Building (and Documenting) Information Literacy with Badges

Description

Emily is working with Teaching and Learning with Technology on the creation and application of digital badges to support information literacy skills. With the assistance of a graduate student and the Association of College and Research Libraries’ Information Literacy Standards, Emily created a series of badges that apply to areas such as information search and retrieval, credibility, ethics and citations.

Traditionally, many courses across the University visit the library once during the semester. Disciplinary Librarians provide domain-specific resources and knowledge, helping the students build information literacy skills necessary to succeed. Through the use of Digital Badges, we hope to provide additional opportunities for students to continually engage with the Library, building their information literacy skills throughout their academic career at Penn State. This also applies to our distance students, allowing them the opportunity to build skills without physically visiting the Library.

In addition to working with instructors on requiring the badges as co-curricular learning, it would be interesting to examine the role motivation may play in encouraging students to earn more badges without a requirement from an instructor, or if someone goes beyond the requirements to get more badges than what is required. With the re-writing of the general education requirements, an interesting aspect would also be if there’s a place for badges in the new curriculum.

We hope to pilot these badges in the summer and fall or 2014 in large, resident courses such as CAS 100A and ENGL 015. Emily is also building a research agenda to coincide with the pilots.

Cohort

2014

Focus Area

Student Engagement
Theme: Digital Badges