Social Media as Game Strategy: Twitter in the #infolit Instruction Session
Last week I had the pleasure of attending the State University of New York (SUNY) Library Association Conference (#SUNYLA2015) at SUNY Purchase College. I’ve attended SUNY conferences before on technology, online learning, instructional design and copyright topics, but this was my first SUNYLA. It was so wonderful to connect with librarians across New York State, working in a variety of institutions--from research universities to community colleges and to comprehensive/liberal arts colleges--and to realize that we’re all dealing with the same stuff. Because Purchase is so close to NYC, a lot of folks came up from the City and from within the City University of New York (CUNY) system, and other colleges downstate.
I presented a poster with a CUNY Queens College Librarian, my friend and colleague, Electronic Resources boss Kelly Blanchat. There’s a link to the poster above on figshare and a screenshot of the basic levels of the game below that align with critical information literacy concepts.
The lesson plan uses twitter as a gaming platform to engage students in topic exploration and strategic searching by using hashtags as controlled vocabularies.
Once students get a handle on the concept of how to search using hashtags in social media, they start to collect related hashtags to create a concept map.
Next, we introduce students to the library databases where the conceptual experience with hashtags is used to introduce and apply searching strategically for keywords and subject terms.
This transition from popular to scholarly searching allows students to apply connect the conversations from social media which are relevant to their lives to research expanding on their lived experiences in scholarly formats.
The key to this lesson plan is a conversation about how to translate twitter hashtags to library subject terms. This inevitably involves student discussion of the meanings behind common terms, casual and slang language, and the implications of translating vernacular and community-based knowledge to a higher education institutional framework.
Students may have to codeswitch from the hashtags they found in online conversations to the acceptable research terms for library databases: but then, isn’t that what we all had to do at some point in our careers?
While the game exposes the gap between communities of affinity online and scholarship as a conversation in research, it creates discussion and moments of analysis for students and instructor to expand the deeper meanings and ideas underlying those 140-characters bursts into fuller and richer contexts supported by strategic and specific search terminology.
If you’re curious for more about this lesson plan, I’m also super stoked to announce that Kelly Blanchat and I are writing a chapter on it for the #critlib book on critical pedagogy edited by Nicole Pagowsky and Kelly McElroy for ACRL Press. Look for it in 2016.