Did any of you attend yesterday’s online OCLC Symposium, “Play, Learn, Innovate”? If so, what did you think? (If you missed it, keep checking that site – I think they said the archive would be posted there when available).
It was mentioned near the beginning that over 1000 people were registered – wow! Six of us watched it here at NEKLS and we had a great discussion after, too. Sharon took copious notes (thank you!).
It was a two-hour symposium and a lot of ground was covered. Liz Danforth was the first speaker. You may recognize her name if you’ve read her gaming articles in Library Journal. She described the symposium’s goals as being about ameliorating the cognitive dissonance we have about the benefits of fun and play. On one hand, we suspect things are clever, novel, funny, even visionary, but then are stifled by the worry that they are crazy, stupid, silly or disruptive.
Kurt Squire was the second speaker. He’s the author of the newly released book Video Games and Learning: Teaching and Participatory Culture in the Digital Age. and had some interesting examples to share. He talked a lot about ARIS — for a taste of what that’s about, check out this video.
Erica Rosenfeld Halverson was the final speaker. She teaches at UW-Madison (Squire does, too). Maybe it’s because she was the final speaker, but I feel like her ideas were the ones we ended up talking about in our after talk. Her production-oriented approach fits well with the roles R. David Lankes discusses in his book The Atlas of New Librarianship (which a few of us are reading). In literacy and instruction, it’s not about the tools, but it’s about what’s required to use tools in a production process.
I loved the discussion our little group of 6 had after the presentations (our discussion wasn’t really planned – it organically happened). I think the idea we were playing with is, How do you implement these ideas in a public library? We shared examples that already exist and talked about what could be. I left the conversation feeling inspired and energized (despite a miserable head cold). Thank you to Cindi, Diana, Heather, Jenne, and Sharon for that!
Brenda Hough is the Continuing Education Consultant at NEKLS. You can reach her by email (bhough (at) nekls.org), phone, or on several instant messaging platforms (look Brenda up by her email address). Visit the 
I’ve been pondering libraries and the future a lot lately and I very much enjoyed the optimistic tone of yesterday’s webinar and the sentiment that Fun belongs in libraries. As I think best when blogging, here are the rest of my ponderings (http://lybrarian.wordpress.com/2011/06/08/play-learn-innovate-how/).
I want our librarians to know that if they need a source for ‘just in time’ tech training to remember 23 Things Kansas! Every lesson is archived on the blog (http://www.23thingskansas.org/category/weekly-lessons/).