You enter into a world where interactions are always positive, engagement is crucial, and anything is possible. This world is known as the Hyperlinked Library. Are you ready to begin your tour?
[[I am ready to begin->Stage 1]]
This is one of the continents found within the Hyperlinked Library. Here you will find a system of islands called the Keys to Gameful Design, the valley of Story Telling, a desert village known as Infinite Learning, and of course the glass structure named the Transparent Library. Where would like to begin your tour?
[[Keys to Gameful Design]]
[[Story Telling]]
[[Infinite Learning]]
[[The Transparent Library]]Welcome to Gameful Design. To proceed, you must prove your interest in our fair isles. Which island piques your interest most?
* nhicledsr cvrsisee
* eent vsyroiad
* lautd ggeeenanmt
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[[Children's Services]]
[[Teen Advisory]]
[[Adult Engagement]] The valley of Story Telling is lush, verdant, and full of life, and as you look at the hills on either side it seems almost as though the grass is shifting colors with the wind. At first blush it looks completely uninhabited, but as you descend and move further in you see dwellings camouflaged into the grass, opening up into whole worlds on the other side of the doorway. Time and space mean nothing here; the Dreamtime rests next to stories we haven't even heard of yet.
You're not sure whether what you're seeing is real, whether it's individual stories or whole mythologies of a culture or people. Your guide taps you on the shoulder as you peer into an iridescent doorway.
(text-style:"italic","wavy-underline","smear","expand")[Would you like to go in?]
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Here the learning never stops! All artisans, craftspeople, and everyone else in the village are constantly teaching each other their skills and stories that they know, and they turn to their librarians and archivists to bring them knowledge of different arts and from far-off lands. Sometimes, the librarians and archivists travel to places like the Transparent Library or the Keys of Gameful Design in order to learn from other librarians and share their knowledge. At these conferences of learning, they can exchange knowledge in their [[ways of the past->Professional Learning Experiences]] or we can look forward to see the potential [[exchanges of the future->Gamifying Conferences]].The Transparent Library spirals above you, all glass and chrome and mirrors. In it, you see thousands of librarians all walking around, helping people and restocking books, writing furiously in notebooks and on computers, and sitting down to tell stories with people. While you are still a few hundred feet below them, you can tell that most of who you see are not in fact physically in the building, but are reflections and projections of librarians from all over the world.
As you ascend the crystalline ramp in the central spiral of the library, you can see both the public and private ways in which the libraries are run. Plans are made, communities surveyed, and buildings worked and reworked to serve the myriad people who come to see them. Around you on the ramp itself you can see other people like you, coming to see all the facets of how their libraries work. The Transparent Library is available to everyone, and you know as you complete your climb that the ability to visit like this helps bring these communities closer together and breaks down the barriers that people might fear when looking for information.
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(dialog: bind $tltravel, "What would you like to do now?", "I want to tour another part of the Hyperlinked Library","I'm done for today")(if:$tltravel is "I want to tour another part of the Hyperlinked Library")[[Click here to continue->Stage 1]] (if:$tltravel is "I'm done for today")[[Click here to continue->The End]]Library conferences in the days of yore. We stand here, still in the present day, but our professional lives remain filled with lectures and screens and presentations. For instance...
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(click: ?page) [=Let us create a podcast! Portable tablets and recordings? The future is now! But still, here we have a slideshow, a clicker, and a single man speaking at the front of the room. It seems we still sit in a [[room of the past...->Next Library]]
...
(click: ?page) [=Take a dive into the 23 Sea! It's a scavenger hunt of knowledge as we seek out the 23 skills you need to understand technology in a library. Too bad it doesn't have any real [[prizes...->23 Things]]
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(dialog: bind $pletravel, "Where to next?", "I want to see the future of Infinite Learning","I want to tour another part of the Hyperlinked Library","I'm done here")(if:$pletravel is "I want to see the future of Infinite Learning")[[Click here to continue->Gamifying Conferences]] (if:$pletravel is "I want to tour another part of the Hyperlinked Library")[[Click here to continue->Stage 1]] (if:$pletravel is "I'm done here")[[Click here to continue->The End]]Here's an idea: Your region is broken up into groups in smaller regions- let's call them branches. All of your branches meet up once every three months to exchange ideas and knowledge. But simply talking is not enough! No, you must create events! Engage your audience! Be (text-colour:#1ccce3)[Interesting!]
Each branch will take turns creating a theme for these exchanges. You plan small group conversations, scavenger hunts, role-playing sessions, brainstorming sessions, activities, and whatever else your heart may desire in order to impart and share knowledge on that topic in a way that will stick.
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Let's say you are meeting on or around Earth Day. You could:
* Hold a book club about nonfiction nature books or speculative climate fiction
* Take a trip to see a living wall or rooftop urban garden
* Brainstorm ways to make your library greener or more eco-friendly
* Have a team challenge to create a children's scavenger hunt or storywalk about climate change and ecology
Or myriad other options! Why sit in a room with a projector and a lecturer when you could be making, doing, engaging in a way that can give you real skills to take back to your branch? Plus, now everyone gets an opportunity to plan events when it's your branch's turn to create a theme! Isn't this fun?
(click: ?page) [=(dialog: bind $gctravel, "Where to next?", "I want to see the past of Infinite Learning","I want to tour another part of the Hyperlinked Library","I'm done here")(if:$gctravel is "I want to see the past of Infinite Learning")[[Click here to continue->Professional Learning Experiences]] (if:$gctravel is "I want to tour another part of the Hyperlinked Library")[[Click here to continue->Stage 1]] (if:$gctravel is "I'm done here")[[Click here to continue->The End]](open-url: "https://287.hyperlib.sjsu.edu/office-hours-the-power-of-stories-part-2/")(open-url: "https://thinkspace.csu.edu.au/digitalknowledge/about/")You have reached the end of the tour. Thank you for visiting the Hyperlinked Library, and we hope you have learned something along the way. Have you?
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It's been a pleasure to be your tour guide today. Please, don't be a stranger! Take your knowledge and share it along; become a tour guide in your own universe of knowledge.
(And should it please you, come find me on twitter @ emrysemerald. Say hi and stay safe!)(text-style:"bold","blur","buoy")[The Dock:] Building games into early literacy classes and storytimes is, pun intended, child's play in terms of ease. See if they can predict what happens in the story, and see if they can tell the story back to you when you're done! Using storytelling cards to prompt their curiosity can be another game element to increase engagement and retention of learning.
(text-style:"bold","outline","sway")[The Path to the Forest:] Try creating a storywalk! If you have an outside area, create weatherproof signs that tell a story as you follow them and perhaps give some nature knowledge along the way. Parents can read them aloud as they walk, giving them valuable bonding time as well as helping the children to learn to read those signs themselves, and the kids will get some valuable exercise and outdoor time as they learn.
(text-style:"bold","emboss","fade-in-out")[The Village in the Trees:] Have the kids design their own programs! Give them a topic or a goal, then let them create the format they want to learn in. Maybe do it over an extended period of time, so they have an hour to brainstorm one week, then you have time to prepare so they have a session the week after that. Learning math through educational computer games? Sure! Creative writing practice through creating Star Wars battles in a tabletop roleplaying game system and then practicing strategy by playing those battles? Absolutely! Anything you want to teach, they will tell you how they want to learn it. Gameful Design focuses on making things fun, even and especially when learning is involved. Keep this in mind as you move on.
Speaking of moving on,
Do you want to visit [[Teen Advisory]]?
How about [[Adult Engagement]]?
Maybe you'd care to [[tour a different part of the Hyperlinked Library?->Stage 1]]
Or are you [[done for the day?->The End]](text-style:"underline","emboss","mirror")[Teenagers] know exactly what they want and how to get it.
The best way to design gamefully for teenagers is to let them at it.
Create a teen advisory [[board]] and have them tell you what they want and need out of their space and their programs.
Give them room to be themselves and find themselves, and you won't be able to keep them out of the library.
Of course, you can still design for them as well.
Who doesn't love video games?
Or scavenger hunts?
Or creating puzzles?
Try playing some games yourself,
go on Twitter or something and find some teenagers,
And then see
what you find that you can use to engage and teach the young people coming in and out of your library.
Now that that's out of the way, where to next?
[[Children's Services]]
[[Adult Engagement]]
[[A New Tour Destination->Stage 1]]
[[Home->The End]] (enchant:?passage,(b4r:"groove","none","groove","groove")+(b4r-colour:#00588f,white,#00588f,#00588f))(background:(gradient: 0, 0,#ffffff,0.5,(hsl:200,0.973,0.2902,0.5),1,#ffffff))[Designing gamefully for the adult library patron.]
What a difficult prospect, no?
Here are [[two->Liz Lawley]] [[ideas->emrys blog]] to help get you on the right page.
Here are some more ideas:
* An exercise program, akin to couch-to-5K, but it's a library community project, and there's always a theme.
(v6m: )[ {do people run in Game of Thrones? is there a particularly significant distance in that show? i'm sure there is. if not, i'm sure you could arrange a Walk into Mordor.} ]
* Easy gameful design: board game nights.
* Something like [[23 Things]] or the Habitica app: creating badges, rewards, and milestones for accomplishing goals or certifications or simply creating a habit of doing things. Create accountability partnerships or groups, and level up your rewards and actions to keep things engaged.
* Always, always, always: Reach Out To Your Community And Ask What They Want.
Feeling invigorated? Good! This is one of the most beautiful islands in the Keys, if I do say so myself.
That's enough from me, though. I'll let your guide take over.
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(dialog: bind $aetravel, "Where would you care to go?", "I want to visit another one of the Keys","I want to tour another part of the Hyperlinked Library","I'm through with this tour")(if:$aetravel is "I want to visit another one of the Keys")[[Click here to continue->Keys to Gameful Design]](if:$aetravel is "I want to tour another part of the Hyperlinked Library")[[Click here to continue->Stage 1]] (if:$aetravel is "I'm through with this tour")[[Click here to continue->The End]]The passageway shifts and swells around you as you step through this doorway. Prismatic lights, almost like the iridescence on the edge of a bubble, radiate around the doorframe as you step through, and you feel it pulse almost like it's breathing before you step out on the other side.
Through the door you see that you are on a tall hilltop, looking out over a forum below you, with a stone amphitheatre embedded in a nearby hillside and wooden dwellings on the lower foothills beyond that. Shielding your eyes from the bright sun, you turn around and see that you are on the Acropolis of Athens, but this is no ruin: you see shining, brightly painted stone and a feeling of life coming from within. As you watch, an owl and a raven swoop down to land at the edge of the roof, looking at you curiously. Right behind them, a man appears! He has wings on his sandals and helmet, and as he lands, he points to you and your guide and says
(text-style:"italic","double-underline","emboss","sway")[ποιος στο διάολο είσαι εσύ?]
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Before his sentence is even through, the world shrinks away from you into a distant point of light, then with a (text-style:"bold","superscript","blink")[pop!] you are standing on the second floor of a library, looking over a low balcony railing into the rotunda below. As you watch, a group of teens pours into the lobby, all chattering excitedly with one another. As they begin to take up spots around the lobby, your guide asks without speaking,
[[Would you like to listen in?->Story Library]]You find yourself instantly amidst this group of young people, looking around to see what they are looking forward. After a moment, a young-looking librarian appears.
(text-style:"wavy-underline","shadow")[It's time!]
They lead the group into a large room with a projector set up and comfortable low seating around the room. As you watch, they engage in the most chaotic, enthusiastic round-robin puppet show you've ever seen. You realize they are all telling stories about themselves, about their inner lives - if you didn't know any better you'd call it fiction, but having stepped through this doorway you know they speak of their inner selves and dreams, and they are all intertwined. As you continue to watch and listen, you can see the story they weave form on the ceiling above them; this is the new generation of this indigenous people and the ways of their ancestors are alive in them today. Here, in this library, given the space and the tools, they have learned to tap back into the storytelling properties that have lain dormant for too long, and in a [[storytelling festival]] environment, as you can tell this is, they have rekindled that knowledge back to life.
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As you come to this realization, you see the library fade out into a gentle blue-gray. It envelopes you for a moment, before you find yourself once again on the side of a mountain, looking over the valley of Story Telling. Without needing to be told, you know that experiences like the one you just had can be found all over. You have tasted this magic now, and you feel as though you can carry a bit of it back with you from now on.
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(dialog: bind $sttravel, "Where would you like to go now?", "I want to see another part of the Hyperlinked Library","I'm ready to leave")(if:$sttravel is "I want to see another part of the Hyperlinked Library")[[Click here to continue->Stage 1]] (if:$sttravel is "I'm ready to leave")[[Click here to continue->The End]](open-url: "https://287.hyperlib.sjsu.edu/emrys/2021/05/03/directors-brief-tell-me-your-tales-a-new-storytelling-festival/")(open-url: "https://themixatsfpl.org/events/teen-advisory-board")(open-url: "http://www.slideshare.net/mobile/mamamusings/gameful-design-for-libraries")(open-url: "https://287.hyperlib.sjsu.edu/emrys/2021/03/18/reflection-post-4-hyperlinked-communities/")