If you want a glimpse into one pos­si­ble future for LIS edu­ca­tion, look no fur­ther than Scott Nicholson’s free Gam­ing in Libraries course, run­ning now on a com­puter near you. It makes use of a fas­ci­nat­ing mix of tools that together let any­one par­tic­i­pate at what­ever level works for them, even after this iter­a­tion ends.

Dr. Scott Nichol­son is an asso­ciate pro­fes­sor at the Syra­cuse iSchool. In fact, he’s the pro­gram direc­tor for the Mas­ters of Sci­ence in Library and Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence pro­gram there, and if you’ve fol­lowed gam­ing in libraries at all, his name is already famil­iar to you because of his video series, the monthly pod­cast he runs, the annual cen­sus he started in 2007, the Library Game Lab he runs, and more.

Now he’s one-upping him­self and run­ning a 30-day, intro­duc­tory course about gam­ing in libraries. Syra­cuse and WISE con­sor­tium stu­dents can take the course for credit, but any­one, any­where can watch the daily video lec­tures he’s post­ing on YouTube and dis­cuss them in the class com­mu­nity on ALA Con­nect (you have to join the com­mu­nity to see the dis­cus­sions, but any­one, includ­ing non-ALA mem­bers, can do that). The syl­labus is avail­able as a Google doc, and you can even down­load the videos from the Inter­net Archive to take them on the go. So far, the videos have ranged between about 5–17 min­utes, so they’re easy to watch and digest.

He’s already up to video lec­ture #10 (I’ve been remiss in not post­ing about this before now), and you can join the other 66 par­tic­i­pants in the Con­nect com­mu­nity to dis­cuss your thoughts about the con­tent, includ­ing some videos by guest lec­tur­ers. In fact, this is one of the most active com­mu­ni­ties on Con­nect right now since it’s such a hot topic.

In fact, now is a good time to jump in, because start­ing with lec­ture #9 (posted yes­ter­day), Scott is break­ing new ground by offer­ing new insight and spe­cific strate­gies for plan­ning gam­ing pro­grams in libraries.

“This is a new con­cep­tual model I’ve devel­oped over the last few months on how to look at the library gam­ing expe­ri­ence, and then I use that model to cre­ate five gam­ing arche­types, into which you can clas­sify all (I hope) library gam­ing expe­ri­ences. The arche­types then form a bridge between library goals and spe­cific game choices.

Lec­ture #10, Gam­ing in Libraries Class Ses­sion 10 — Five Gam­ing Expe­ri­ence Archetypes

Watch for your­self and see what you think. Whether you’re new to the topic or an expert advis­ing oth­ers, the new model alone is worth it (I love that it’s called SNAKS). With a total cost of $0, you’ve got noth­ing to lose, and if your library’s gam­ing pro­gram is rel­a­tively young, the con­tent from the course will be invalu­able for you. I hope other LIS pro­fes­sors begin teach­ing Scott’s model when they talk about gam­ing, and libraries that use it should report back about how it works so that we can begin build­ing resources around it. Luck­ily, Scott is writ­ing a book that will include infor­ma­tion about the model, but I’m sure he’ll be report­ing fur­ther research around it via the Library Game Lab.