I have an image that I like to use when I have in-person classes to show the ways to come up with a research topic, but for the online environemnt I wanted to make it more dynamic. Initially, when I was putting it together I wanted to make it a bit more choose your own adventure themed, but to be totally honest I ran out of time before the class. I was able to make the spreadsheet more responsive than a static image would have been, but I'm not altogether happy with how it came out.
What Works: The flow is good. I like the two branch structure and I stand by the text of the tool. What Doesn't: The formatting gets real wonky when too much text is added. I also think it's too long in terms of its dimensions. What I'd Change: I think there's potential for Sheets to support a more dynamic research topic/question flow chart, but I'd have to do some work to figure out how that would work.
0 Comments
My teaching philosophy tends to be grounded very much in doing and playing around with things. I think this is really important, especially for information literacy, because a lot of what we teach in library instruction sessions are skils not facts. And now that we're all online because of the global novel coronavirus pandemic, active learning tools that support these goals have to look different.
Of the learning games I've been exposed to, I really like Walsh and Williamson's SOURCES because I'm positively tickled by thinking about collecting sources for a bibliography as a deck building game. Naturally, handing cards out wouldn't be a super save pedagogical choice even if we could be in the same room and it's downright impossible over Microsoft Teams. So, I took the underlying structure of their game and made an activity that kept the instruction goals the same but was in a format that was friendlier to my current circumstances. You're welcome to click through the game yourself, but the core idea is that you pick a topic on the first page and then you're brought to a collection of 10-ish sources from which you pick some number that satisfy the "assignment" requirements and build toward a coherent argument. When you hit submit, you're taken to a discussion page where I describe what choices I would have made with the sources in front of me. The class I made this for was partially synchronous, partially asynchronous (students could choose what path), so I had to think about people in the Teams meeting with me on the day I was set to teach and people who would be watching the session later. What Worked: The collection of sources I put together for each prompt worked really well and offered different paths to a bibliography depending on how the player wanted to put their argument together. The students in class the day of said it was a really helpful way to think about what role different kinds of sources (scholarly, popular, etc) played in constructing an argument. And they thought it was fun which is a huge bonus because I wasn't sure how engaging it would come across on Teams. What Didn't Work: I had a little trouble getting a student to volunteer (this was the first of three classes I was embedded in for this course) so their professor ended up being my volunteer, but that did lead to a good conversation between the two of us about what he was choosing and he was a real sport about talking through his process for the students. The google form format wasn't ideal because participants had to scroll up and down between the "source cards" and the selection options. Collecting the sources was pretty labor intensive. What I Want to Change in the Future: I might not use google forms for this game. The scrolling up and down is intrinsically a significant source of cognitive load, and I'd like to minimise that so that players can focus more on learning the skill and not navigating the format. I'm not sure what a good alternative would be, and the form was fine as a proof of concept, but I definitely want to make the underlying structure less distracting. |
Interested in any of these? Use the Contact tab to be in touch!
You can also view the current state of these activities on my instruction menu: Categories
All
Archives
October 2022
|