The study seeks to understand what teachers know about students’ friend networks and how they use that information for instruction.
Abstract
Purpose
The study seeks to understand what teachers know about students’ friend networks and how they use that information for instruction.
Design/methodology/approach
This qualitative study relied on interviews and sociograms that teachers drew of students’ friend networks.
Findings
Our data suggest that teachers’ awareness of their students’ friend networks varies by their experience and their exposure to students. Also, their use of this information for instruction coalesces around dimensions of grouping and social support.
Research limitations/implications
This study took place at one school. To more deeply understand what teachers perceive about their students’ friend networks and how they use that information for instruction, more studies could be done with teachers in more schools.
Practical implications
Implications might suggest developing teachers’ social competence to support their students’ learning and development.
Originality/value
While studies cited in this paper have explored teachers’ knowledge of students’ social networks, this study builds on this work by exploring how that information can be useful for instruction. In addition, this study explores the use of teachers drawing sociograms as representations of what they know about students’ friend networks.
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Peter Samuelson Wardrip, Samuel Abramovich, Annie White, Lauren Penney, Stephanie Chang and Lisa Brahms
Seeks to argue that procedural literacy, of which programming is a part, is critically important for new media scholars and practitioners and that its opposite, procedural…
Abstract
Purpose
Seeks to argue that procedural literacy, of which programming is a part, is critically important for new media scholars and practitioners and that its opposite, procedural illiteracy, leaves one fundamentally unable to grapple with the essence of computational media.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper looks at one of the earliest historical calls for universal procedural literacy, explores how games can serve as an ideal object around which to organize a procedural literacy curriculum, and describes a graduate course developed at Georgia Tech, Computation as an Expressive Medium, designed to be a first course in procedural literacy for new media practitioners.
Findings
To achieve a broader and more profound procedural literacy will require developing an extended curriculum that starts in elementary school and continues through college. Encountering procedurality for the first time in a graduate level course is like a first language course in which students are asked to learn the grammar and vocabulary, read and comment on literature, and write short stories, all in one semester; one's own students would certainly agree that this is a challenging proposition.
Originality/value
New media scholars and practitioners, including game designers and game studies scholars, may assume that the “mere” technical details of code can be safely bracketed out of the consideration of the artifact. Contrary to this view, it is argued that procedural literacy, of which programming is a part, is critically important for new media scholars and practitioners and that its opposite, procedural illiteracy, leaves one fundamentally unable to grapple with the essence of computational media.
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Rebeca Peacock, Heather Grevatt, Ellie Dworak, Lindsay Marsh and Shelly Doty
This paper aims to describe the evolution of an academic library’s approach to first-year student information literacy instruction from face-to-face instruction to a fully…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to describe the evolution of an academic library’s approach to first-year student information literacy instruction from face-to-face instruction to a fully integrated online microcredential. The design considerations, motivation theory and evaluation methods used to create and evaluate the course are also discussed, with implications for future library microcredential design, integration and research in campus first-year seminar courses.
Design/methodology/approach
In this paper, a multi-method approach is used to evaluate an undergraduate asynchronous online information literacy microcredential embedded in a first-year seminar. Two methods (Likert scale survey and coded reflection essays) were used to evaluate whether one method may be more beneficial than the other in future iterations of evaluating microcredentials.
Findings
In looking at a complex cognitive process such as motivation, multiple approaches to analyzing student thoughts may be beneficial. In addition, the role of the first-year seminar instructor, to help students make a connection to library material, is reinforced as is the need to provide students with accurate expectations for time required to complete online asynchronous microcredential courses.
Originality/value
This paper addresses the evaluation of microcredentials in academic libraries and also has implications for other campus departments investigating the creation of microcourses that are integrated into campus programs. These implications can be addressed in the design and development phases of the microcredential using Keller’s attention, relevance, confidence and satisfaction model, and in turn, can be improved through iterative evaluation cycles using collected student data.
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J. Tuomas Harviainen and Amon Rapp
The purpose of this paper is to expand the research of games as information systems. It illustrates how significant parts of massively multiplayer online role-playing function…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to expand the research of games as information systems. It illustrates how significant parts of massively multiplayer online role-playing function like information retrieval from a library database system.
Design/methodology/approach
By combining ideas from earlier contributions on the topics of game environments as information systems, the paper explores how gameplay connects to information retrieval, restricted content access, and information system structure. The paper then proceeds to examine this idea through an ethnographic study conducted in World of Warcraft during 2012-2016.
Findings
By discussing how multiplayer digital game play is a form of information retrieval, the paper shows that players enjoy the well-restricted access to information that is a constitutive element of gameplay. Examining controlled access, procedural literacies and emphatic keywords, the paper finds that content relevances and system use may be influenced by hedonic concerns rather than task efficiency.
Originality/value
The study of retrieval issues related to gaming enriches our knowledge on inferences in retrieval. It shows that people may prefer that their access to information be limited, in order to make system use more interesting.
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Bernadett Koles and Peter Nagy
The current paper aims to embrace an interdisciplinary approach to illustrate some of the ways in which virtual worlds expanded upon the individual, social and professional…
Abstract
Purpose
The current paper aims to embrace an interdisciplinary approach to illustrate some of the ways in which virtual worlds expanded upon the individual, social and professional options of employees in organizational settings.
Design/methodology/approach
Through an extensive literature review, the paper compiles the latest and most fundamental research capturing relevant concepts from the fields of psychology, pedagogy, management and human-computer interaction.
Findings
The current conceptual model incorporates individual- and group-level outcomes associated with virtual world participation, along three primary dimensions, namely self-reference, role experimentation and social capital, accounting for potential variation based on the extent of organizational engagement.
Practical implications
The three proposed dimensions elaborated in the current model, including reflexivity/transference, role playing/role identification, and group collaboration/virtual teams, enable organizations to understand the likely outcomes of their virtual presence from the perspective of their structural and social attributes.
Originality/value
The proposed conceptual model offers a theoretical base for academics and practitioners to expand upon and develop concrete practical examples and cases.
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Adam Jerrett, Theo J.D. Bothma and Koos de Beer
Teaching students/library patrons twenty-first century literacies (such as information and library literacies) is important within a library setting. As such, finding an…
Abstract
Purpose
Teaching students/library patrons twenty-first century literacies (such as information and library literacies) is important within a library setting. As such, finding an appropriate manner to teach these skills in a practical manner at tertiary level is important. As vehicles for constructivist learning, games provide a unique opportunity to teach these twenty-first century literacies in an engaging, practical, format. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the implementation of an alternate reality game (ARG) to teach these literacies through gameplay.
Design/methodology/approach
An ARG was designed and developed where the core gameplay tasks taught and exercised twenty-first century literacies. The game, once completed, was then analysed as a case study to determine the effectiveness of the game-based approach to literacy learning.
Findings
Throughout the play of the game, players spent increasingly more time in the library, often using it as a common meeting point during play. Players reported that they learnt or exercised the skills that each game task focussed on, additionally noting that the game-based context made the process of learning and exercising these skills more enjoyable.
Originality/value
The findings suggest that the creation of games, whether real world or digital, may be useful in engaging students/patrons with twenty-first century literacies as well as with their local library. The documentation of a successful ARG to teach twenty-first century literacies provides a model for future research to follow when designing engaging library-oriented games.