Should we use stories or games to teach Information Literacy?

One of my favourite articles in the library literature (*snicker*) is Jeff Purdue's wonderfully written Stories, Not Information: Transforming Information Literacy:

What does it mean to want to replace information with stories? Drawing upon (Walter) Benjamin's insights, I would suggest that we need to present IL and research as paths of discovery that must be self-generated. Look at the reference interview, during which librarians act as guides. Although there are situations when we simply want to give patrons "information," typically we engage the patron with questions: "What are you trying to find? What is your purpose? How have you gone about searching so far?" Or, in storytelling terms, "Where have you come from? And where are you going?"

And so, let's tell stories. Here's one I learned from Robert Graves's I, Claudius that was recently re-told by Dorothea Salo (her comments are in italics):

It seems, then, that we may as well abandon all hope of finding it, unless perhaps… why, there's Sulpicius! He'll know if anyone does. Good morning, Sulpicius. I want you to do a favour for Asinius Pollio and myself. There's a book we want to look at, a commentary by a Greek called Polemocles on Polybius's Military Tactics. I seem to remember coming across it here once, but the catalogue does not mention it and the librarians here are perfectly useless...

Sulpicius gnawed his beard for awhile and then said: "You've got the name wrong. Polemocrates was the name and he wasn't a Greek, in spite of his name, but a Jew. Fifteen years ago I remember seeing it on that top shelf, the fourth from the window, right at the back, and the title tag had just 'A Dissertation on Tactics' on it. Let me get it for you. I don't expect it's been moved since then."

So let's recap. Livy had the author and author's ethnicity (and possibly language) wrong, and he couldn't remember the title—but boy, he sure as heck expected the catalogue and the librarians to turn up his book—er, scroll—anyway!

Any reference librarian will tell you that this sort of reference request happens all the time. Graves absolutely nailed it with this anecdote.

I've been thinking about games and how, perhaps, they might be applied to teach concepts used in Information Literacy. The game format that immediately came to mind was of a quest-type adventure in which the player must venture out of the library to find the necessary information to track down a type of Holy Grail. But in the absence of a helpful librarian (or Sulpicius) , it is the player that must go out into the game space and try to find out which part of her citation she has that is true and which parts need to be corrected by some sort of digging around and asking of questions.

Granted, it would only be a game that would be fun for librarians.

The other reason why I won't be pursuing this line of thinking for a library-game is that such a game is inherently celebrating the barriers to knowledge. But we are looking for the Holy Grail not because it is a goal unto itself but because we are on such a quest to cure the king and heal the land. The game - like the mechanics of search - is a distraction from the real work at hand.

Let's end this post with another story. This one is from Jeff Purdue,

Let me tell you a story. Recently, I directed an independent study with a student who was conducting a research project in an attempt to formulate a theoretical response to a series of advertisements by which she felt personally affected. She worked hard, and by the end of the quarter had gotten a handle on some pretty sophisticated material, like Gramsci, Stuart Hall, Barthes, and Althusser. She really made those ideas her own; she transformed them. Although she was able to work in an original way with the authors mentioned above, the finished paper struck a carefully neutral tone: she seemed disconnected from it all. This bothered me because I remember the enthusiasm with which she approached the research for this project, so I asked her about it. I said: These advertisements made you angry. When we first talked about this project, you made it clear what your personal stake in it was: Where did the emotion go? Her reply: I thought that that's what I'm supposed to do. And she's right; much academic writing tends to avoid emotion, but good academic writing knows when to put a little passion in—it can be a very powerful tool. There is a place for righteous anger. But more importantly, staying connected with the emotion that made you undertake a research project is a way of staying connected with yourself and what you hold most important.

Librarians need to remind ourselves that these are the connections we need to reinforce, whether through stories or through games.

Who is the biggest enemy of learning?

My daughter just passed her first birthday and so its not surprising that I am very fond of Neil Gaiman's benediction for a Blueberry Girl which he wrote for his God-daughter.

One line in this poem struck me in particular: "Remind her that Fortune is blind." This is a sentiment not often expressed in our "you can do anything if you believe in yourself" culture. To know an alternative to this current notion that modern man has somehow wrest himself from fate is one of the reasons why Professor Donald Kagan of Yale thinks we would do well to study the ancient Greeks.

Last week I listened to Dr. Kagan's lecture to entertain myself as I was doing the dishes. There are no slides to see - just 33 minutes of a man talking from a stage. It reminded me of my own university days when a course meant you were given dry facts from a textbook and fluid thought professed from your professor and somehow you had to weave them together into something you could remember for your midterm.

Now that I work at a university, I know that this "sage on a stage" teaching style is frowned upon as it has been largely discredited for being largely ineffectual for memory retention in most students. Instead, faculty are encouraged to engage their students in the classroom and online using a myriad of techniques and technologies. Anything goes - except for reading a lecture to your students. It is as if the new slogan is "The biggest enemy of learning is a talking teacher."

And yet something doesn't sit right with me about this development.

While I acknowledge that the lecture is not suitable for all ages or contexts, I don't want to see the lecture become completely banished from the university. We still need it. Sometimes, intertwining complex ideas need to be unwound in a slow and deliberate manner. Five lectures over five days can change your worldview forever. A keynote speech is essentially a lecture and if you've heard a good keynote (or my personal example: Rick Salutin's talk at WILU 2007) you know that it sits with you and moves you in a completely different way than a "presentation" does.

There is nothing wrong with a teacher talking as long as that teacher is telling a compelling story.

The stories told by the ancient Greeks are so compelling that we still tell them. When I was in university, one of my favourite indulgences was to go to the local comic book shop and buy Neil Gaiman's The Sandman - a series in where ancient myths take both modern and timeless forms.

And then, I would get back to the lectures.

The care of the sick unfolds in stories

I can't remember where I heard the anecdote, but author Bill Bryson recommends to play a little game next time you are in a museum and find yourself being numbed by all the objects in front of you: pick out the one object in the museum that you would take home if you could.

I'm playing a similar game to keep myself engaged in my periodical reading and the results can be found in the mother blog under the label maglog.

So far, the most interesting item I've found in the January 19th issue of The New Yorker is an ad on page 11 for Columbia University's Graduate Program in Narrative Medicine.

The care of the sick unfolds in stories. The effective practice of healthcare requires the ability to recognize, absorb, interpret, and act on the stories and plights of others.

Collaborative Story Telling as a Game

I have never played this game but I can't wait for my children to get to the age in which I can try it out with them:

The game is called Shadows and it's a very simple role playing game that even very young children can play. In Shadows, the game master is the narrator of a story. The story begins with the characters waking up somewhere from a noise. The game master will then begin a story and occasionally interrupt it to ask those who are playing to do three things: say what they want to happen next; say what "Their Shadow" - a character that always wants to get into trouble - wants to happen next; and to roll two die. If the Shadow die comes up with a higher number than the "Good" die, then the story will unfold as The Shadow wants. [LionKimbro's unalog]

I have never played role playing games myself, but my friends and I in high school and in university, used to write "add-on short stories" (otherwise known as the Surrealist game, Exquisite Corpse) via email. Looking back at them, I would say that the characters we constructed were all Shadows of our own selves.

What detractors of games in libraries may not understand (or may care not to understand as is more often the case) is that gaming can be thought of as something much larger than following a set of rules to determine a winner and a loser. I'm following the work of Jane McGonigal trying to better understand what this much larger force is and can be.

The gift of storytelling

The baby was getting a little fussy as it was approaching his bedtime so we picked him up and took him to the front porch to calm him down and enjoy the early evening. Unlike most evenings, there was no clamour of small neighbourhood children about and so the baby was entertained by watching the occasional car go by when he wasn't pulling my hair.

And then the little girl next door wandered out. She was the shiest girl on the block and also the one most desperate to have someone to play with as her little brother was just a baby. We'd frequently see her standing on her front lawn forlornly waiting for a neighbour's child to emerge, waiting with pure ache. When she did play with the other children, she would happily but wordlessly follow them along and mimic whatever game was at hand. This was not just because of shyness; she was a recent immigrant and English was her second language. Like most children, she paid little attention to adults but over time, she overcame her shyness to occasionally join us on the porch so she could silently stare at Mats, the baby, up close. It was yesterday when she spotted us, she stopped, stared at us for a moment, and then bolted back inside.

Moments later she emerged with a stack of small books and she ran to our porch, stopped dead in front of us and looked expectantly. Ghengis took the pile of books, picked one, and began to read to her. You could see her brighten with delight. Reading fed her happiness.

I noticed that all the books had come from the Windsor Public Library. It is moments like these that make me proud to be a librarian.