I had a great time teaching today. One of the things I love about my job as a social sciences librarian is leading in-class library research strategy sessions. Among academic librarians, these things are called “one-shots” because you get one shot at instilling enough library skills in a roomful of students to tackle the assignments in a given course.

These sessions tend to cluster at the begining of each semester. Today I had two sessions of a Business Administration research methods class; one of an Education capstone class on legal and social issues in education; and one session for a First Year Seminar (intriguingly titled Cold Case: Mystery and History in the Theatre) on unresolved questions such as whether Thespis was really the first actor and who really wrote all the stuff attributed to Shakespeare. A very mixed bag indeed (and another thing I love about my job).

Fueled by my recent thinking about online gaming as a metaphor for Millennial learning and by enouraging comments from colleagues, I decided to try something new.

I decided to ask in each of the classes if anyone there was a gamer.

Interestingly, in the First Year Seminar, I got blank stares. Eleven out of twelve blank stares, to be exact. Since this was a group comprised entirely of freshmen, it made me wonder if we aren’t already experiencing a first wave of yet another generation. But the one guy who raised his hand was also the student had been most vocally involved in the search we had done as a group. He was the one who had caught a typing error. He was the one who had the “path” through the catalog mastered fastest.

In the Education session, I shared–as I often do with Education classes–that I was trying something new pedagogically and talked to them about the Nintendo metaphor. They were interested because they have a sense of how popular culture molds the students in their classroom.

In the Business research methods class, of all places, I hit the jackpot. I try hard, I try very hard, every semester to excite four successive rooms full of Business Administration majors about the prospect of a doing a literature review using scholarly sources. (I meet with two more sections tomorrow.) The dreaded literature review means, inevitably, that these students will be forced to master our link resolver.

In essence, the link resolver is a pop-up tool driven by a program that attempts to match a citation from an article database with a source for the article itself.

The sources are all over the map. They may be PDFs in other databases, or microfiche or microfilm in our collection, or bound journals.

The link resolver always leads to a second level . . . either to our catalog, or to interlibrary loan, or to a jillion possiblities for retrieving the article online. The catalog is standardized but the holdings information is arcane to the uninitiated. And the more than one hundred databases and electronic journal collections that the resolver draws article links from–such as JSTOR and LexisNexis and Expanded Academic ASAP–all have different interfaces and opening screens and entry points.

In the past, at the point at which I introduce the link resolver, I have warned of dragons and apologized profusely for the messy state of information in the year 2007.

Today, I asked if anyone in the class was a gamer.

“Yeah,” one startled guy replied.

“So when you have a new game, how do you approach it?”

“I just start playing.”

“And how do you learn how to play?”

“I just keep trying things.”

“Oh,” I said–and I could tell the class wondered where this was going. “You just jump in and try things.”

Heads nodded–and not because they were falling asleep.

“Well that’s what you’ll have to do with this Locate Journal Article box.”

“Do you mean,” asked another student with that light-dawning look, “That finding stuff in the library is like playing a game?”

I was so cranked up that I gave him a high five. And he was so surprised to see an old lady reliving the 80s that he graciously gave me one back.

PacMan worketh. Or PacMan work-ed in that one class. I’ll try it again tomorrow.

In the aftermath of my Schoolhouse Rock awakening, I finally actually read Diana Oblinger’s seminal article Boomers, Gen-Xers & Millennials: Understanding the New Students. These are ideas that have been avidly discussed and adopted on my campus by an informal learning community of faculty, librarians, and administrators. (UMW has been blessed with an amazingly creative and apparently insomniac instructional technology team with a national reputation for innovation.)

Even before reading the article, I had pretty well assimilated the basic point about Millennials. Millennials are here. They’re connected. They’re comfortable with technology. Why not use their own tools in teaching?

What I hadn’t gotten before was what my Gen-X colleague, Jami Bryan, manager of UMW’s College of Graduate and Professional Studies library, had been saying in just about every conversation she and I have had over the past couple of years about teaching online library resources.

I’ve tended toward providing detailed step-by-step instructions for our databases. Jami has countered that students learn by noodling around. She has encouraged me to get them to the resource, give them a little demo, and then to get out of the way and let them play.

It was the “play” part I didn’t get until I read Oblinger’s assertion that “Learning is more like Nintendo than logic. Nintendo symbolizes a trial-and-error approach to solving problems; losing is the fastest way to mastering a game because losing represents learning.”

I am not a gamer unless kitchen table poker counts. The last time I played a pinball machine, it had mechanical flippers. And the only electronic game I have ever experienced (this is not a joke) is ancient, arcade Pac-Man. But I respect Jami’s opinion, so I’ve been trying something new. I can’t do it in research classes because of the laptop problem. But instead of hogging the computer during an individual research appointment in my office, I’m learning to roll my own chair away from the keyboard and let the students drive. I’m impressed at how quickly they pick up the mechanics of the search. Once that is mastered, they have more freedom to collaborate on the intellectual content. I’ll be doing a lot more of this in the future.

I’m getting that sheepish feeling again. The one I get when I’ve just told you to be careful with your sloppy hamburger and look down to notice that the condiments are dribbling out of my own burger onto my new white shirt.

My latest embarrassment was brought about by two of my stepchildren . . . ages 35 and 37.

The day after Christmas found them sprawled in front of the TV singing along at the top of their (actually rather melodic) voices to the DVD collection of Schoolhouse Rock . And I thought to myself–here comes the ketchup now–that if I could just identify the current equivalent of “Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, Get Your Adverbs Here” and “I’m Just a Bill,” and use those methods in my classes, I would be better able to help students grasp the concepts of information fluency.

Duh! Isn’t what Diana Oblinger has been saying all along?