5 Ways in Which Pokemon Go Exemplifies 21st Century Learning

With all the recent news coverage about Pokemon Go, and because I am really impressed with the way libraries are responding to this trend (librarians rock!), I thought I’d take the opportunity to discuss how Pokemon Go can be seen as an exemplar of 21st century learning.

What makes Pokemon Go a valuable 21st century learning tool? Here are 5 ways.

1. It’s a fun way to practice critical thinking and problem solving skills. Pokemon Go requires strategic thinking, and strategic thinking is central to successful problem solving.
2. It’s collaborative. 21st century learning is all about collaboration, and Pokemon Go fosters a sense of teamwork, something so important to the collaborative process.
3. It requires information literacy skills. Finding, evaluating, and synthesizing information coming from both the virtual and physical world is information literacy in practice.
4. It promotes spatial thinking skills. With the explosion and increasing ubiquity of GIS technology, spatial thinking is an essential skill for 21st century learning. And spatial thinking is an important skill in STEM education.
5. It’s an avenue to digital citizenship. Digital literacy, digital access, digital commerce (pokecoins), digital etiquette (and real world etiquette), and digital security (personal information) are just some of the elements that must be practiced or addressed during Pokemon Go play.

What makes Pokemon Go different from many other games is its transmediality. The physical world and virtual world truly collide in this transmedia game adventure. And because Pokemon Go is part of a much larger (and long-lived) transmedia franchise, librarians can take advantage of its many media platforms (graphic novels, videos, video games)  to promote multimodal literacy.

Pay attention librarians! Pokemon Go is not just a trendy new game. It also represents an advancement in the growth of this phenomenon we call transmedia storytelling. With transmedia storytelling, we are entering a new era of literacy, where the idea of reading is changing altogether to encompass reading in multiple modalities (multimodal literacy) in order to gain the full story.

 

 

The “3 I’s” of Information Literacy Design

With the ACRL Framework and metaliteracy and metacognition on every academic librarian’s mind, what does good information literacy design look like now? Actually, not much different than before the framework, but I think there is more awareness that the “old way” of doing things was not all that effective. In today’s post, I will lay out my thoughts on the matter.

In trying to come up with a way to simplify the discussion of good information literacy design (and make it easier to remember), I’ve categorized it into three areas — what I will call the “3 I’s.” The “3 I’s” of good information literacy design encompass elements that should be present in all information literacy programs. They are as follows:

Integration

Information literacy is always practiced within the context of something else, so it makes sense that it should always be integrated or anchored within the context of a course or discipline. Otherwise, transfer becomes problematic (this conclusion comes from the research about transfer in critical thinking, which shares many similarities). That is why I do not recommend standalone information literacy courses, unless they are anchored within a discipline (e.g. nursing, teacher training) or integrated into a learning community.

Integrated information literacy reflects the community of practice concept that is central to the ACRL Framework. While anchored courses and learning communities may not be feasible in all academic settings, integrating information literacy within courses across the (core) curriculum is a reachable goal for most institutions.

Well, isn’t that already being done with one-shot sessions?

Not really. One-shots don’t represent integration in any meaningful way. Integration is a holistic and seamless part of a course. In one-shots, information literacy is usually shoehorned into a course.

There are a number of strategies that I have written about in previous posts for holistically integrating information literacy into courses, including the interactive syllabus, Google Docs, and embedding the library (not just the librarians).  Another approach is through the development of a dispositions rubric based on the ACRL Framework. This kind of rubric can easily be shared with students as a core reference in any course that requires the practice of information literacy skills. By creating a rubric that identifies the dispositions of an information literate student with examples of associated actions (knowledge practices), students are provided a metacognitive tool for gauging their own information literacy progress. In addition to the rubric, librarians can provide scaffolds that help students achieve the goals of the rubric. Such a tool would also be invaluable for classroom instructors, who would then be able to intentionally plan the course’s projects and assignments with the rubric in mind.

Inquiry

Inquiry is at the heart of information literacy. We have a question, we seek out information on the topic. And information literacy skills help us sift through the world of information to find the good stuff.

In a perfect world, students would always be motivated to find the good stuff, but sometimes things get in the way of that. Like metacognitive miscalibration and self efficacy and self regulation. Addressing those issues is essential to improving students’ success (not to mention habits of mind) when it comes to improving inquiry skills.

Engagement in scholarly pursuit is also a necessary component of developing strong inquiry skills, and engagement can depend on approaches to inquiry. There are four types of inquiry: confirmation, structured, guided, and open. There is a tendency in higher education to focus on open inquiry, where students ask a question and then find the answer. But, is open inquiry really the best approach, especially for first- and second-year students? My thought on that is no (in most cases). Why? If we are serious about teaching students a set of specialized knowledge practices to develop their information literacy dispositions as laid out in the ACRL Framework, they are going to need a bit more guidance. Besides that, most students at the lower undergraduate level are not developmentally ready for open inquiry, at least in terms of their reasoning skills. In other words, open inquiry may lead to loss of student engagement for the developmentally unready student who lacks the metacognitive and self regulated learning skills that are necessary for information literacy (maybe that’s why so many fall back on the comfort zone of Google).

I think that a better approach to inquiry in lower level undergraduate students is guided inquiry, where more support in the planning and design of the research process for a shared question or goal provides the scaffolding that many students still need to become information literate. Guided inquiry is more common in K-12 environments, but when used with first- and second-year students, it provides a nice entry point into the ways of thinking and ways of doing that go on in a scholarly community of practice. Kulthau’s approach to guided inquiry is a great place to start.

Interaction

Interaction reflects the very essence of communities of practice. In an information literacy community of practice, there are three types of interaction: student-student interaction, student-librarian interaction, and student-content interaction.

Student-student interaction takes place with peer teaching, peer modeling, peer review, and discussions. Peer teaching and peer modeling can be supported by librarians through such means as library-sponsored study groups or peer research assistant programs. Peer review of the various steps in the research and writing process (outlines, bibliographies, synthesis) should be encouraged. And discussions, whether in-class or online, allow students to share what they are learning about the research process with each other.

Student-librarian interaction provides students with insight into the expert ways of thinking and doing that are so important in learning information literacy habits of mind. An ever-present connection to the library, one that ensures student awareness and access to library resources (including librarians) both off and on campus, is a necessary step in making this happen. And it is more likely to happen when integrated approaches to information literacy design are utilized (see above).

Student-content interaction includes all the ways in which students interact with library resources, including library instructional resources. This includes, but is not limited to, easy-to-navigate library web sites, resource guides that avoid information overload, and library tutorials that reflect the principles of multimedia learning.