Book review

Here is my book review for James Paul Gee's "What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy" (the video is embedded below, or you can click the direct link here):



Here also is a transcript of the video:

BOOK REVIEW OF
JAMES PAUL GEE'S
"WHAT VIDEO GAMES HAVE TO TEACH US
ABOUT LEARNING & LITERACY"

By Alessandro (LSC 597)




Important knowledge ... is content in the sense of information
rooted in, or at least, related to, intellectual domains or academic
disciplines like physics, history, art, or literature. Work that does
not involve such learning is "meaningless." Activities that are
entertaining but that themselves do not involve such learning
are just "meaningless play."
--- James Paul Gee (p. 21)




Gee's argument is whether or not there is
value in how video games (a so-called
"frivolous" activity) can "teach" its users
how to play ...

Can a similar argument be made for how
social-networking tools like Facebook &
Twitter (also considered by many to be
time-wasting activities) can help users
"learn" new skills?




The theory of learning in good
video games fits better with the
modern, high-tech, global world
today's children and teenagers
live in than do the theories
(and practices) of learning that
they see in school.
-- James Paul Gee (p. 7)




Both video games & social media require
users to learn and think in new ways, ways
that they are not necessarily exposed to in
our school systems.

In fact, Gee argues that learning should be
a social experience, where students are not
"isolated" but are instead able to take
advantage of the "social world" in which
we live.




Learning ... is social, distributed,
and part and parcel of a network
composed of people, tools,
technologies, and companies all
interconnected together.
-- James Paul Gee (p. 177)




When we look at learning as a social
experience, an individual's knowledge and
skills are distributed across:

1) the self ("exists in his own head & body")
2) other people ("the social community")
3) various tools & technologies (computers,
the internet, etc.)

This creates a "social mind" that benefits all!




Social networking works the very same
way, in that other users of the
social-media tools (as well as the tools
themselves) "extend" an individual's
intelligence beyond what's simply in
his or her head ...

It's the "social mind" at work, and Gee
argues that it "plays a central role in
helping people to think about learning
in our modern, high-tech world" ...




Video-game players can be part of a
powerful network, if they so desire and
know how. Their own ineptness need
not stop them.
-- James Paul Gee (p. 187)




The power of the network is the ultimate
learning tool ... In video games, players are
asked to publicly display & share their
knowledge for the benefit of the group (and
the system as a whole), just like in social
networks.

The learner as "social isolate" (isolated
from other people & from knowledge
tools) is no longer the answer in our
modern "social" world!




Young people who play video games often experience
a more intense affinity group, leverage more knowledge
from other people and from various tools & technologies,
and are more powerfully networked with each other
than they ever are in school.
--- James Paul Gee (p. 194)




Much like in social media, there are no
"outsiders" when it comes to the world of
video games ...

Players are encouraged to produce & design
content themselves, rather than being mere
passive observers ... Gee points out that
"game designers & game players are both
insiders & producers," making the experience
more "vibrant" and real for the user!




In the modern world, language is not the only
important communicational system.
Today images, symbols, graphs, diagrams,
artifacts, and many other visual symbols
are particularly significant.
---James Paul Gee (p. 13)




Gee also stresses "visual literacy" (learning
to "read" images & symbols) ... Like video
games, social media has grown its own
visual language

[@SuellenPHD #LSC597] [Like Button] [Digg Button]

that you have to recognize or else you
won't understand what's being said.




As Gee points out with video games, social
media is its own unique "semiotic domain";
if you can't read/understand the meaning of
terms like "tweet" or "poke" in the context of
social networking, then you can't converse in
that world (you are "social-media illiterate")

Furthermore, one can better understand
the world of social media if one is an active
"producer" in that world (i.e. gain a better
understanding if one participates)!




The bottom line for Gee is that, in a specific
context (like video games or social media),
particular words, actions, objects, & images
take on distinctive meanings ... If you don't
know how to "read" these signs, then you
cannot be "literate" in that domain.

The lesson for us all: Understanding the ways
that things like video games & social media
"teach" us how they work can be applied to
our classrooms to great effect!




Gee, J.P. (2003). What video games have to
teach us about learning and literacy.
New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.




VIDEO CREATED USING

Windows Movie Maker ver. 5.1




MUSIC:



"Saving The Shy Librarian"
from "Famicom Sessions Special Edition"
By MisfitChris

Used under Creative Commons license:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by-nc-nd/3.0/




Images inspired by the sprite artwork of
Kouichi Ooyama
("Earthbound", c1995 Nintendo of America)

Created using

Paint Shop Pro ver. 5.01

Tagging sites (LibraryThing, CiteULike, PennTags)

LibraryThing (librarything.com)

I've been meaning to create an account with LibraryThing for awhile now ... as a member of our library's Technical Services staff, I'm immediately drawn to any service that promotes itself with the ability to "catalog your books online"!

As of this writing, the site boasts 1,360,184 members with 63,542,867 books cataloged (6,173,071 of those are described as "unique works"); also, there have been 76,978,503 tags added to the site - wow, that's a lot of social participation! - and 1,433,245 reviews ... Very impressive stats all around!

I clicked on the "tour" link in order to get a better idea of how the site worked ... First off, it's apparent that the creators of the site want people to know that LibraryThing emphasizes a community experience (the sentence "LibraryThing is a cataloging and social networking site for book lovers" is repeated twice on the first page); users are encouraged to "contribute tags" and share "common knowledge" (i.e. facts about a book or author), as well as "participate in member forums or join the Early Reviewers program."

It is also a great resource for gathering information about the books that one has in their personal collection; LibraryThing draws its cataloging information from Amazon (which non-library users will easily recognize), but also "over 700 libraries around the world, including the Library of Congress."

Of course, the main drawing point is the ability to create one's own descriptive terms via social tagging (here called "LibraryThing concepts"); on this page, the author - I assume it's Tim Spalding but it doesn't actually say - talks about the necessity for a system to organize collections of books, but that "for most personal libraries ... subject classifications [such as Library of Congress subject headings] aren't much use" (sad but true). The author goes on to compare the admittedly cumbersome subject heading "Bible. N.T. Romans I, 18-32 -- Criticism, interpretation, etc. -- History -- Early church, ca. 30-600" (which a lot of patrons won't make heads or tails out of) against the more straightforward concepts of "early church" and "homosexuality". In this case, I would agree that simplicity is sometimes for the better!

All in all, this site is a great resource for book lovers, not only in keeping track of their own collections, but - as the site puts it - "providing some of the best recommendations on the web" through "social information" such as "which members have the book and what they think about it - tags, reviews and even links to conversations about the book."

CiteULike (citeulike.org)

I've come across a few scholarly journals linked through CiteULike via Google, but never actually took the opportunity to explore the site more fully ... Clicking the "Frequently Asked Questions" link found at the top of the very sparse frontpage, I found that the site promises to "store, organise and share the scholarly papers you are reading." It emphasizes simplicity ("When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library ... CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there's no need to type them in yourself") as well as the social aspects of the service ("You can share your library with others, and find out who is reading the same papers as you. In turn, this can help you discover literature which is relevant to your field but you may not have known about. The more people who use CiteULike, and the more they use it, the better it becomes as a resource").

I tried searching for "librarianship" and came up with over 800 results ... Aside from a list of the articles tagged with the term "libraranship", the search also included a list of groups interested in that term (like "librarian" and "Semantic-Social-Networks"), and it produced a tag cloud of other users interested in the term "librarianship" (with users like Joachim Schopfel and David Bibb in bold text for emphasis). This is a great example of the social power of CiteULike, as I can now see what other articles are being used/cited by people within the library profession, thereby discovering sources of information that I might have otherwise missed out on.

PennTags (tags.library.upenn.edu)

The University of Pennsylvania's social-tagging project seems to be one of the first (and most successful) endeavors by the profession to integrate the controlled vocabularies of "traditional" catalogs with the simplicity of user-generated tags ... Of course, since I'm not a student at the university, I can't create my own tags, but the system still allows "outsiders" to browse and see what others have come up with.

The frontpage immediately greets visitors with a tag cloud of the most popular terms ("tags used at least 110 times"). Many of these highlighted tags look familiar to someone like me who is outside their campus community ("copyright", "animation", "medieval_studies"), but some are clearly for personal use ("scholarship_is_changing", "to_read"); it's like how Hesham Allam described some tags as altruistic ("easy retrieval by anyone using that system") and others as selfish ("users tag their own contents for their own easy retrieval").

In their "About" section, PennTags is described as a "social bookmarking tool for locating, organizing, and sharing your favorite online resources." From this description, it's apparant that the service is being "sold" to the Penn community in much the same way as a commercial service like Delicious ("Have you ever bookmarked a web page and then cant find it again in your mass of bookmarks? The beauty of PennTags is that it allows you to organize your bookmarks/resources exactly the way you want and it lets you share them with others. It's both personal and portable"); by portraying the service as something that the students would be familiar with, it makes it that much easier for those patrons to accept the service and adopt it into their usual online routine.

To highlight the popularity of PennTags within the community, the site provides a very robust list of tags already employed by the students, as well as a list of "owners" who are contributing to the social-tagging aspect of the site ... It certainly seems as though the PennTags concept has really caught on with the community, and that the patrons are making good use of its services.

Services like PennTags are a great way to "socialize" the library's online catalog, without completely discarding that system as "obsolete" ... As I've mentioned before, it's a way for social-tagging and controlled vocabularies to work in tandem, in order to better help patrons locate and retrieve the information that they are looking for.

"Social tagging as a knowledge organization and resource discovery tool" by Hesham Allam

In his article, Allam defines social tagging as a process which "can be performed by anyone by freely attaching keywords or tags to describe the content of a Webpage [emphasis mine]." He further goes on to state that this is unlike traditional indexing, where "experts are needed to catalogue and create metadata to describe search terms for efficient retrieval."

Now, I don't want to continuously harp on this subject (and come off as "elitist"), but there is a reason why the "experts" are "needed" in certain cases, and that is to get the job done right.

Of course, it is impossible to "catalog" the entire Internet, but relying on amateur content organizers (as Wichowski described them) will always introduce its own set of problems (misidentification, spelling errors, spam etc.) ... That is why, in terms of the library profession, social tagging should be seen - at least in its current form - as a supplementary extension of the process of acquiring information for patrons.

There's been a lot of successful cases of the implementation of social tagging within the library field (this site has some good information on the subject), but the point should not be to totally supplant the "traditional" methods ... Again, to tackle the entire internet via those traditional methods is not an option, but there is room for both systems - folksonomies and controlled vocabularies - to exist within the burgeoning information environment that we now find ourselves in.

"Tag gardening for folksonomy enrichment and maintenance" by Isabella Peters and Katrin Weller

In the other article for this week's readings, Wichowski mentioned ways to "standardize" social tagging, for the betterment of all users; she brought up terms like "tag training" and "educating users about tag literacy", as well as "linking folksonomies with ontologies," which all sounds well and good ... unless you're like me and think that "regular" users (i.e. amateur content organizers) will never expend the time or effort to partake in such things, at least not in the numbers necessary to make such an endeavor worthwhile.

Not to be cynical, but I've always felt that regular users are going to tag their pictures/bookmarks/videos with whatever keywords suit their needs - even if those tags are factually incorrect or too specific to be useful to the general population - regardless of how other people may use them. Really, in my mind, I see no scenario in which the everday internet user is going to exert the energy required to "train" themselves in the "correct" forms and standards; if they wanted to go to all that trouble, they would've already been enrolled in library school :)

Therefore, I could have never bought into the idea of the typical internet user taking part in the type of "standardization" described by Wichowski, and thus simply wrote off such initiatives as a pipe dream ... However, after reading Peters and Weller's thoughts on the subject of "tag gardening", I may be coming around to their way of thinking.

If there was a dedicated group of people who would take the time to "optimize tags in a folksonomy data set" after the fact (i.e. evalute the tags created by others for accuracy and correct/re-write them accordingly), then this opens up the possibility for a whole new industry devoted to "tag gardening," which could take up residence in the new information environment and "clean up" those errors that would usually permeate a community's particular folksonomy.

In fact, this could be the new role that future librarians play in helping to organize the online information landscape; instead of simply creating subject headings for books, they could be re-organizing and re-cataloging tags found on sites like Flickr and Delicious!

After all, librarians have the knowledge and training necessary to identify tags beyond the level of simple keywords; while the authors aren't referring to librarians specifically, they seem to be describing our profession when they talk of users who can "manipulate, revise and edit folksonomy tags" to better reflect that information so that it can be useful to the community at large.

For example, they cite a study which found that "users can be influenced by the tags which are already assigned to a resource," and recommended that "a new tagging system might be seeded by its designers with a large set of tags of the preferred type" [emphasis mine] to better guide users on the best tags to adopt ... Maybe it's just me, but librarians sound like the perfect people to step in and use their training to produce these "tags of the preferred type" (in essence, a controlled vocabulary for tagging).

However, it's not enough for librarians to act as "outside observers" of these social-tagging communities, remaining distant and separate from their users ... The authors talk about the process of removing "bad tags" (i.e. the "weeding" aspect of tag gardening) to help improve folksonomies for the purposes of consistency, and that this process of elimination/evaluation should be "handed over to the users themselves."

With this seemingly innocent statement, the authors (unwittingly) touch upon the idea of social capital as it pertains to the librarian-patron relationship, which we have been discussing in class thus far ... In other words, it's not enough for librarians to simply help the users, but they must become the users!

Librarians must familiarize themselves with tools like Flickr and Delicious; they must experiment and manipulate and participate, until they are just as much a part of the community that they are serving as the patrons themselves. In this way, handing the responsibility of optimizing tags in a folksonomy data set over to a librarian ("Their processing should be handed over to the users themselves") will be no different than handing them over to an amateur content organizer; the two become one and the same!

"Survival of the fittest tag" by Alexis Wichowski

As a cataloger myself (or should I say "future cataloger" until I get my degree), I always find it interesting when the subject of social tagging comes up as it relates to the use of controlled vocabularies in libraries, such as Library of Congress subject headings.

Wichowski starts off her article by stating that "unidentified and unorganized content, however useful it may be, is at risk [of] being rendered unfindable, and thus obsolete" in the new information environment brought about by the internet ... Of course, this type of scenario still existed when our information resources were limited to books and journals: if a patron can't find a piece of information that they're looking for, then - to that patron - that information simply does not exist. That's where cataloging would come in, to make that information easily identifiable via the assignment of subject headings (the idea is rather comically represented in this 1947 short film, a personal favorite of mine).

However, now that the "modern information environment holds far more information than specialists to identify it", and the advent of folksonomies has transformed everyday people into "content organizers" (boy, sounds like us catalogers are out of a job!) the argument usually goes - at least in many studies that I've read - that there is simply no need for the adoption of a controlled vocabulary within the online world when we have the patrons doing the tagging for us.

I would argue that social tagging doesn't have to replace things like subject headings; in my opinion, this is not an either-or scenario. Instead, social tagging can be seen as a supplementary resource to help make the process of finding information easier ... In essence, social tagging is just another access point created for our patrons, to help them attempt to locate exactly what they are looking for.

That's why I was happy to see Wichowski point out a study which stated that "when folksonomies were combined with the directories with controlled vocabularies, precision and recall results were higher than in searches using the controlled vocabularies alone" ... As I said, this doesn't have to be an either-or scenario (discard the old in order to embrace the new); both systems - folksonomies and controlled vocabularies - can be used in tandem to enhance the information finding experience for the user.

Of course, one thing to remember in all of this is that no information-organization system is perfect; Wichowski admits as much when she states that most (relatively new) folksonomies are "immature, uncoordinated, and have much to learn from their predecessors."

On the one hand, "amateur" content organizers can tag information with easily recognizable terms, written in everyday language that patrons can understand (many subject heading terms can admittedly be a little bit on the technical side) ... And yet, since there is no specific training or rules associated with folksonomies (hence the "amateur" status), these newly-minted content organizers don't always get things right.

For example, tagging by everyday users can lead to incorrect/misleading results (many YouTube video are labelled "librarian" when they are really referring to "bookstore owner" or even just "pretty girl wearing glasses"), or results that just aren't very helpful (a Flickr image of the Egyptian Sphinx could be labelled "summer vacation" or "1997" or "digital camera" or any other combination of words except for "Egyptian" and "Sphinx") ... That is why it can be advantageous to supplement folksonomies with controlled vocabularies, rather than just abandon the idea entirely, and this is something that those within the library profession should keep at the forefront of the argument.

"Always on: libraries in a world of permanent connectivity" by Lorcan Dempsey

One subject that Dempsey brings up in his article is collection management as it pertains to libraries; now that we live in a "permanently-connected" world, the idea of collecting and storing print material is becoming less and less of a priority. After all, physical space has always been an issue with libraries (I know that my library has trouble finding room in the stacks for all those books!), and now that mass digitization initiatives are becoming more and more feasible - getting to a point where patrons can simply access anything in the library's collection via their computer or mobile device - we are looking at a major shift in what the term "library collection" even means.

This brings up the point of partnering with "outside" sources within the digital realm to collect and store these new online "personal and instituational collections"; for example, Dempsey brings up scenarios like using Flickr to manage digital images, or uploading a collection of university podcasts on iTunes. Now, unlike the usual methods of housing a physical collection (i.e. it's in the library building so therefore the library owns it!), these new methods are taking materials out of the librarians' hands - so to speak - and placing them in the "care" of third parties. Of course, the individual institutions still retain the rights to their intellectual property, but (as we've seen in the case of licensing issues brought up against database and online-journal vendors) a "virtual" collection is not as easily claimed as a physical one.

For example, if Flickr suddenly closes up shop (unlikely but not impossible) and your library did not think to save backups, then that virtual collection is gone forever ... Or, if iTunes is down for maintenance (or some other technical issue), and your patrons want to gain access to the university's collection of podcasts, then the librarians' hands are tied; unlike an in-house technical issue (the library website is down, etc.), libraries can do nothing in this situation because they have - in effect - "outsourced" their collection to a separate third party.

We can even look at social-media site in the same way ... Let us say that a public library has really put a lot of effort into its Facebook page, uploading pictures and maintaining a robust calendar of events taking place at the library and so forth; while not a "collection" in the traditional sense, status updates and the like are still information sources that libraries are sharing with their patrons.

Now, let us say that Facebook decides to take down that library's page for some unknown reason (it's been known to happen); since the library handed over the reigns of their social-media presence to an outside company (rather than keeping such information on the library website or an in-house social networking system), then they are really at the mercy of every whim or technical snafu of said company, with no true recourse. In this case, "your" page is actually Facebook's page, and - truthfully - then can do anything they want with it (including deleting it) without explanation.

This is the danger of libraries ceding control of their collections to third parties, and is something that they must consider before proceeding on that course.

"Library/mobile: tips on designing and developing mobile web sites" by Kim Griggs ... [et al.]

One of the things that I took away from this article is that compatibility is a serious issue when it comes to designing a mobile website, even moreso than designing a "standard" website for desktop browsers ... I used to fancy myself a web designer in college, and back then I always found it a real hassle trying to make sure every single web browser/operating system could display my creations the way I wanted (Will these tables format correctly in earlier versions of Netscape Navigator? Will these fonts display in Mac OS 8? etc. etc.)

Anyway, it seems like things are an even bigger headache nowadays having to deal with the explosion of newly possible entry points to the web (the article mentions "thousands of devices and hundreds of browsers"), and this can have a serious effect on librarians that are attempting to draw in patrons by designing a mobile version of their library's website ... After all, if the library's mobile website isn't compatible with a patron's particular mobile device, they will simply give up and look elsewhere for their information needs.

The article mentions that a push for conformance within the mobile world has not met with much success, as there has been "little movement from cell phone providers and browsers to agree to and adopt" a set of standards ... Oh, there are standardized tools available (like MobileOK and MobiReady) which librarians can use to test their mobile sites, but the fact is that not everyone can agree on a form of "code compliance," and this leaves the door open for mobile users (and by extension library patrons) to suffer with incompatibility issues as a result.

The authors admit that "mobile application testing is often an issue in mobile application development", but do give a few suggestion on testing methods to use - such as browser simulators and device emulators - before having one's new mobile site go "live" ... However, we must remember that smartphones and internet-enabled cellphones aren't the only mobile devices on the market. There are PDAs, tablets, even handheld gaming consoles (Nintendo DS, Sony PSP, GP2X Caanoo, etc.) come equipped with web browsers now! All of these devices could be a potential gateway for patrons seeking information, and (if librarians truly want to serve all members of their community) then they must take such things into account.

Obviously, the authors do not recommend taking on the herculean task of researching every single device for compatibility issues ("testing on all devices is out of the question"), and using the most popular devices for mobile application testing should be enough to cover the largest percentage of a library's particular user base. The authors say as much when they state that by "identifying device families between which the user experience is the same or similar, you can greatly reduce the numbers of devices on which to test" (i.e. it's "good enough") ... Unfortunately, just like the well-known "digital divide", some patrons are going to be left out in the cold when it comes to accessing their library's mobile website in this scenario.

However, the article does provide a useful suggestion that might get around this problem: the authors talk about "focus groups and online surveys [as a way] to have users evaluate a mobile site and provide feedback even after the mobile site is released." By targeting actual patrons (either by posting a survey on the traditional website or even walking up to someone in the library who is typing away on their mobile device), it gives librarians a chance to gauge what their users are looking for in terms of a mobile website experience and - if the mobile site is already "live" - if they are experiencing any compatibility issues.