. It also pro­vides an oppor­tu­nity for stu­dents to to explore a host of life skills not inher­ent in the cur­ricu­lum , but impor­tant for suc­cess. Some of these include: micro-managing resources and options; actively re-evaluating, re-prioritizing and re-adjusting goals based on uncer­tain and shift­ing sit­u­a­tions; deter­min­ing accept­able losses in an effort to obtain an end goal; and employ­ing ana­lyt­i­cal and crit­i­cal skills to more authen­tic social experiences.

Here is a list of NYS stan­dards cur­rently sup­ported by a well estab­lished school game library:

NYS Social Stud­ies Standards:

  • Stan­dard 3: Geog­ra­phy Stu­dents will use a vari­ety of intel­lec­tual skills to demon­strate their under­stand­ing of the geog­ra­phy of the inter­de­pen­dent world in which we live—local, national, and global—including the dis­tri­b­u­tion of peo­ple, places, and envi­ron­ments over the Earth’s surface.
  • Stan­dard 4: Eco­nom­ics Stu­dents will use a vari­ety of intel­lec­tual skills to demon­strate their under­stand­ing of how the United States and other soci­eties develop eco­nomic sys­tems and asso­ci­ated insti­tu­tions to allo­cate scarce resources, how major decision-making units func­tion in the U.S. and other national economies, and how an econ­omy solves the scarcity prob­lem through mar­ket and non-market mechanisms.

Sev­eral more are listed in the post, so please click through to see just how good a fit this can be.

If you still ques­tion whether there are lit­era­cies (espe­cially information-related ones) involved in play­ing videogames, ask your­self if those same things hap­pen around play­ing board games. If your answer is that yes, they do, what then is the dif­fer­ence between learn­ing those skills through board games and learn­ing them through videogames? Brian’s work helps illus­trate the sim­i­lar­i­ties but even more impor­tantly, it shows how eas­ily a school library could start out with the famil­iar world of board games as a way to imple­ment gam­ing ser­vices and engage stu­dents more inter­ac­tively in learn­ing infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy skills. Thanks, Brian!

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10:48 pm Comments (14)

14 Comments »

  1. what then is the dif­fer­ence between learn­ing those skills through board games and learn­ing them through videogames?

    While I agree that games and videogames can be impor­tant tools in teach­ing lit­er­acy, there are some seri­ous dif­fer­ences. With videogames, even inter­ac­tive ones, you can­not claim the same social cap­i­tal is being gen­er­ated. If it is an online game and you are not in the room with the other play­ers, the same social skills are not devel­oped — you can ‘ignore’ any­one you dis­like, and you can quiet and restart the game instead of work­ing out con­struc­tive solu­tions, as you often have to do when in the same room as the other players.

    I lived with adult gamers for awhile who were seri­ous WoW play­ers (I real­ize this addresses games at the school-age level, but it paves the road for behav­ior down the line, as well), and while the struc­ture of that par­tic­u­lar game forces you to be social (i.e., join guilds) in order to get to the end-game, the social dynamic of video games encour­ages iso­la­tion from *real* social inter­ac­tion. Some will argue against my dichotomiz­ing the online world from the ‘real’ world, but it is a dis­tinc­tion that needs to be made, and early, given some of the unhealthy ten­den­cies chil­dren are tak­ing with them into adulthood.

    Any­way, yes, a cer­tain kind of social­iza­tion occurs even in videogames, but it would be dan­ger­ous to equate it with the social­iza­tion of inter­act­ing with other human bod­ies in a ‘real’ setting.

    Comment by Colleen Harris — February 20, 2008 @ 7:36 am

  2. […] John Rice: […]

    Pingback by Mathematics Education Blog » Blog Archive » What Do Games Have to Do with Literacy? — February 20, 2008 @ 8:04 pm

  3. I have mixed feel­ings about this topic. It all depends on what we mean by learn­ing. Not that I am an enemy of games but rather I hate to see valu­able edu­ca­tional time wasted. If solid meth­ods and pur­pose are applied learn­ing with games can be ter­rific and stim­u­lat­ing. I learned an awe­ful lot play­ing monop­oly with my mother yet I also see games as just a babysit­ter. As a teacher-librarian, I try to build a strong cul­ture of schol­ar­ship and crit­i­cal think­ing. I don’t see the library as a coffe shop. When gam­ing is just for recre­ation, I think the cost and effort of school­ing is wasted. I see social net­work­ing and IM in the same vein. All learn­ing is not just play– some­times it is work too. It really depends on the gifts and skill of the instructor.

    Comment by Al Smith — February 20, 2008 @ 10:59 pm

  4. Thanks for shar­ing your thoughts, Colleen. I think you’re com­par­ing apples and oranges. While it’s true there are videogames that are designed to be played by one per­son that may not involve social inter­ac­tions, the same can be said of some table­top games. One such exam­ple would be the aptly-named soli­taire. I don’t dis­agree with some of your points, but there are lots of videogames that are incred­i­bly social, so I think it would be bet­ter to com­pare social videogames to social table­top games and ask these questions.

    Where I do dis­agree with you is that “the social dynamic of video games encour­ages iso­la­tion from *real* social inter­ac­tion.” There are some videogames that are bet­ter with real social inter­ac­tion and some that fos­ter it. This is no dif­fer­ent than with any type of gam­ing (includ­ing sports).

    I also don’t see any­one equat­ing social­iza­tion around videogames with social­iza­tion in other set­tings, although I will note that my expe­ri­ences as a casual gamer involve very “real,” very social inter­ac­tions. Just because they hap­pen around videogames does not make them any less valid than if they occurred around books, tele­vi­sion, movies, the weather, fish­ing, knit­ting, or politics.

    Comment by jenny — February 21, 2008 @ 8:21 pm

  5. Hi, Al — can you define what you mean by “recre­ation” when you describe wasted school­ing? Would your def­i­n­i­tion also apply to art, music, phys ed, choir, etc.? I’m try­ing to dis­cern how (for you) game play­ing is recre­ational and a waste of time in school ver­sus those other activities.

    I see IM as a tool, not an activ­ity, and I know a lot of stu­dents use IM to col­lab­o­ra­tively work on home­work. Would you also describe using the tele­phone as a waste of time? If the stu­dent is IMing with a librar­ian, does that make it okay?

    I don’t mean to pick on you (I appre­ci­ate your com­ments), but I feel like there is more to these things than just pure recre­ation and that they do have learn­ing value. As with any sub­ject, you’re spot on that the instruc­tor can be key. So can parents.

    Comment by jenny — February 21, 2008 @ 8:27 pm

  6. […] — Gam­ing, School Libraries and Cur­ricu­lum­Next time any­one asks you why you are play­ing so much video games, point them to this arti­cle. Just don’t quote me on it. Alter­na­tively, you might also want to read Paul Waelchli’s arti­cle on the skills used to play pop­u­lar videogames.(via The Shifted Librarian) […]

    Pingback by Blogging Librarian » Blog Archive » Quick Links - “100 Books Every Child Should Read” and Other Stories - 23 February 2008 — February 22, 2008 @ 6:31 pm

  7. […] What do games have to do with literacy? […]

    Pingback by Post #3 - Shift to Gaming « Blog Me a Story — February 23, 2008 @ 11:20 am

  8. I have some mixed feel­ings as well on this, but I guess I’m old fash­ioned. I read LOTR over and over again–there were no movies or video games in my day. And I feel that there is noth­ing like hav­ing an imag­i­nary world inside me that was cre­ated only by books.

    Comment by Brian Mandabach — February 26, 2008 @ 12:55 am

  9. Brian, can you explain why you think it’s one or the other and why it can’t be both? Many of the peo­ple I know who read LOTR cover to cover also played D&D, Magic, and/or other games. Do you think their imag­i­nary worlds were any less valid than yours because they played table­top games?

    Comment by jenny — February 26, 2008 @ 7:28 am

  10. Another link related to using games (Catan, Empire Builder, Road to the White­house) in the class­room:
    http://www.mayfairgames.com/teacherzone.htm

    Comment by DeanG — February 26, 2008 @ 10:20 am

  11. […] in Feb­ru­ary, I was excited that Brian Mayer had tied the New York state cur­ricu­lum stan­dards to board games and that the School Library Sys­tem of Gene­see Val­ley BOCES had invested in a board game collection […]

    Pingback by The Shifted Librarian » How School Libraries Can Use Board Games — April 22, 2008 @ 6:24 am

  12. […] in Feb­ru­ary, I was excited that Brian Mayer had tied the New York state cur­ricu­lum stan­dards to board games and that the School Library Sys­tem of Gene­see Val­ley BOCES had invested in a board game collection […]

    Pingback by News » How School Libraries Can Use Board Games — April 22, 2008 @ 9:06 am

  13. Just wanted to add that I work in an urban high school library. I want to but can’t afford to pur­chase video games and 1 or 2 con­soles but instead I have added a table for board games, have numer­ous board games avail­able for stu­dents to play dur­ing their free time(lunch period) and have added a foose ball table which we have not used because we need to have some rules estab­lished. Stu­dents enjoy play­ing the games enor­mously and I am con­sid­er­ing adding a sec­ond table. They exhibit good social skills and employ logic strate­gies. Name with­held, please.

    Comment by Name withheld, please — April 29, 2008 @ 11:29 am

  14. […] What Do Games Have to Do with Lit­er­acy? (The Shifted Librarian) […]

    Pingback by The OPLIN 4cast » Blog Archive » 4Cast #90: Google Health, Blu-Ray, Gaming, E-Books — August 7, 2008 @ 12:43 pm

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