Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Teaching Information Literacy through Fantasy Football

We haven't talked too much about libraries using gaming yet. Check out Paul Waelchli’s article in the January 2008 issue of the Association of College and Research Library News: Librarians' sport of choice: Teaching information literacy through fantasy football (C&RL News, January 2008. Vol. 69, No. 1)

So, not only can librarians teach students to be media literate, they can use what young people already love doing (video games) and connect from there to teach about information literacy, which then students will apply to other situations. That's the premise, anyway.

“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....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…."

He also has a Research Quest blog on which he writes about "educational applications for video games and gaming strategies," from political video games to Grand Theft Auto.
And, finally, here's a chart from his blog showing which ACRL Information Literacy Standards are met by playing Final Fantasy, Halo, and Madden.

I first saw this on Jenny Levine's blog: http://theshiftedlibrarian.com/

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