Fall Research: Games as Analogy for Information Literacy

During the first month of the fall semester I've spent my research time split between integrating information literacy into the curriculum and games the teach information literacy. This past spring, I was submitted a proposal (a section of which is shown below) and was awarded a two-year research fellowship student. The student will be assisting in the research, development, application, and assessment of using games to help exemplify and teach information literacy skills.

Description of Projects Involved: The Research Fellow, in collaboration with the project leader, will research and create tutorials that will be used by students to help teach information evaluation skills. These tutorials will include three distinct mediums for student interaction; powerpoint, web-based games, and commercial video games. In order to accomplish this, the Fellow will be responsible for researching critical thinking, information literacy, and game based learning. The Fellow will review gaming projects from other libraries and experiment with online Flash and commercial video games. The project will include four distinct phases: research, creation, application, and evaluation. The first year of the project will focus on research, creation, and piloting of the three tutorials. The second year will include applying these tutorials in workshop or classroom settings and evaluating the results.
We have spent the first month of the fellowship compiling a bibliography and helping the student work her way through the literature. As we work through the literature, I will be posting summaries and discussion of some of the articles. And as the fellowship project progresses, there will continue to be updates and discussion and hopefully examples of games.

While there is much discussion on creating games with the to attempt to teach information literacy skills. One of the goals of this project is to find existing web-based games that can engage players in information literacy skills and help create a discussion of how those skills can be used in their own research. The project will also compare student evaluations to multiple types of games as instructional technologies. The games themselves will not be intentionally library focused. They will ideally use a variety of settings to provide practical examples of information literacy skills and serve as an analogy for academic based research.

2 comments:

Beth Gallaway said...

Congratulations, Paul!!!

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