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December 19, 2005
Museums and schools are adapting, now libraries are considering it... what's next? Corporations?
This is an easy time of the year to see just how pervasive gaming has become with all of the advertising, press and hype running through the holiday season. It is indeed part of our culture. Other indications of gaming culture include incororation into our learning institutions such as museums (many are very innovative adopters of emerging media and a few have recently explored location based gaming), education - just take a look at the exhibitors at the upcoming BETT conference in London in January (search on keyword 'games' - 27,000 educators expected to visit with dozens of game creation tools and educational game releaseson hand where there were only a few just two years ago, and in libraries, long thought of as bastions of quiet consumption of content now exploring incorporating games to adapt to our changing culture:
A conference was recently held in Chicago titled 'Gaming, Learning and Libraries' to explore how libraries could and should adapt to gaming culture.
Brandon Breyer wrote about it in Gamasutra here where you can find this presentation summary of Constance Steinkuehler, an assistant professor at University of Wisconsin who has been studying massively multiplayer online role playing games and makes a few great points on gaming as a learning environment and an example of 'participatory consumption'
'...She also took care to discuss gaming as an intellectually rich environment, where young players with no classical training in education were utilizing sophisticated techniques: joint participation, scaffolding and sequencing of activities, repeated opportunites for practice and feedback to apprentice newer players not only in technical in-game practices, but full enculturation into the ethos of the game world.Steinkuehler urged libraries to care about gaming for precisely these reasons, that their environments were sites for wide array of literary and educational practices, and that through fan fiction and game modding, they represented a cultural shift toward participatory consumption, where gamers were 'not reading, but rewriting the book.'
Which institutions will be next to adapt to our gaming culture and the capabilities for learning today and tomorrow? Corporations proud of their reputation or aspiration to be 'learning organizations'? Organizations wanting to accelerate speed to competence in their new hires? Companies that see gaming as a communication medium seeking to reach their people in new ways that work and stick? Non-profit social cause organizations trying new educational methods for better results? We're already starting to see examples of these...
Posted by Ron Edwards at December 19, 2005 08:24 PM
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