Zoë WS in SI 643

Socratic Seminar  In last week's class, we focused more on the Socratic seminar model and demoed a discussion on Prensky's 2011 article "In the 21st-Century University, Let's Ban (Paper) Books" (which I discussed in the previous blog post). I wasn't entirely surprised by the negative reaction from my peers, but I did enjoy the depth and variety of critiques: Ignorance of copyright (something I don't think about often),  Prensky positioning himself as a disruptive "change-maker" within the field, Rhetorical failures (all of the logical fallacies etc.), Lack of engagement with related/complementary/more thoughtful trends in librarianship, etc.  It's helpful to realize that even though many share a lot of common experiences and vocabulary, each of us also has a particular vantage point within the information science fields that comes from the professional identities we have held and aspire to -- but also our focus points of intellectu...

Class Reflection  At the end of last class, we took turns facilitating conversation based around a list of prompts. I found that brief activity to be an incredibly powerful experience -- the experience of sharing that space with my classmates brought to the forefront a bunch of questions that have been in my head this semester (and things I’ve been trying to get better at as a human). I’ve always had a kind of ambivalent relationship to listening and speaking. I very sincerely love listening to others, and specifically creating space for people to work through ideas and express themselves in a way that makes sense. I appreciate opportunities to facilitate where I have a formalized role that involves stepping back and making space, and to that end, I very much enjoyed trying to lead the discussion and create a supportive little bubble of conversation, if only for a moment. At the same time, I often want to share my own ideas and speak up. I sometimes do this too much -- the ur...

Class Reflections I want to ask a question. What do you think happens next? We've got all these amazing gamers, we've got these games that are kind of pilots of what we might do, but none of them have saved the real world yet. Well I hope you will agree with me that gamers are a human resource that we can use to do real-world work, that games are a powerful platform for change. We have all these amazing superpowers: blissful productivity, the ability to weave a tight social fabric, this feeling of urgent optimism and the desire for epic meaning. (McGonigal, 2010)  Jane McGonigal closed her 2010 Ted talk “Gaming can make a better world” with a mixture of specific arguments about gaming (the typology of four “amazing superpowers”) and a wide-open argument about saving the world. As we discussed in class, the world-saving piece has aged much more poorly than the exploration of gaming. Our discourse on tech and its role in social change continues to become more critical, and r...