Nicola Semple

On Monday, I attended the CILIP Information Literacy Group Event – Game-based learning for Information Literacy Teaching. For the sake of simplicity, the areas of information literacy on the first talk of this event were divided into the following areas:

• Finding information
• Evaluating information
• Plagiarism (or ‘academic honesty’)
• Construction (of information, such as in an essay)

I work with both FE and HE students, and I am currently improving the study skills programme for both. I attended this CILIP event in the hopes that it may help me in approaching future sessions in a more playful (and less theoretical and practical) way, to make it more accessible to a wider variety of learners. I believe it may have done just that!

Games for Learning

Sarah Pavey, an independent trainer and consultant for school libraries, gave a lot of fantastic game ideas that can be adapted to have an information literacy focus. What I gained most from Sarah’s talk was that the game comes first, and the learning comes naturally through playing the game. So most games, some you may not have even considered, could be adapted for a learning purpose. Such as Two Truths and a Lie, a game that can be played with students as a way to teach information evaluation.

Since the session, I started to think of games that I like that I’d never considered as a possible learning activity before, and then it came to me:

I love mysteries, I grew up reading a lot of Agatha Christie, and Cluedo is one of my favourite board games. It had never occured to me that games like Cluedo could improve your ability to find information. Or at least teach the concept of finding information. I’m hoping to incorporate Cluedo into an information literacy session, so I’ll update you on my progress with this soon…

Adults Can Play Too

I’m not going to lie, I have difficulty doing anything just for the fun of it. It is a flaw of mine that I have to always know that there is a purpose to what I am doing. Most likely it’s a symptom of my anxiety disorder, and I do try to push myself in this area all the time. Animal Crossing is my most recent attempt to do this, but I still managed to find a reason for a spreadsheet and built a library on my island. It is important for my villagers to have access to books and learning. Although they seem to enjoy sitting in the outdoor cafe much more, but I digress…

Rosie Jones, the Director of Student and Library Services at Teeside University, was the second speaker at the CILIP event. This talk left me thinking about how we as adults can use games as icebreakers and team building exercises. Examples of this were from things like conferences, but I realised that things like Top Trumps could be a great addition to library inductions, and playful prompts like making animals out of your GPS routes would be good for familiarising students with a new campus.

Death to Powerpoint

The third and final speaker of the event was Andrew Walsh, Academic Librarian and Teaching Fellow at University of Huddersfield. He’s also the owner of Innovative Libraries Limited and the editor of Journal of Play in Adulthood.

Andrew surprised us all and switched up his presentation when his rabbit attacked and destroyed it. The rest of the talk was told as a story, instead of relying on PowerPoint slides. Which got me thinking – why, when we have an upcoming session, do we instinctively open PowerPoint and started filling up slides with text and pictures? Who made this a rule and can we please stop? Let’s get people moving, and literally thinking on their feet. Studies do show that as we get older, we become more fixed to our seats and our screens. But we know we can learn in many different ways, so it’s time to get creative.

#ILGGBL2022