The Horizon Report 2012 Higher Ed Edition identified Game-Based Learning as one of two technologies expected to enter mainstream use in the next two to three years. For those of you unfamiliar with the Horizon Report, it reports annual findings of the NMC (New Media Consortium) Horizon Project, “a decade-long research project designed to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have an impact on learning, teaching, and creative inquiry in higher education.” Six emerging technologies are identified across three adoption horizons (one year or less, two to three years, and four to five years). A wiki documents the selection process, and includes discussion of the many technologies considered. It’s worth a look.
The field experience students in Instruction & Outreach were asked to investigate a few of the emerging technologies discussed in the wiki, and Game-Based Learning caught my eye. As a person who enjoys games of all types, I’m attracted to the idea of games as instructional tools. Imagine harnessing gaming’s power to engage for library instruction! A recent article in the Journal of Information Literacy discussed the development of a web-based game to teach information literacy skills to undergraduates. I first heard about this game, BiblioBouts, at a poster session at the ALA Annual Conference last summer. Created by a team at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, “BiblioBouts is an online tournament made up of a series of mini-games or bouts, each of which introduces students to a specific subset of information literacy skills within the overall research process”. Through the series of bouts, players search for and select relevant resources, choosing the best ones to play against their opponents, as well as evaluate their opponents’ resources.
At another ALA2012 poster session, I talked to Caitlin Shanley about “The Nightmare on Vine Street“, a library orientation video game created by librarians at Lupton Library, University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. In the game scenario, “a student wakes up late at night in a study room on the top floor of the library and has to navigate their way out of the building by appeasing various librarian zombies encountered along the way”. You can see a screencapture of the game on the library’s blog. Also tapping into the recent popularity of zombies, University of Florida librarians formed a partnership with the designers of Humans vs. Zombies, a campus-wide alternate reality game, to create a library mission that required players to use information literacy skills to survive the zombie apocalypse. They even created a LibGuide for the game; notice the zombified Albert and Alberta (the school’s mascots).
If you’re interested in using games for information literacy instruction, but don’t have the resources to create something as elaborate as the above examples, never fear. There are alternatives that require less of an investment. In a previous post covering the NCLA conference, I mentioned The Information Literacy Game created by UNC-Greensboro librarians. It’s included in the UNC-G Instructional Technology Toolkit, along with other games you can use to assess information literacy. Try them out, or create one of your own and share it with us. And have fun!
References
Markey, K., Leeder, C. and St. Jean, B.( 2011). Students’ Behaviour Playing an Online Information Literacy Game. Journal of Information Literacy, 5(2), 46-65. http://ojs.lboro.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/JIL/article/view/PRA-V5-I2-2011-3
Johnson, M., Buhler, A. G., & Hillman, C. (2010). The Library is Undead: Information Seeking During the Zombie Apocalypse. Journal of Library Innovation, 1(2), 29-43. http://www.libraryinnovation.org/article/view/64/102
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