Good morning and Stop the presses! Mashable is reporting that those classic games of my childhood, Oregon Trail and Where In the World is Carmen Sandiego, are coming to Facebook.

Now … who out there remembers playing Oregon Trail 1.0 on a green-screen, where the animation was so slow your bullets never, ever hit the deer? Oh, yeah, baby. That was some slammin’ gamin’.

Those of you who know me know that I’ve made it some kind of game to see how long I can last staying off of Facebook without feeling like I am deprived of contact with all humanity. But this may just be what puts me over the edge … well, maybe if they get Rockapella back to do the music … or if there weren’t people out there saying that Facebook makes us sad …

But I digress. On with the show! Get your 5-1/4″ floppy disks out and let’s get moving!

I’m sitting in our classroom as my children’s lit  (aka, “Media for Children and Young Adults”) students do a pair of reflection projects.  First, they reflect as a group about the major ideas and themes of the course.Then, I ask them to reflect alone. The instructions:

This semester, you’ve heard a lot about what I believe about literature and resources for children and young adults.  Now that you’ve reflected on the course content, what do you believe about selecting media for children & YA?You can write your response as:

• a “This I Believe” essay
• a policy statement
• a Children/YA Bill of Rights
• a philosophical statement for your portfolio
• something else

I like spending the final hours of a course having students synthesize the ideas so that they can leave the course reminded of all we have done, but I’ve only this year added the individual reflection.So … what do I believe about media for children and young adults? I asked myself, watching them write, and I figured I should answer my own question.

I believe that books still matter and that they can help us grow our thinking and our world view.  They can make us laugh, teach us how to do things, or help us know our world.

While print books are still my preferred mode, I believe in multimodal and multimedia formats: digital texts, ebooks, audio books, audio mp3s, graphic novels, magazines, Web sites, and more.

Keeping kids reading is more important than being picky about what they read.  I am excited that we have passionate readers throughout our K-5 building.

I believe that our library collections should be real havens for pleasure reading, not just give lip service to that. 

I don’t expect my students to love what I loved, even if I wish they did.

I believe in library spaces that welcome children in and value them for who they are.

I believe in library spaces that build a sense of community and thoughtful excitement about learning.

I believe that library spaces should adapt to the needs of its users, not vice versa.  My hat is off to whoever invented casters for library furniture.

I believe that kids should be allowed to check out what interests them, not what is good for them or what is “on their level,” and that we should help them make good choices for their developmental level, not decide for them.

I believe that making good selections based on student needs and available budget is not censorship, no matter what School Library Journal put on its cover.

I believe that reader’s advisory is two-way: that I can recommend resources to kids, and that they can advise me right back.

I believe that libraries are safe places to explore new, unfamiliar ideas.I believe that a kid saying, “I love the library” should be the rule, not the exception.

I’ll close now so I can see what my students have to say.  Knowing their track record this term, it will be far more profound than what I have written.

What’s your manifesto?

{Post-class afterthought: I’m sitting in my office with tears in my eyes reading what they wrote. I’m a very lucky prof. Very lucky.}

I learned about this Library of Congress announcement from Jo on the MAME listserv:

People today born into a digital world are experiencing a far different environment of information-gathering and access to knowledge than a generation ago. Who are these “digital natives” and what are they thinking? How are they using the technology, and are IT experts adequately responding to them?

These questions will be addressed in a new Library of Congress series titled “Digital Natives.” The first lecture will explore how young people think, learn and play.

Distinguished scholar and child-development expert Edith Ackerman will present “The Anthropology of Digital Natives” at 4 p.m. on Monday, April 7, in the Montpelier Room on the sixth floor of the James Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington, D.C. Sponsored by the Library’s John W. Kluge Center, the event is free and open to the public. No tickets or reservations are needed. In addition, the lecture will be webcast live at www.loc.gov and made available on the Library’s webcasts homepage www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc at a later date.

Ackerman is an honorary professor of developmental psychology at the University of Aix-Marseille in France. She is currently a visiting scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the School of Architecture and a visiting professor at the University of Siena in the Department of Communications.

The four-lecture series will examine the generation that has been raised with the computer as a natural part of their lives, with emphasis on the young people currently in schools and colleges today. The series will seek to understand the practices and culture of these digital natives, the cultural implications of the phenomenon and the implications for education – schools, universities and libraries.

Ackerman is particularly interested in helping shape the future of play and learning in a digital world. “I study how people use place, relate to others and treat things to find their ways – and voices – in an ever-changing world,” she said.

Future lectures in the series will be at 4 p.m. in the Montpelier Room of the James Madison Building. They include:

Monday, May 12: “Internet, the Private Mind?” by Steven Berlin Johnson, author of “Everything Bad is Good for You.”

Monday, June 23: “The Anthropology of YouTube” by Michael Wesch, assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University.

Monday, June 30: “Open Source Reality” by Douglas Rushkoff, author of “Screenagers: Lessons in Chaos from Digital Kids.”