I have just been listening to talk-back radio, and hearing an 85 year old man expressing the opinion, that compared to naked violence, watching the expression of love was a far better thing, and that he had been married 47 years. He expressed it well and was courtly and subtle. Naked violence. Well said. And it reminded me that I wanted to comment on San Andreas. I’m not altogether happy with my boys playing Grand Theft Auto, and the theme of violence in video games and its effect rears often. Nevertheless we will not be buying San Andreas Grand Theft Auto after the rumours of embedded virtual sex. Phew! But the comment I had to make was about the reaction to this discovery. We can allow the game to cross counters all over the world with no comment whatsoever about the graphic, horrendous violence, and yet the moment sex is mentioned, we throw up our hands in horror. What an interesting differentiation. And it was articulated even better in an article in the New York times.

explicitly sociopathic – not to say psychopathic – criminality.. ah that’s how to write!

And then there’s the memory of growing up on the farm and accompanying my father everywhere – through deaths, branding, killing, and butchering, but never, no never, to a difficult birth. Are we frightened of our sexual urges? Have we been taught to control our violent impulses, but not the other …. ?

“It’s bin awhile.” I’ve been busy organising the awards for presentation at International convention in Baltimore. I ran a competition, internationally, and named it “Target Twenty”. If they achieved a twenty percent incease in membership or twenty members, clubs were eligible for a prize and recognition at convention. I don’t know if it motivated anyone to go out and get new members, but it certainly created a buzz around PREM, the area of ITC that coordinates Publicity, Recruitment, Extension and Membership. So if I have managed to focus attention on issues in those areas, and motivated someone to focus themselves on that area and to do something for their membership, then I will have achieved a goal. I’m happy to have created the Toolkit that went with the competition, because it will remain as a resource for members to use in years to come.

This is an interesting take on the “video games and TV versus reading,” and “we’re all going down the tube with our lowest common denominator popular culture” issue. I blogged about it on liblog recently, quoting an article in the SLAQ serial “Access.” Now I’ve discovered a book review in the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell. The book is “Everything Bad Is Good for You” (Riverhead; $23.95), by Steven Johnson. The point is made that our IQ is rising, despite our wallowing in popular culture, and Johnson claims that television and games require much more brain work and a different understanding. Gladwell remarks …

“The point is that books and video games represent two very different kinds of learning. When you read a biology textbook, the content of what you read is what matters. Reading is a form of explicit learning. When you play a video game, the value is in how it makes you think. Video games are an example of collateral learning, which is no less important.

Being “smart” involves facility in both kinds of thinking—the kind of fluid problem solving that matters in things like video games and I.Q. tests, but also the kind of crystallized knowledge that comes from explicit learning.”

Might I extend this to the fact that many different forms of literacy and thinking require different types of thinking, different genres or disciplines? And as we remarked in Liblog, they are all aspects of literacy.

Malcolm Gladwell has written a book called Blink in which he discusses how we make decisions intuitively, often in a split second, and suggests that these are the ones that are more likely to be successful than the ones we mull over for ages.

I like the implications involved in that idea. Did we always make decisions that way? when life was lived at a slower simpler pace? (Do I have the right to call that pace slow and simple?) And are they really better decisions – the ones we make on the fly?

What I do want to look at, though,is the response to the book by Gord Hotchkiss writing for Search insider. He relates this decision-making process to our use of internet search. Most people surveyed could not articulate why or how they made the decisions they did when searching the internet.

I want to apply this to children (and possibly anyone learning search at any time). Surely many of the decisions we make are based on what we have learned through experience. It is time to direct children, and many Librarians and Teacher Librariana are doing just that. But it seems that many are left to learn by trial and error, using their valuable education time. This seems such a waste. If they are to use the internet in their education, then they need to learn more quickly and accurately. They need to be shown how to evaluate the material presented by search engines and owners of sites. They need to make conscious decisions, based on strategies we can teach them. Then those conscious decisions can become the “intuition” that guides them in later years. I do believe that intuition is much like conscience, an amount innate, but, to a greater degree, learned behaviour.

The strategies have to be similar to those we teach in paper-based research. We exhort not to judge a book by its cover … then we must teach how to judge a search result, just as well.

I visited a local library yesterday to set up a display for my ITC Club, Mt Gravatt Communicators. Garden City is a nearby suburb with a large shopping complex, including this library. I work in a school library, and I always find it exciting to visit the public libraries. I’m assailed with fascinating promises. There are so many programmes for so many interests. “Nite owls” caught my eye, mainly because of the interests at the school – promising “Activities on the internet based around the popular book ‘A series of Unfortunate events’ by Lemony Snickett. Ideal for children 8-12 years old.” And the other is the programme by Brisbane City Council Libraries (of which Garden City is one) to have everyone in the city read and share this one book. It beckoned from their website every time I visited there as well, although One Book, One Brisbane has now been overtaken by an amnesty on fines. Great promotion. And now I have a home to promote my other passion as well. And given the atmosphere in the library, we’re bound to attract some interest.