The Voices In My Head - The Official Blog of Chris Stubbs

For those who read this blog, it tends to come as a bit of a surprise that I am not actually paid to sit around and pontificate the mysteries of video games, education, and life. After the surprise wears off, there tends to be a mix of confusion and nervous laughter that acompanies the realization that I think about such things with such frequency, all of my own accord.

Regardless, I do partake in "real work" outside of the gaming realm... at least occationally, and such is the purpose of today's post =)

Recently, my collegue Brad Kozlek and I began meeting with two members of the University Library system to discuss the possibility of developing an application that would make the library more accessable to students. How? By bringing the library to the students where they live - facebook.

For the moment, this project is being done as part of a Hot Team, with the end goal being a proof of concept facebook app as well as a white paper which could potentially springboard into a more advanced development project.

There are a few notes worth mentioning in all this. The first is how easy it was to start to develop a facebook app. Obviously the app I've been working is still a raw draft, but in only a few hours of playing around I was able to get a basic shell in place with some limited functionality. For any aspiring facebook app developers out there, you'll need to learn some custom facebook tags, a bit of php, and have a place to store your code. But assuming you have all 3 pre-reqs down, getting in and making a little magic happen is easy like sunday morning.

Secondly however, is how exciting it is to see the University Library (as well as Penn State units in general) really starting to look opportunities to "meet students half way". A few years ago, something like facebook would probably have been dismissed as a silly, childish site. Today, people are looking for ways to harness the power of facebook to bring valuable resources to the students who use it.

I was an undergrad at Penn State once, and the library was an intimidating place that I would only visit when absolutely necessary. But bring the library to facebook, in an user friendly way, and all of a sudden you've opened doors that might never have been opened before - just because you were willing to meet students in their world instead of forcing them into yours.

There is still a ways to go until this little facebook app I've been working on will be ready for anything nearing public consumption, but this is an exciting project to be a part of. And I hope Penn State as a whole continues to make strides to meet students in their environment.

I'll be sure to post again once my little app is ready for the view of the real world or when the white paper is ready to rock.

(As a disclaimer, I believe the actual german word referenced in the title of this post is "wunderbar" (wonderful). But if you are yelling out in excitement, "vundabah" seems to capture the essence much more effectivly. I advise that you try it near unsuspecting friends or co-workers.)

image taken from money.cnn.com