How to use this Page

I just started the “Snapple Real Facts Buster” wiki a couple of weeks ago and lo and behold, you can find our site by searching “snapple real facts” on google already.  If you search “snapple real facts” wiki, then we are the first on the results list.  I just sent a mass email to all the 4th graders and hopefully, they will find this an exciting turn of events.  (I really wasn’t expecting google spidering us so quickly!)

This is a report on my new Information Literacy Unit for 4th graders.  The link to the unit wiki site is here: http://snapplerealfactsbuster.wikidot.com/ for reference.

My daughter has always been fascinated by those Snapple “Real Facts” under their bottle caps.  Not long ago, a few odd-sounding “facts” piqued my interest and I started to verify the validity behind each fact we encountered.  It turns out that not all of those facts are entirely true.  I have concluded that the good folks at Snapple did not start out to fool their public, but due to the space limitation of the caps, they had to truncate quite a bit of their facts into short sentences and along the way choices of words and syntax often altered the meanings of the facts.

A few weeks ago, I thought, hey, why don’t I use this into an Info. Lit. Unit for my fourth graders?  First of all, I have been trying to figure out a way that will make creating wiki documents meaningful to the children.  A wiki can be a natural space where they can share their findings with each other and the world, where I can give them instant and continuous comments and pointers, and where they can formulate a solid understanding of how wiki sites are put together and thus are less likely to be simply just believe in whatever they find online.

We started the unit by looking at how wikipedia works and how we could add and change information about our school on wikipedia without submitting any proof of our identities or expertise.   And then  the students were shown how to create their individual group’s wiki file and record their “research findings” of the randomly assigned caps/facts.  We named our wiki “Snapple Real Facts Buster” in the fashion of the very popular Discovery Channel’s “Myth Busters.”  We are in the thick of figuring out whether any of the facts is valid and discovering that it is not always that easy to verify a simple factual statement.    In a week or two, we will be done with the unit and a final reflection and discussion will be posted on our site.  So far, this has been a fun unit to create and it seems that the students have enjoyed the idea behind the unit.  It is, however, hard work for 9- and 10-year-olds to have the patience and tenacity to continue working both after 15 minutes of futile searching or seeing one source, regardless of its validity.  This is part of the discovery process and hopefully both the success stories and difficulties will prove to be illuminating for both the children and the library teacher.

I’ve been telling everyone who will listen about Paul Waelchli’s work mapping the ACRL Information Literacy Standards to skills used to play popular videogames. I’ve been waiting for someone to do the same thing for school libraries, and now we have our first step towards that goal because Brian Mayer has mapped New York State’s education standards to some modern board games.

Gaming, School Libraries and the Curriculum

“Games engage students with authentic leisure experiences while reinforcing a variety of social, literary and curricular skills. When an educational concept is introduced and reinforced during a game, it is internalized as part of an enjoyable experience and further utilized as one aspect of a strategy to attain success.

Games also carry other benefits. They help students connect and build social skills, working as part of a team or negotiating the most advantageous situation for themselves. It also provides an opportunity for students to to explore a host of life skills not inherent in the curriculum , but important for success. Some of these include: micro-managing resources and options; actively re-evaluating, re-prioritizing and re-adjusting goals based on uncertain and shifting situations; determining acceptable losses in an effort to obtain an end goal; and employing analytical and critical skills to more authentic social experiences.

Here is a list of NYS standards currently supported by a well established school game library:

NYS Social Studies Standards:

• Standard 3: Geography Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of the geography of the interdependent world in which we live—local, national, and global—including the distribution of people, places, and environments over the Earth’s surface.
  • Ten Days In.. Series
  • Ticket to Ride Series
     
• Standard 4: Economics Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of how the United States and other societies develop economic systems and associated institutions to allocate scarce resources, how major decision-making units function in the U.S. and other national economies, and how an economy solves the scarcity problem through market and non-market mechanisms.
  • Catan Series
  • Puerto Rico” [Library Gamer]

Several more are listed in the post, so please click through to see just how good a fit this can be.

If you still question whether there are literacies (especially information-related ones) involved in playing videogames, ask yourself if those same things happen around playing board games. If your answer is that yes, they do, what then is the difference between learning those skills through board games and learning them through videogames? Brian’s work helps illustrate the similarities but even more importantly, it shows how easily a school library could start out with the familiar world of board games as a way to implement gaming services and engage students more interactively in learning information literacy skills. Thanks, Brian!

Check out Paul Waelchli’s article in the January 2008 issue of C&RL News in which he expands on his blog posts about information literacy and fantasy football.

Librarians’ Sport of Choice: Teaching Information Literacy through Fantasy Football

“Librarians want students to effectively identify and evaluate information and make decisions based upon what they discover. These are just some of the skills that an information literate student successfully applies. These are the same skills that more than 19 million people use on a daily or weekly basis playing fantasy sports.1 As the NFL football season comes to a close, millions of Americans, some as young as 12 years old, have spent the past few months connected to information literacy. They just don’t know it.

The challenge for librarians is to connect fantasy sports skills to information literacy and create building blocks for academic applications of the same concepts. One library, University of Dubuque, did just this by teaching fantasy football research to incoming student athletes. Through the lesson, students engaged in discussions of creditability, validity, timeliness, and search strategies to find and evaluate fantasy football information….

The high level of player investment creates educational opportunities for librarians. According to a 2006 study by the Fantasy Sports Association, a large number of college students play fantasy sports. Librarians can build upon the information literacy skills that students are already unconsciously using through fantasy sports play. The successful fantasy sport player consistently applies four of the five ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards (2000)….

At the end of the sessions, the students completed a short evaluation that assessed both criteria for evaluating sources and library perceptions. More than 80 percent of students were able to describe two of three appropriate source evaluation criteria and more than 60 percent provided all three. The students were asked to describe what research meant to them before the session and responses included, ‘headaches,’ ‘work I didn’t want to do,’ and ’school work.’ The responses to the same question after the sessions showed a dramatic change in perspective and included, ‘making sure one is getting accurate information,’ ‘comparing and knowing where I’m getting my information,” and “fun work.” While the ‘fun work’ might be a stretch when homework is involved, it does show a change in perspective and awareness about research. One student first said that before the session, research meant ’school,’ but afterwards he responded, ‘everything.’

In addition to the change in perception of research, the student athletes were asked about their perception of librarians. Prior to the fantasy football orientation session, the students had a 66 percent ‘very positive’ impression of librarians. After the session, the students “very positive” perception was more than 90 percent. While these results are not scientific and large enough to generalize, they show a distinct change in students’ impressions of libraries and their own abilities. One student stated, ‘I made the fantasy football connection to looking up school stuff quick, it worked well.’ “

And if you haven’t seen it, Paul’s chart illustrating which of the ACRL Information Literacy Standard are involved in playing Final Fantasy, Halo, and Madden (football) is also well worth your time.

There's a lively debate about information literacy and critical evaluation skills over at The Wired Campus today. Apparently a British professor is expected to ban students from using Google or Wikipedia in her course.
The post compares Google to "white bread for the mind."

What does everyone think about that statement? I loathe the idea that I'm feeding my brain white bread. (Who eats white bread anymore, anyhow?) But I also usually turn to Google/Yahoo for my first attempt at solving an information need. Now, I am almost never doing academic research, and perhaps there is the difference. I guess it is simply a question of using the right tool for the right use. Because surely these search engines/wikis are simply tools to be used at appropriate times, I agree with eFoundations.

At the risk of sounding like Andy Rooney here (who is forever on my black list because he dissed librarians), it reminds me of my theory that people who shop exclusively at Wal-Mart are statistically predisposed to have a lower quality of life. I have this theory because almost nothing in Wal-Mart seems to be made with attention to detail, design or beauty. It is all about function and price. And sometimes as a consumer, all you care about is function and price.

But other times you are willing to spend the money for high-style Italian leather sofas. But if you only shop at Wal-Mart to the exclusion of all else, you have no hope of ever even seeing the beautiful sofa because you mistakenly think the only universe available to you is what is on aisle 10.

As a shopper, you need to know there are times for Wal-Mart and there are times for Roche Bobois. And plenty of times for something in between. The same might go for information literacy? Or is it too crass a comparison.

Karen Markey is a faculty member in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. Earlier this year, she received a small grant from the Delmas Foundation to build a prototype online board game that teaches students information-literacy skills. Her game prototype is now fully operational and is being tested and evaluated by a class of 75 undergraduates at the University of Michigan.

They’ve just finished conducting interviews with student game players, but they haven’t had sufficient time to mull over interview data and analyze game play logs. They already recognize that the incentive for playing the game is a critical issue and future games must be intimately connected to a class assignment or project.

Because Karen wants to do something that would scale beyond Michigan, she is looking for research partners at public or academic libraries who are interested in building on her foundation, expanding what they have already done, and testing her approach with their library patrons. Her intent is to find libraries who want to collaborate on an IMLS National Leadership grant to host a unique instance of the game that is customized to achieving their information literacy objectives.

The game is based on the “search strategy” model that Tom Kirk and his Earlham College colleagues devised to teach undergraduates how to do library research. Karen chose the “Black Death” for the prototype game’s topic, and they are learning from their evaluation other topics that college-age students prefer.

Here are some links to learn more about their approach:

1. Information on their Storygame Project generally: http://www.si.umich.edu/~ylime/storygame.html
2. Playing-the-game video at YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u76tW-ne-yY
3. Manual for playing the game: http://ics.umflint.edu:3904/manual/manual.html

If you’re interested in partnering with Karen, you can contact her at ylime [ at ] umich.edu. I can’t wait to hear more about this project and watch it develop.

- Adina Lerner (Santa Monica PL), Alan D’Souza (San Francisco PL), Carol Bean (BeanWorks)

Adina

“review the pew” - A Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users report
we’re not going to help the elite tech users, want to try for middle of the road users, but really want to help the 49% with “few tech assets”
have to know your community’s demographics
census.gov only gives you 2000 numbers, which may not reflect what’s going on now
need to know your local resources, too

locating students
- listen to your patron requests
- create a survey (they did a “computer classes questionnaire”
- ask patrons to submit ideas to a Suggestion Box

community outreach
- appeal to niche groups, such as parents wanting to help children with homework online (offer a class on homework help for parents)
- offer health-related searching class using your databases for older patrons

bringing new skills to old hands
can the 20% middle of the road users be tempted?
- managing files/folders
- digital camera skills - using free sources such as Flickr, Pixenate, Picnik, Snipshot, Slide
- they found that 49% of their users had digital cameras, even though they might not have computers at home
- eBay skills
- they’re not legally allowed to offer classes on ebay because of liability issues, but they found certified ebay university trainers to do the sessions in their labs
- internet security issues
- help them understand about not using IE, virus control

you have to acknowledge your limitations, both of your library and your patrons
- hard to do Second Life in 90 minutes and you may not have bandwidth
- lack of reliable access to computers both in library and at home due to limitation of space and funds
- lack of transportation or mobility of the patron - go to a senior center, etc.

at what point will information literacy become a basic skill, similar to reading a newspaper or a book, navigating a library catalog, or using an ATM?

presentation will be on slideshare (search on her name)

Alan - Non-English Classes at SFPL

The Foundation
- mission statement
- have to present staff who look and sound like our communities
- literature & signage should reflect welcoming atmosphere, not just the “No’s”
- strong collections for populations
- website is in two additional languages, chinese and spanish
- have an “ethnic services committee,” although they rely on the individual branches to do the programming
- book club in russian and spanish
- offer computer classes in chinese (cantonese and mandarin), japanese (don’t really offer these anymore), russian, and spanish
- keyboards not in the native languages (such as chinese) is an issue
- they have a class in chinese wikipedia
- partnered with the seniornet people for a 4-week course that takes seniors from turning on your computer, to managing folders, to managing email; now they are asking for how to upload photos
interestingly, attendance numbers across all languages are down, though

have a “book a librarian” program where patrons can schedule a consultation with them about anything at all
need staff interested in teaching these things

recruiting trainers
- staff & volunteers
- language fluency
- technology fluency
- enthusiasm

training the trainer
- InfoPeople
- SeniorNet (still use their lesson plans, even though they don’t partner with them anymore)
- Mentoring - main way they train trainers now
- File sharing - share handouts, lesson plans, etc. this way
- Feedback

The Numbers for 2006/2007
- 3752 classes taught
- 450 attendees for non-english classes were taught in 50 classes
- >45 is the average age of attendees
- had a 100-year old Chinese woman attend a class!

hurdles
- facilities - renovations, adding meeting rooms
- technology - trying to upgrade, adding wireless, trying to use laptops, but that means issues such as smaller screens, touchpads, etc.; IT locks down all of the computers, which is another problem
- patrons - skillset is very, very low; requires a lot of patience; hand-eye coordination issues
- time & money - go for a lot of grants

overall, though, people are very, very grateful for these services

Carol - Make the Connection: Technology Training for the Older Generation

what she’s learned in 6 years of creating training for this group
- physical effects of aging (cataracts and declined vision, arthritis, neural noise, increased sensitivity to cold, decreasing hearing, etc.)
- cognitive effects (increased distractability, neural noise, etc.)

solutions include adaptive technology (move the screen closer, get glasses for computers, use track mice)
- they set resolution of screens to 400×800 resolution
- adaptive training techniques

North County Regional Library’s approach - mousing tutorial
beginning computer classes (Getting Started Series)

mousing tutorial assumes nothing and is progressive
- includes instruction on common experience with a computer
- includes instruction on physical problems using a mouse
- and it’s *fun*

Getting Started Classes
- went from 4 to 5
- designed to get older adults comfortable on the computer
- owning a computer is not required
- web-based

Class 1 - mousing
Class 2 - the browser
Class 3 - web forms
Class 4 - sign them up for web-based email, send an email
Class 5 - how to read email, more about email

classes are small trainer intensive, don’t last more than an hour max because their eyes glaze over after that
offered in the morning, no longer than 3 days apart (after 48 hours, they’ll lose the information if they don’t use/build on it)

classes teach only what they need to know with step-by-step instructions
make sure steps and pages are numbered
handouts should use a large, easy-to-read font
trainers speak slowly, with clear enunciation, and use unambiguous terms
students are encouraged and validated frequently to boost their self-confidence

prospective students are interviewed by the trainers to be sure they belong in the classes; makes sure everyone is at the same level, too
if they are motivated, they can learn it

outcomes
- <5% drop out
- <3% retake the course
- <99% have positive responses/comments
many go on to take regular classes at the library

there will always be some that fall through the cracks no matter what you do

can see the mousing around tutorial in english at http://pbclibrary.org/mousing/

all class materials are at http://esnips.com/users/ncrlab in word format

how does it feel to be these people - http://grouper.com/

question: as part of your decision-making process or publicity efforts, is there an outreach component at all, not just on your sites and locations? do you network with other groups to publicize these services?
answer: Alan - language librarians put up flyers in the ethnic supermarkets, etc. but we struggle with this; have not yet done a session at a facility that isn’t ours

I’m intrigued by Karin Dalziel’s Chart of 4 Types of Information Literacy, although I would add “evaluating” to the first “information literacy” box.

Sadly, most libraries don’t teach her third and fourth types - media literacy and digital literacy. For several years, I’ve highlighted Illinois’ Project Next Generation in my presentations and how it creates collaborative work spaces where kids can learn the skills necessary for media and digital literacies. I’d still like to see more libraries provide these types of opportunities because after all, where else are these they (and adults) going to learn them? Are libraries really just about books and information, or is there more we can and should be educating users about? Or at least providing the spaces in which they can do that?

A Personal Tour of Learning

“I’m not saying that my schooling was worthless, nor that there aren’t things that need to be taught. Absolutely not. I’m just saying that education’s job, in the 1950s and ’60s, was to prepare students for a future that was static and predictable.

I believe that we no longer live in those times. I believe that we need schools where students teach themselves. We must assure that they become literate, but that it is a literacy to learn — learning literacy. We should assure that they are gaining a common context for themselves, who they are, what they are, where they are, when they are, and that they appreciate the ways that their environment impacts them and how they impact their environment — and that they learn these things through their developing learning literacies.” [2 Cents Worth]

Applicable to how we teach information literacy, as well as how we teach in our library schools.