News & Events

Congratulations to Han Leon How and Heather Giles, who won first and second place in a recent digital literacy contest sponsored by the IUB Libraries and the IU student chapter of the American Library Association.


Read about the event and the organizers' goals in this report from SLIS student Erin Rykken.
 

Digital Literacy Comes Alive

by Erin Rykken

Future reference librarians of America answer me this: what is the username of the person who edited the Wikipedia article ‘Exxon’ on August 26, 2007 at 4:02am?

Stumped? Ponder it too long and you might be the only one left without an answer. If the recent Digital Literacy Contest, co-sponsored by the IUB Libraries and the ALA-SC, is any indication, the newest generation of undergraduates can not only answer that question, but in lightning-fast time, they can find a credible online source to back up their response. Furthermore – and this is the kicker – they understand the importance of establishing the credibility of their sources.

No big surprise, you might say, what with kids these days practically born navigating the Internet. But worth noting here is a new tool available to librarians and students that helps measure how the strength of students’ perceived searching abilities actually stacks up against scholarly research methods. The tool is this thing called the Digital Literacy Contest.And on Tuesday, September 30^th, IUB hosted its inaugural event.

Some history: The Digital Literacy Contest is the brainchild of Purdue alum Daniel Poynter, and is a component of his company, Global Networked Intelligence Contests (GNIC). Developed last year as a way to evaluate how students use the Internet as a “mental prosthetic” of sorts, GNIC equates these contests to a “Tour de France of Internet-enabled minds.”  The goal is to assess how students are handling technology-driven information overload, specifically, if they have the tools needed to both access and evaluate sources of credible information. Poynter’s inspiration for the contest came after reading many influential works on the ways in which technology is changing our society, such as Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock and Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat.

Here’s a basic rundown: a DLC event is hosted by a university library. The contest is web-based. Competitors logon to GNIC’s site and have thirty minutes to answer thirty questions. Questions range in scope from finding the zip code of an NARA-approved asbestos researcher in California to providing the last name of the person in charge of correspondence for a PLoS article on the pharmaceutical industry. This is obviously not your parent’s type of trivia game.

To make matters more complex, questions are answered in free response form, as opposed to multiple choice.As a correct answer in free response can take many shapes, GNIC has a team of judges at Purdue evaluating contestant responses in (near) real time. Much like the game show Jeopardy, participants can both gain and lose points depending on whether or not they answer a question correctly. A correct answer not only provides the appropriate response, but also the proper URL from which the information was obtained. Winners are announced just minutes after the contest concludes.

DLCs benefit students in several ways. Most notably (perhaps “trivially” is a better word), there is a cash prize for first- and second-place competitors. The IUB Libraries and IU’s ALA-SC generously donated a $100 first place prize and a $25 second place prize, respectively. However, this is an optional component and only six of twenty IUB participants named this as a reason for participating in the event, with most offering a second reason such as to help with the study of digital literacy or to seize the opportunity to test their own searching skills. The contest also gives students the chance to become active participants in their education. This is a crucial point because it translates into having more informed, engaged students who will no doubt conduct more productive research throughout their IUB careers. This is never a bad thing.

However, the largest benefits of a DLC are kept for the hosting university. The DLC allows university libraries to observe firsthand the tools students have, or are in need of acquiring, when it comes to finding information online. The contest also has the potential to inform the university and its librarians of how students evaluate the credibility of the information they do find, and about how students perceive their own searching abilities.

For example, an important finding in IUB’s contest was that 45% of participants felt that IUB libraries could do a better job teaching Internet research skills. Unfortunately, the response portion of the contest does not yet allow participants to offer suggestions on the improvements they’d like to see in Internet research instruction, let alone allow students to consider whether or not it is actually the library’s teaching program that is responsible for their lackluster searching skills.

Regardless, the responses in this case also indicate an increasing reliance on the Web for educational purposes (91% of respondents answered that they consider the Web crucial to their intellectual development). Additionally, when asked what they learned from the contest, nearly half of the participants noted something to do with using new academic databases and realizing the importance of evaluating sources of information. A quarter of participants also noted that they were now aware of inefficiencies in their searching strategies and that they learned new ways to improve the quality of their results.Not bad for an hour and a half of their time.

While these statistics may merely support what is already accepted as a given in the world of knowledge management, what is of most importance is the advent of the tool that gathers this information—the DLC. Response questions can be honed in the future to better assist librarians in finding out what is not already a given.

To get at the heart of finding out what students know or don’t know, response questions could be fine tuned to better assess concerns a particular library may have. For example, in the pre-contest survey, in addition to asking participants their strategy for winning, a more specific follow-up question might be “Which database will you use to answer questions on American history?” or “What steps do you take to logon to Academic Search Premier?”

The post-contest survey could also potentially concern itself with evaluating student attitudes toward particular types of searches. Responses to the level of comfort/confidence using EBSCO—getting students to nail down specific reasons—could help librarians better understand why students avoid using such databases and assist librarians in figuring out new instructional techniques.

Regardless of the shape of future DLCs, participants agree that there is a need to keep tabs on the digital literacy of today’s students and that there is, indeed, a future for this sort of contest.100% of participants affirmed this in the post-contest survey, with all twenty saying they would both compete in the spring as well as recommend the contest to a friend.

The DLC is currently hosted by Purdue, the University of Florida, and Brown, in addition to the IUB campus.After that, I’m guessing the contests will most likely take over the world.

To learn more about this fascinating project, visit http://www.gnic.org.