Report from #ecil2014 - Providing New Learning Strategies for Information Literacy Instruction

Next item I'll blog from the European Conference on Information Literacy, held in Dubrovnik is From Know That to How From Know That to How From Know That – Providing New Learning Strategies for Information Literacy Instruction, authored by Kathrin Knautz, Anja Wintermeyer, Lisa Orszullok and Simone Soubusta (Heinrich-Heine-University). They are using a computer role play game, Legend of Zyren, as part of a credit bearing course on knowledge representation. This approach is also carried outside the game. She said that the students reacted much more positively to group work when it became "forming a guild to compete against other guilds" - she gave an example of having to explain a technical term through drawing or mime. She also gave an example from the computer game - a murder mystery quest. In order to solve it you have to create a faceted classification (e.g. for the murder weapon). There was an evaluation, with a positive response. At the end of the course no one thought it uninteresting, no one thought it was useless and grades improved. A nice touch was that they had used students from another class who worked on developing the game, for credits!
Photo by Sheila Webber