A Scalable Online Social Game for the Development of Academic Research Skills

1. 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 info@bibliobouts.org

2. Outline • The Problem • The Solution = Games • The BiblioBouts information literacy game • 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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 • Digital writing and electracy • Business plans for Web 2.0 technologies • Hamlet • Literary arguments • Intercultural communication

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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 20-student class, each student rates and tags 16 closed donations • Exceed quota for bonus points

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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 full-texts, 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

14. 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

15. Evaluating BiblioBouts • Evaluated in 13 classes at 4 universities • Multi-methodological evaluation • 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

16. 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 game-play performance

17. 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

18. 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

19. 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

20. 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.”

21. 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.”

22. 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.”

23. 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.”

24. 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

25. 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

26. Project Outcomes info@bibliobouts.org http://bibliobouts.si.umich.edu/ • 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