The NYT Times has discovered that video games are being used as teaching tools (Using Video Games as Bait to Hook Readers),

Increasingly, authors, teachers, librarians and publishers are embracing this fast-paced, image-laden world in the hope that the games will draw children to reading.

Spurred by arguments that video games also may teach a kind of digital literacy that is becoming as important as proficiency in print, libraries are hosting gaming tournaments, while schools are exploring how to incorporate video games in the classroom.

It’s one of those frustrating “on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand” articles that makes sweeping statements about what educators on various sides of the argument say, with very few actual quotes. 

But at least it shows how libraries are using video games; the article notes that in the first half of the year, NYPL hosted over 500 game tournaments, drawing 8,300 teenagers. Libraries in Columbus OH and Ann Arbor, MI are also mentioned.

One of the few experts quoted is James Paul Gee, author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy; “Games are teaching critical thinking skills and a sense of yourself as an agent having to make choices and live with those choices.” 

What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy

Second Edition: Revised and Updated Edition 

 James Paul Gee

• Paperback: $16.95; 256 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan; 2nd edition (December 26, 2007)
• ISBN-10: 1403984530
• ISBN-13: 978-1403984531

This may refute Steve Jobs’s assertion that Americans don’t read anymore; NPR.org producer Joe Matazzoni recently told Publishers Weekly, “Books are among the top three topics attracting traffic to the NPR site.”

As a result, NPR.org is expanding its coverage by adding Web-only content, including three to four book reviews a week. They’ve hired six new reviewers, among them Bookslut founder, Jessica Crispin and graphic novel reviewer Laurel Maury.

NPR news show, “The Bryant Park Project” was launched Oct ’07. The goal of the daily two-hour show is to “combine the authority and intelligence of NPR with the tone and sensibility the next generation of Public Radio listeners demand.”

Since they’re trying to appeal to the younger portion of their audience, as are many libraries (Maricopa County PL just completed a marketing study of 24 to 40 year olds), it’s worth a look at the books they cover.

Yesterday, Robert Powers, the author of You Are a Miserable Excuse for a Hero talked about his book, the first in the “Just Make a Choice! Series”. Powers uses humor to illustrate his theory that most people avoid making decisions, and thus, fail to become heroes because they prefer to keep their options open.

The book is owned by just a few libraries; it looks like it wasn’t reviewed prepublication.

You Are a Miserable Excuse for a Hero

Book One in the Just Make a Choice! Series

• Paperback: $13.95
• Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin (May 27, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0312377347
• ISBN-13: 978-0312377342

The show also features a monthly book club with regular online discussions. The titles that have been covered so far are:

Petropolis, Anya Ulinich, Viking — current selection

Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman, Morrow– May

The God of Animals, Aryn Kyle, Scribner — April

In The Country of Men, Hisham Matar, Dial — March (first selection)

“The Bryant Park Project’” is currently carried by a limited number of stations (you can check here to see if it’s in your area. You can also listen to it online).

It’s tough to say what’s the best line from today’s NY Times Op/Ed piece by Timothy Egan, “Book Lust.” In it, Egan challenges Steve Jobs’s recent comment that people don’t read any more.

I vote for this one as the most inspiring line:

Reading is… an engagement of the imagination with life experience. It’s fad-resistant, precisely because human beings are hard-wired for story, and intrinsically curious. Reading is not about product.

But the “Oh, snap!” moment is this one:

The latest Harry Potter book sold 9 million copies in its first 24 hours – in English. “The DaVinci Code,” a story of ideas even with its wooden characters and absurd plotting, has sold more than 60 million copies.

By contrast, Apple reported selling a piddling 3.7 million of the much-hyped iPhones through 2007. Is the iPhone dead? Of course not. But what should be dead are foolish statements about how human nature itself has changed because of some new diversion for our thumbs.

I just wanted to do a Friday shout out to Richard Reyes-Gavilan, for making one of the best points I’ve heard about the N.E.A. report on the decline in reading of creative literature in America. In response to the New Yorker two-part series “Twilight of the Books,” he points out that the survey was conducted in August, 2002; “Speaking for myself — and countless readers at the New York Public Library, where I worked at the time — the twelve-month period beginning in September, 2001, was not a particularly good one by which to measure reading habits.” He quotes Ian McEwan, who said that post-September 11th, he found it “wearisome to confront invented characters.” (The study only reported on “literary reading” which excludes nonfiction).

Naively, after the N.E.A report, “Reading at Risk” was published, I thought it was counterproductive to argue with the results. Surely, pointing out this “national crisis” would bring a multitude of efforts to solve the problem? The NEA created “The Big Read.” And, on the other hand, we get responses like Steve Jobs casually declaring the Kindle a failure because “people don’t read anyway.” Thanks, Richard Reyes-Gavilan, for standing up for readers.