from The Shifted Librarian.
Hot Books is a game designed to bring life back into libraries by forcing players to explore, discover and share the deserted and unexplored spaces that make up a library.
See also:
Jane McGonigal’s Avant-Game
Hot Books at NYPL
Sometime in the next month or so I will summarize the extraordinary seven installments of a workshop given earlier this year at Lakewood Public Library. Also, I will reconfigure the web resource from Lakewood’s web site, and attach it to the squareONE web site.
The series was initiated to prove the concept:
Transformative learning is an aspect of adult education and experiential learning. In the modern library the lack of formality, the encouragement of do-it-yourself investigation, and the breadth of library resources aptly fits with initiatives oriented around informal learning leveraged through active, experiential engagement in and with the library and its resources.
In the conventional sense of self-directed learning about a subject of interest, a library presents an array of resources a learner uses to investigate and learn about this subject.
However, when the subject is one’s self, the hallmark of learning is learning through which this “subject” activates a process of discovery and testing and change. Such initiatives are ultimately emancipatory, and expressly the goal of this type of learning is self-knowledge and advances in personal capability.
The concept was proved. (Hat tip to Alana, who attended every session, and also to Fred and Ken.) In fact, the series was a high point of my own game-making career. One of the neat realizations shared with participants, aggrandizing as it may be, was that our collaboration and innovative use of the library, had never happened in this way ever before in any library. We all were groundbreakers in experiential learning in the environs of the great Lakewood Public Library.
Rather than decide between cognitive, somatic and phenomenal modes of experiential learning, the conceptual underpinning of transformative learning utilized for the programs at Lakewood Public Library integrates the three modalities and terms this integration: Integrated Learning.*
Integrated learning joins experience of relatedness to features and phenomena of the world (including other persons,) plus one’s spontaneous perceptions plus reflective conceptualizations about these experiences. It’s aim can be a: test of learning; discovery of further possibilities for investigation; or insights powerful enough to cause transformative effects.
[Lakewood Public Library Transformative Learning Portal]
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(* Integral Learning’s conceptual framework with respect to its cognitive aspect is closely related to the learning models of David A. Kolb, et.al., and Jack Mezirow. With respect to the phenomenal (world-situated) aspect it is indebted to the work of Paulo Freire. Whereas its somatic aspect emerges from a variety of models and theorization in the interdisciplinary realm of embodied learning, etc.)
