Thing 15 Online Games

I don't really know what the place for gaming is in public libraries but do believe that gaming is a way to improve educational motivation and application of learning in students. I chose to play/wander around in Second Life.
After creating an account, I meandered around in rooms, lists of sales, etc. While online tonight there were 54,000 plus other people in the site. Pretty incredible. I found the site hard to use and need more time learning how to integrate it in a cohesive way. At this point it doesn't hold a lot of appeal to me except to understand what it offers and to understand better why it is attractive to so many people. I made my character as old as I am so will be interested to see if I'm invited to be friends with anyone. The most interesting room I found was the Shakespeare Reading Room. It looked like it was created by an 'oldster'. Lots of the rooms and scenes reminded me of Japanese popular culture and images.

Gaming Myths was interesting; I didn't know that females now outnumber males in gaming.

The concepts in the article were especially strong coming from a PBS site which has always been innovative and focused on the well being of children and other patrons. This article could easily be a focus for parent/teacher groups to discuss because it offers a strong argument that many of the fears adults have about the negative effects of gaming are false.

In the YALSA podcast the students were really into Second Life and it was fun to listen as I searched and started this blog entry. The new vocabulary involved in Second Life is interesting. The kids really took on challenges to themselves in creating the actual graphics. Since my husband is a computer graphics specialist it is interesting to me to see how far all this has evolved from the beginning graphics he worked on in the 1970's to now. The incredible thing for me was that the students reported being on Second Life from four to fifteen hours a day. The kids on the show lived in New York and the UK. They liked that they were making friends 'across the pond'.