A Scalable Online Social Game for the
Development of Academic Research
Skills
Karen Markey, Chris Leeder, Fritz Swanson,
Gregory R. Peters, Jr., Brian J. Jennings, Beth St.
Jean, Victor Rosenberg, Soo Young Rieh,
Geoffrey V. Carter, Averill Packard, Robert L.
Frost, Loyd Mbabu, Andrew Calvetti
[email protected]
Outline
• The Problem
• The Solution = Games
• The BiblioBouts information literacy game
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Playing bouts and winning BiblioBouts
Learning objectives of BiblioBouts’ bouts
BiblioBouts demonstration
Game-play incentives
• Involvement of instructors and librarians
• Benefits of playing BiblioBouts (see also LOEX
proceedings)
• Our next steps in the BiblioBouts Project
• Project outcomes
The Problem
• Information literacy and reaching all students
• Students overestimate their information
literacy skills and knowledge
• A minority of institutions have first-year
programs with information literacy content
• Faculty ceding classrooms to librarians
• Students wanting just-in-time assistance that
is tailored to their specific situation
The Solution = Games!
• Gaming reinforces principles of good learning
– Results by trial and error, experimentation
– Self-discovery
– Repetition and practice
– Feeling of satisfaction from getting it right
– Transfering lessons-learned to later problems
– Meaning and knowledge are built up through
various modalities, not just words
Purpose of our Talk
• How to play and win the BiblioBouts
information literacy game
• How students benefit from game play
• Based on an evaluation of the game, how our
project team is redesigning and enhancing
BiblioBouts for game play in 2011
• What are the outcomes of the BiblioBouts
Project
BiblioBouts Project
• Design, develop, deploy, and evaluate the online
BiblioBouts game
• BiblioBouts gives students practice using library
research tools while they do their assignments
• BiblioBouts enables students to leverage their
research efforts finding sources, assessing their
usefulness, and choosing the best sources with
their classmates’ efforts so that everyone
benefits
• 3-year project funded by IMLS
BiblioBouts Overview
• A collection of mini-games or bouts that defines a
specific subset of skills within a much larger skill-set
and helps students structure their library research
efforts
• Partner with faculty who assign students a library
research and writing assignment on a broad-based
topic
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Digital writing and electracy
Business plans for Web 2.0 technologies
Hamlet
Literary arguments
Intercultural communication
The Bouts of BiblioBouts-1
• Beta BiblioBouts to be deployed in 2011
• Donor bout (2 weeks, concurrent with Closer)
– Search the web & scholarly databases for relevant
sources on the broad-based topic
– Save information in Zotero (which passes it to
BiblioBouts)
– For scoring, meet the Donor quota, exceed = cap
• Closer bout (2 weeks, concurrent with Donor)
– Choose your best 4 sources!
– For scoring, meet the Closer quota/cap of 4
sources
The Bouts of BiblioBouts-2
• Rating & Tagging bout (2 weeks)
– Tag the content of their opponents’ sources
• Audience level
• Format (journal article, blog, newspaper article)
• Subject matter (3 big ideas)
– Rate their opponents’ sources
• Credibility
• Relevance
The Bouts of BiblioBouts-3
• Rating & Tagging scoring
– Quota, no cap
– For scoring, multiple assessments per source: 4
students rate and tag each closed source
– BiblioBouts scores based on average of the 4
assessments
– Quota: if 4 closed donations per student in a 20student class, each student rates and tags 16
closed donations
– Exceed quota for bonus points
The Bouts of BiblioBouts-4
• Best Bibliography bout (3 days)
– Disclose the specific topic of their written research
paper
– What 3 big ideas their paper will discuss
– Choose the 10 best sources for your paper
To Win BiblioBouts:
• Be the first to play a bout
• Meet all quotas, exceed them for bonus points
• Match the same credibility and relevance ratings that
opponents give to sources
• Match the same tags opponents give to sources
• Choose high-rated sources for your Best Bibliography
• Choose sources tagged with the same big ideas as the
big ideas your paper will cover
• Choose the same high-rated sources for your Best
Bibliography that your opponents choose for theirs
• Be the first to donate sources that your opponents
choose for their Best Bibliography
Learning Objectives
• Donor: Become experienced users of online library
tools for finding relevant information on an academic
topic
• Closer: Become efficient finding and saving digital fulltexts, assessing their relevance, and choosing the best
ones on an academic topic
• Rating & Tagging: Develop proficiency evaluating
sources based on indicators of their quality, their
relevance to the topic, and their usefulness to potential
audiences
• Best Bibliography: Gain experience specifying a
research topic and choosing the best sources for
writing a paper on this topic
BiblioBouts Demonstration
• Chris will demonstration the alpha version of
BiblioBouts
• This is alpha BiblioBouts that was deployed
and evaluated in 13 classes at 4 universities in
this academic year
Evaluating BiblioBouts
• Evaluated in 13 classes at 4 universities
• Multi-methodological evaluation
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Focused-group interviews (students)
Pre- and post-game questionnaires (students)
Online diary forms (students)
Follow-up interviews 4 months after game play
(students)
– Pre- and post-game personal interviews (instructors)
– Game logs of student game-play
• Beta version of BiblioBouts available for
deployment and evaluation in 2011
Game-Play Incentives
• Students must receive incentives for playing
games
• Instructors must:
– Incorporate game play into their course syllabus
– Set the parameters of minimum-level game play for
for receiving course credit (e.g., BiblioBouts quotas)
• Examples of course credit:
– Extra credit
– A choice between playing the game or completing a
different assignment
– Required game play with credit that is based on gameplay performance
Involvement of Instructors
• Students react positively when instructors are
involved
– Let students participate in broad-topic selection
– Suggest relevant databases, keywords for online
searching, relevant online journals & web sites
– Tell students how to determine whether the
authors of the sources they find are experts
– Tell students how to distinguish between scholarly
and non-scholarly sources
• Additional ideas at our Instructor FAQ
Involvement of Librarians
• When students play BiblioBouts, they want
librarians to
– Awaken them to the library’s database portal
– Tell them where to start: Suggest relevant databases,
keywords, online journals & web sites
– Demonstrate BiblioBouts including sign-on, show
them its troubleshooting FAQ, game videos, game
instructions
– Demonstrate database searching
– Show them how to use Zotero
– Help them understand online texts: citation, abstract,
full digital text, bibliography
BiblioBouts Benefits
• Realizing that library-portal databases yield
sources that are qualitatively better than Google,
Wikipedia, and the web
• Getting practice using a step-by-step approach to
library research and learning a methodology for
evaluating sources
• Finding relevant sources for their assignment that
other students donated to BiblioBouts
• Reducing procrastination
• Putting more effort into reading, scrutinizing, and
comparing sources
Benefits in their Own Words
• “I think BiblioBouts … would be really
useful … because I am like a sucker
for procrastinating and writing my
paper and finding all of my sources 1
or 2 days before it’s due … So this
BiblioBouts forced me to start
thinking about the paper and start
finding sources weeks ahead of the
due date.”
Benefits in their Own Words
• “I think it helped us to read the
articles. Like when I was sorting, I
read through, especially like rating,
tagging, and sorting, I had to read
through and it helped me find the
articles that I used for my paper.”
Benefits in their Own Words
• “Usually I use Google just, you know, and like
comparing the results I would get from Google
to these [library] databases is a huge
difference and like I really realize that now,
that the material that I was getting was not
that reliable and not that scholarly and to be
writing research papers and stuff, I need to be
using like databases and stuff like that.”
Benefits in their Own Words
• “I think [the game] is good because
you’re not realizing at the time that
you’re learning about research. Like,
you might not want to think, ‘Oh, I
want to go learn about library
research today.’ You’re playing the
game and you’re learning about it
without doing that.”
Our Next Steps-1
• Based on evaluation results, we are now
redesigning and enhancing BiblioBouts:
– Simplified set-up procedure
– Greater feedback enables students to assess how
their game play compares with that of their
opponents
– Streamlined BiblioBouts with more
interrelationships between bouts
• See our latest interim report for a full list
Our Next Steps-2
• Deploy and evaluate BiblioBouts in winter and fall
2011 classes
– In winter 2011, we will evaluate the game at our 5
participating institutions (Baltimore, Chicago State,
Michigan, Saginaw Valley State, Troy-Montgomery)
• What is your interest in deploying BiblioBouts at
your institution in fall 2011?
– In academic courses
– In for-credit bibliographic instruction courses
• Invite you to play demo BiblioBouts
Project Outcomes
• Make BiblioBouts available as open-source game
software so that librarians can incorporate it into their
information literacy programs
• Find a permanent home for BiblioBouts to ensure
technical support and upgrades for users
• Confirm and add to our game-design premises list and
generate a model of best practices for the design,
development, and deployment of information literacy
games to guide others in game development
[email protected]
http://bibliobouts.si.umich.edu/