Library Dusk: Successful Application of Video Game Strategies


Earlier this week, I talked about my previous experience and my reflections from this current semester with the student led, multiple path, resource review. Today a colleague of mine, Anne Marie Gruber, taught the same lesson to another class. This is what she had to say about how the information literacy session went:

The Library Dusk lesson was very effective as a model for a student-led review of research strategies. While it is set up as a review of various resources, one student even commented to me, "Wow. I learned a lot today." Even in this 300-level class, several students had never used ILL before, or didn't know what to do when full-text wasn't available.

The "choose your path" pedagogy was very effective. Letting students lead helped them take ownership and stay engaged. While their votes are anonymous, they were willing to defend their choices, leading to great discussion about resource choice. Following the resource review, students made effective use of their work time. They all found some great articles and effectively used the variety of sources we had discussed.

I enjoyed the session as much as the students did, and it was gratifying to see them succeed because of Paul's well-crafted lesson.
Anne Marie is an amazing and dedicated librarian always looking for ways to further engage and help our students learn. I am fortunate to work with her.

For those interested, an asking, here is the link to the powerpoint slideshow of Library Dusk. Any feedback or questions are welcomed.

3 comments:

Linda Jones said...

Thank you for posting this. I'm interested in doing something similar, although when we finally have our response technology fully installed. How did you set up your storyboard for this project?

Paul said...

Linda, I'll email you this as well, but I set up the storyboard first as an outline. Laying out what I wanted to cover in a traditional manner. Then after knowing the content, I mapped it out like a concept map. The concept map made the paths clear.

I did not initially know all of the dead ends. I marked the ones I knew would exist on the map. But I let the databases help generate the other dead ends based on the search terms and results that I used.

With a concept map design, each bubble ended up being a slide. The prep time for it all was around 4 hours with creating the slides, getting screen shots and hyperlinks. I did end up spending about another hour checking and fixing hyperlinks. But your time will vary depending on the size of your lesson.

Thank you for the feedback & interest.

Anonymous said...

Thanks very much Paul. I did what I could do only because of your lesson that used active learning/ game strategies--successful pedagogy that is easy to apply if well-planned.

One additional comment. Students did engage in the discussion about "do-overs" though we didn't use that terminology. We looked at successful & unsuccessful search terms. Several were surprised by the lack of results in some cases--I leveraged this into a discussion about what to do when "hitting the wall" with a search.

I referred back to this during the work time when one student wasn't finding what she needed. We tried a different strategy and then she was more successful.