Great days of teaching

I have had a few great teaching moments in the past week. Last year, a few of the students in that class got to the library very early. While I was setting up, one girl complained, "Why do we have to do this again? I've been here so many times already!" I ran through the useful resources for the assignment, asking them to explain some of the stuff. There were many questions they couldn't answer. I talked about relevant reference books, but when they broke off to do their lab assignment on creating a profile for a neurological disease, they went straight to Web sites.... and they got very frustrated. Finally I convinced one of them to try the Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine, and there was a moment of light shining down as they got it. They were recommending it to the other groups, and I watched those heavenly spotlights shine down.

This year I told the students how much previous students liked that resource, so many of them went straight to it. They loved it even more. One group had to be told to go use some electronic resources because they were so involved in the print encyclopedia. It was wonderful. It was like having a celebrity endorsement.

Today I taught two English composition courses. We did the spy game and it went very well. For the first time, I coupled the game with a clicker review at the end. Almost the entire class got every single question right, and a majority of them reported that this was a fun way to learn about the library.

Furthermore, one student that I had worked with one-on-one the previous week, came up to tell me how much she had learned about the library from our meeting. She was raving about the resources and the elevator. She seemed very excited about her topic and research, which absolutely thrilled me.

Article on gaming

Spiegelman, M. & Glass, R. (2008). Gaming and learning: Winning information literacy collaboration. C&RL News, 522-525.

I had to read this for our weekly meeting coming up, though the meeting isn't until next week. I'm a little disappointed, but I'm finding that's usual for articles written on gaming and instruction. I'm finding much better information from books.

This article is all over the place, mixing the value of professor-librarian collaboration, with the value of integrating Web 2.0 tools to enhance classroom learning, with the value of educational game-like activities to learn research skills. The Web 2.0 part includes mostly having students contribute to wikis and blogs. They mention having attended the SUNY Conference on Instructional Technologies, which I'm interseted in looking into.

The games had nothing to do with technology and were active learning techniques with the game aspect being having teams vote for the best results. The games were as follows:

• The Dead Mathematicians Hall of Fame: Students got in groups and researched a famous person in the field of logic. They had to write an acceptance speach from that person's point of view, which required some research. The class voted on the best.
• Grateful Dead Scientists Game: The students had to research a famous scientist and create a course that person might have taught. The votes come in the form of registrations for courses the students would like to take.
• History of the Times Game: Students use the New York Times Historical Backfile to find an interesting story or ad, then vote on best results.

Other things I want to look into are Jenny Levine's "gamer ethos" in her article from Library Technology, and Friedman and Booth's "cultures of play."

Oh, and BTW, Lone Ranger should be capitalized.

Focus Group Heaven

Last night I organized a focus group of students to help me brainstorm ideas for developing my instructional games. In exchange for their help, I made them chicken Marbella (my favorite!), mashed potatoes, and chocolate fondue with fruit.

I had 8 or 9 students from the Creative Arts Society (CAS) show up, and it was sooo much fun. I wish every focus group could go so well. They actually enjoyed the games as they were, which amazed me. They loved the "Secret Agent" story. So here are some of the ideas and suggestions they came up with... and I did encourage them to say whatever came to mind.

• Have laser tag in the library and when you find certain library resources, you get several seconds of immunity


• If you want the students to be more active, you could have a central, physical place to get maps and other resources.


• Add "Your mission, if you choose to accept it..." message to the secret agent theme. Along that line, I think I'll add "this message will self destruct in 5 seconds" and then an explosion animation.


• Add video clips and sound clips from James Bond, Carmen Sandiego, Q (the Bond weapons guy?), or Frankenstein for the monster game


• Allow teams to choose a name


• For freshman orientation, do a themed (pirates?) scavenger hunt. Could involve points, keep score with tokens, passbook, or big board to award prizes at end.


• Again for orientation, split each cluster of students into groups, each group with a different color of handouts. Each color will be a different track, where one clue will lead to the next.


• Reminisced about the "Temple of the Hidden Monkey" where contestants had to build monkey statues while avoiding guards. In this case, library staff could be guards that deduct points if they catch students running.


• Involve having them get video clues in one of the screening rooms


• Have some kind of lock box they're working to open, which will contain small prizes like lollipops at the end (going along with the secret agent theme)


• They liked the Web evaluation part of the game, they called them "real and fake sites"


• Have the "correct site" unlock something (I don't remember the context here)


• More on databases, they wish they had known about them earlier


• They were excited about "Choose Your Own Adventure" type games. I've done simple HTML games along these lines, there is potential for more here. They particularly focused on scholarly vs. popular journals here... we went off about turning in a paper based on articles found in Vogue :)


• They really liked the idea of animating the Boolean operators sequence. Right now it's tutorial-like, but eventually I'd like to give students AND & OR buttons where pressing on those buttons will rearrange objects that fit the search (like only the spies wearing yellow coats AND red pants).


• Could make author-themed games, like Poe (ravens, grave yards, tombs by the sea, beating hearts, pendulums, etc.)


• They think we can assume students have cameras with them, esp. on cell phones. Could use those for photo scavenger hunts.


• They thought the ideas of Big Games were really cool. I told them about juxtaposing maps of campus or Williamsport with some other map and asked what map? They suggested Gotham (if it exists), Narnia, Middle Earth, or Eragon

Games I need to look at:

• "Escape from the Basement" (series of places to escape from)


• "Myst" - puzzle game where you have to click on objects in your area


• "Escape Artist"


• "Trapped" - this involves talking to characters you meet, which determines the outcome of the game


• "Oblivion" - there has already been discussion on how people could reorganize this game for their own needs. They suggested talking to a student named Ian Shepard (a.k.a. "Shade").

So you can see it was a productive night. I'm going to include the nice picture I took of them now because I liked both pictures so much and couldn't choose between the two.

Diving into the literature

Adcock, A. (2008). Making digital game-based learning work: An instructional designer's perspective. Library Media Connection.

This was a very short but useful article. Digital game-based learning (DGBL) uses a combination of:

• Play theory or learning through engagin play
• Problem-based learning
• Situated Learning
• Challenge

It's important to keep the game from being too confusing or too hard. I've been seeing this in several other cases of library instruction games (i.e. ASU's Quarantined). You also need to give the students continuous feedback and scaffolding. DGBL should also be avoided on its own, instead it should be used with other methods such as a verbal introduction and a debriefing/review session. Students should be given the chance to practice what they have learned in the game as much as possible.

This also points me to other resources I've seen mentioned before but now sound really great, like Prensky's Digital Game-Based Learning, and Lave & Wenger's Situated Learning.

A success

My experiments with video games in the classroom payed off yesterday. I lengthened the activity considerably and it took them about 30 minutes to complete. That left us with time to go over a few things, this time it was mostly review.

I have to write up a poster on this and get it to the printer by Monday, which is why I'm at work today. I think my poster is coming along nicely, my husband has promised to go over it with me tomorrow since he has experience presenting his biology research.

The current poster is for our regional workshop on the 31st. I really want to submit a proposal for ACRL, which is due on Monday. I don't know if this project is good enough, but I just have to get over my inferiority complex and accept that I will never get anywhere if I don't try. I really think I'm on to something great here, even if I've only seen the tip of the iceberg. Interestingly enough, I don't think students mind the simplicity of the program. They genuinely seemed to have fun, and teased me about being a spy, or did James Bond impressions while finding their books and during the review.

What needs more development is the story. This seems to be more important than sophisticated technology. If it can seem less library-like and more roll-playing, I think the students will have even more fun, which means they will learn more.

I have been reading books and articles on related topics, though for a poster session I don't understand how you back up the project with past research. My brain is craving to sit down and do this so I can understand where to go next. I am excited that I have one more freshman composition class in a few weeks, so there's still time this semester to work on this, though not before the regional workshop. That's okay, I am very excited at how well the class went yesterday and think what I have is more than just "good enough."

Book Review

Title: What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy

Author: James Paul Gee

Published in 2003

Cited by 1,088 in Google Scholar

I just finished this book last night and I highly recommend it to any librarian, whether or not you have any interest in video games. It is more about how people learn and why video games engage people more than traditional education systems do. It discusses active learning, critical learning, and is closely related to or even part of inquiry-based learning.

Gee has a background in theoretical and social linguistics. The book is heavy on theory after a lot of reading and playing games. However, even for people like me who don't always get theory, it's easy to read and there is much to learn from him. Indeed, I took eight pages of notes, but I will condense them for this post.

A "semiotic domain" is a set of practices that communicate distinctive types of meaning. You can learn facts without learning a new semiotic domain. This involves a) learning to experience the world in new ways b) potential to join this group/affiliation c) gaining resources to prepare for future learning in that and related domains. These three things make up active learning, but you can go beyond active learning to critical learning. This involves thinking about the domain at a "meta" level as a complex system of interrelated parts, and how to innovate meanings within the domain.

Identities are very important to learning. Students bring in their identities including what type of learner they are (i.e. "I'm not good at science), you strive to make them see themselves as a type of mini-scientist or historian (etc.), and there's the relationship/transition between the two. This is like a gamer's real-world identity, the virtual identity, and the relationship between the two. This last one is called the "projective identity," and is how you project your real-world identity onto the virtual identity, or how you project your past identity onto your identity as a scientist. If the learner can get to the projective identity, they learn they have the capacity to make the virtual identity part of their real-world identity. He points out this is more magical than any video game. All learning involves taking on a new identity.

Video games are good at creating "psychosocial moratoriums," which are important to learning. They are spaces where the real-world consequences of mistakes are reduced while they learn how to move or interact with the new material. Learners must be enticed to try, put lots of effort into learning, and achieve some meaningful success. Video games offer lots of opportunities to practice, while schools don't. This practice is often repetitive, but it forces players to apply knowledge to new situations (called "transfer"), and punishes players who have a "routinized mastery." Learners should always be required to operate at the outer edge of their resources, that way the tasks will be doable, but very challenging.

Good games offer and accept multiple solutions to each problem. Players get clues, make hypotheses, test them out, then reform their hypotheses and apply them to new situations. This is how they form patterns, which is what all learning is.

Practice needs to be carefully mixed with overt telling. You can't just let the students go off on their own and expect them to learn. You can do this by periodically assessing their progress, give feedback/lecture, then let them continue.

Learning is a very social activity, just like gaming. While seeking patterns, a person asks other people, reads books, interacts with tools/technologies. They usually share what they have learned, eventually with a group. Otherwise that person has no way to know if the patterns they have formed are real. who will normalize or police their views if they deviate too far from the norm of the group. When there is a disagreement, there is a dialog (more social sharing of information). This interaction and ability to use tools is important in the real-world, yet our schools test what's in the learner's brain rather than what they can do when the use the tools.

Good video games not only allow for consuming, but producing as well. Players can modify worlds, create maps, post on online bulletin boards, and communicate tips and opinions.

Instead of saying video games are a waste of time, we should be looking into why people will spend so many hours learning how to play a game without feeling the same enthusiasm for school. In video games, "hard" is often good, while "easy" is often bad. The argument in this book isn't that good things are necessarily being learned, rather that good learning often occurs during video game playing.

Online/In-Person Instruction Activity

I had two very interesting classes today. At first I wasn't sure how to feel about these two classes, but the more I think about it, the more excited I am. I just talked about this yesterday, but now I actually have two classes under my belt.

I developed an online activity using Macromedia Flash for students who are in our instruction room. It mixes virtual and real-world activities. They have to go upstairs to find a particular book which contains a code required to continue with the activity. The computer gives them a "home base" and has the advantage of giving points more easily/fairly than if the professor and I were scrambling to grade.

The part that I wasn't so happy about at first was they finished this very quickly. I had them for an hour and some groups finished in less than 20 minutes! I have one more section of the same class on Friday, so I have time to work on that. But I stuck to the bare basics and they really seemed to get it! Nine out of ten groups had very good scores and were proud of those scores. I was blown away by how fast they found books upstairs. And on top of it, they really seemed to have fun. I observed this, and then asked if they had more fun than they would have if I had lectured. Their resounding "yes" was very convincing.

I will report again on Friday afternoon about how the last class goes with the upgrades.

Delighted

I had the second half of the class I was frustrated with... meaning I'm frustrated with the whole class, and half of the class on Wednesday and the other half today. I was dreading the class even after preparing for it better than I had been on Wednesday. I found a chapter of a reference book that discussed the subject, made copies of it for everyone, and passed it out first thing in class. I talked about what it was a little bit before starting into the resources. I also was informed of a better database for the subject. It was a major database, but I didn't realize this subject was covered so well in it.

Anyway, this made a WORLD of difference. It was like night and day. They were not so resigned to failure, they had no problems finding examples in newspapers, nor finding scholarly articles. They asked good questions and left with a pile of sources to use over the weekend. They still may not know how to write the paper, but at least they have good resources.

I sent an e-mail to the students who had been in the Wednesday class and invited them to pick up copies of the reference article at the reference desk. I don't know if any have, the pile looks as big as it did yesterday. But at least I have done what I could to make up for not knowing everything I needed to know. Not that it was my fault. I have to remind myself of that. I was raised Catholic, I'm always feeling guilty about something.

Appreciated

Here's a picture of the lovely flowers that arrived today from an English professor. She was at a teaching conference over the weekend, and we took her two classes and discussed Web evaluation. I had a great time with the classes, but it's so nice to know we were appreciated. We're leaving them at the library reference desk to share their beauty with all who pass by.

Coming together

I have held back on this blog the past few days because I feel I have so much to complain about (...grrr LibQUAL is all I can say about that...), or sad news to tell about deaths and health crises among our faculty and their families. It's the first time in a long time I haven't looked forward to Friday since we're going to a funeral tonight... I'm nervous about crying as hard as the family even though I don't know them well just because she was way too young to die.

But today there are a few things that are a positive. First is how much I love my office-mate who took over reference for the entire day as I covered for one late-scheduled class and helped cover for another librarian who is at the hospital taking care of her daughter. I had asked her to take over just while I was in class, and without asking she took over the whole day.

Second is I had some good classes today that were enjoyable with lots of participation.

Third is that I just got one more person to sit on my panel and two people asking if they could bring posters to our SLC workshop next month. Oh can you ever! I am so excited, their topics sound great.

Fourth is I got a call saying my pre-ordered copy of Inkdeath arrived at our local indie bookstore. I didn't think it was coming out for another two weeks.

And the fifth thing to be happy about comes from a conversation I had with my mentor yesterday about what women students lives were like even when she went to college. I can't imagine my father not being able to help me move into my dorm room, or having to be back in my dorm by 9, or not being served dinner because I was wearing pants rather than a skirt, or not being able to go to Harvard just because of my gender. I know it's not really equal yet, but I was reminded how much progress has been made even in my parents' lifetime. I'm grateful for my parents and teachers who said I could do whatever I wanted and wasn't limited by my gender.

Classes

I had two really good classes. This is good, since I got evaluated by the library director and a co-worker today. I hope they think the classes went as well as I did, even if I ran out of time at the end of the second one.

The first class had six theatre students in it. They were very engaged and happy to participate. At the end, I had some review questions and told them I would divide the small prizes in accordance with how much they participated. I didn't tell them what the prizes were, but it was enough of a motivation that almost every one of them raised their hand for every question. Not every answer was what I was looking for, some were better than I was looking for, some answered to their interpretation of what must have been a vague question. But they all participated, and they all did a great job. I passed out $1 coupons to the campus coffee shop, and they said, "this isn't a small prize, this is great!"

One student asked about why I wrote AND instead of using the ones EBSCO already had. I had been waiting to add an OR statement and was explaining why you want to keep OR words all in one line. I told them funny things would happen, and they'd probably not even know those funny things were happening. I asked them if they had seen the original Ghostbuters, they all nodded enthusiastically (which is good, considering that movie is older than they are). I said "Mixing AND and OR can be dangerous, kind of like how they kept saying in that movie 'don't cross the streams.'" Okay, so it's a bit of a stretch of an analogy, but they all got it. When I tried to clarify by saying it was like Math where addition and multiplication are mixed... they interrupted and said they were theatre majors and didn't get math analogies. So I asked if Ghostbuster analogies worked, and they all agreed that it had.

As they were leaving, one girl said, "This was my favorite library session ever." I had to be honest with her and said it was one of mine, too.

Instruction Handout

There's an interesting conversation going on in the ILI listserv about handouts in library instruction classes. In my two years of teaching, I couldn't imagine not giving them something in print to take with them, do what they may with it. It seems that is the consensus from the respondents on the listserv.

It's interesting to see the variation in what they put in those handouts, too. I am planning to use more PowerPoint presentations in my upcoming classes and wasn't sure what to do with the handouts. I have some good ideas, and for the first time the handouts won't be just the outline of the class, and should bring in some active learning elements. I'm getting excited about teaching now that I've started to prepare! I do like teaching, I love the one-on-one time towards the end of the session, but I hate the prep work. The two classes I have started working on are fun, though, and I'm bringing in lots of pictures from I Can Has Cheezburger... though my husband is terrified I will embarrass him when I told him I have cute cat pictures in my presentation.

Training

The timing of the Pegasus Librarian's post on training couldn't be better, and I plan to re-read it again when I'm not feeling like a zombie due to staying up too late several nights in a row painting my living room. The living room looks nice, but I don't think I've accomplished much today. But as we spent almost three hours on SMART board and Senteo training, I didn't have to accomplish much. This trainer was soo much better than the last guy they sent who showed up late, couldn't put the equipment together, was unprofessionally dressed, and started his speech with, "I don't know much about technology." No kidding, and it just went downhill from there. Still, I thought this woman should have known more than she did, and I don't think it required two hours to show us what she showed us. The third hour was us playing or watching each other playing with it. The software is very cool, but it could have been done and training is painful no matter what.

Why do I want to re-read her post? Because no that we're down to the wire, I really need to do better with instruction this year. I'm perfectly good at lecturing, but I really need to bring more active stuff into the classroom, and think of good ways to do assessment.

It's time to go home. Remind me of how tired I am if I try to go to the fabric store to get curtain fabric to match my pretty new wall color. Or just shoot me. Really, I don't need any new projects!

So much to say

I am really liking a blog I recently started reading, called Please Be Quiet. She was able to go to LOEX 2008 and provides summaries for the sessions she attended. I am so jealous now that I am reading these summaries.

I am particularly interested in Session 3, and the idea of starting off an instruction session with Internet searching since that's what they know. Then move them into Google Scholar, then into the databases. This provides a better opportunity to show how database searching is different and explain why (more complicated = more sophisticated and precise!).

I need some good ideas for next fall to jump-start my teaching, and I think this may be the first thing I try. It's not active learning, but we can get some hands-on activities in there and it could be really great.

However, I will have to figure out how to fit in reference books into this structure...

Something to Blog About

Two nights ago, I was watching a Simpsons re-run with my fiance (it's one of the few tv shows we can agree on, along with Jeopardy, Cash Cab, and Dirty Jobs). It was a very touching episode that gave a reference book a brilliant moment in the sun. Homer has to do marketing research to try to get more business for the bowling alley so he can get a raise. He put on his reading glasses and is reading Advanced Marketing at the dining room table. That ends up in the trash as he moves on to Beginning Marketing. That also ends up in the trash. Then he is seen with the New American Dictionary, looking up the word "marketing."

I wanted to possibly use this clip in the instruction classroom. It would bea great introduction to reference books and getting students to start at the beginning. However, I hardly ever watch the show and couldn't think of how I would possibly figure out which episode it was.

Within seconds of starting my search, I found the exact episode title, season, summary, and list of cultural references on Wikipedia. It has its own entry for every single episode of The Simpsons through the summer of 1999 (the later DVD's are apparently not available yet). I am completely blown away, and this is a great way to illustrate how Wikipedia covers popular culture much better than any print encyclopedia... I highly doubt any pop culture encyclopedia has its own entries for every Simpsons character, episode, and location!

I looked up Gil Grissom, a character from CSI, and the entry includes the character's life story, first appearance, and have individual entries for episodes of that show as well... Print Preview shows it would take 9 pages to print this article. ER also has a list of episodes with summaries, but not individual entries.

I know Wikipedia was extensive, but I never realized how extensive. It has been incredibly helpful to me today, now I can get that season of The Simpsons on DVD if I want to show it in class, as well as finding new ways to procrastinate at work (which I hardly need)!

Bad day got better

Today started off very badly. I got a cavity filled and the anastesia took four or five hours to wear off. So by the time I got back from the dentist, I grabbed a bowl of chili from the cafe and tried to walk quickly to a lunch meeting... only to trip on the four steps up to the business department, sending chili flying EVERYWHERE. It was all over the steps, all over my coat (including splatters down the back!), and went straight up my sleeve staining the nice shirt I wore today since I was teaching a business class. I went back to the cafe to get napkins to clean up and three people asked me what happened and if I needed them to call help... they thought the chili everywhere was blood!

This afternoon I had a phone interview with someone from Paratext. We were invited to be the first case study of a baccalaureate institution for the Reference Universe database. I spent a lot of time telling her about iGoogle and the Reference Universe gadget I made for it. She was having a hard time understanding what I meant. So I just sent her my login (after changing my password to something generic) and I think she had fun with it. I really need to start promoting this to faculty, it is such a great tool. I also discovered tonight that I can feed my cyber tiger little cyber steaks. It's so cute.