Check out Paul Waelchli’s arti­cle in the Jan­u­ary 2008 issue of C&RL News in which he expands on his blog posts about infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy and fan­tasy foot­ball.

Librar­i­ans’ Sport of Choice: Teach­ing Infor­ma­tion Lit­er­acy through Fan­tasy Football

“Librar­i­ans want stu­dents to effec­tively iden­tify and eval­u­ate infor­ma­tion and make deci­sions based upon what they dis­cover. These are just some of the skills that an infor­ma­tion lit­er­ate stu­dent suc­cess­fully applies. These are the same skills that more than 19 mil­lion peo­ple use on a daily or weekly basis play­ing fan­tasy sports.1 As the NFL foot­ball sea­son comes to a close, mil­lions of Amer­i­cans, some as young as 12 years old, have spent the past few months con­nected to infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy. They just don’t know it.

The chal­lenge for librar­i­ans is to con­nect fan­tasy sports skills to infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy and cre­ate build­ing blocks for aca­d­e­mic appli­ca­tions of the same con­cepts. One library, Uni­ver­sity of Dubuque, did just this by teach­ing fan­tasy foot­ball research to incom­ing stu­dent ath­letes. Through the les­son, stu­dents engaged in dis­cus­sions of cred­itabil­ity, valid­ity, time­li­ness, and search strate­gies to find and eval­u­ate fan­tasy foot­ball information.…

The high level of player invest­ment cre­ates edu­ca­tional oppor­tu­ni­ties for librar­i­ans. Accord­ing to a 2006 study by the Fan­tasy Sports Asso­ci­a­tion, a large num­ber of col­lege stu­dents play fan­tasy sports. Librar­i­ans can build upon the infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy skills that stu­dents are already uncon­sciously using through fan­tasy sports play. The suc­cess­ful fan­tasy sport player con­sis­tently applies four of the five ACRL Infor­ma­tion Lit­er­acy Com­pe­tency Stan­dards (2000).…

At the end of the ses­sions, the stu­dents com­pleted a short eval­u­a­tion that assessed both cri­te­ria for eval­u­at­ing sources and library per­cep­tions. More than 80 per­cent of stu­dents were able to describe two of three appro­pri­ate source eval­u­a­tion cri­te­ria and more than 60 per­cent pro­vided all three. The stu­dents were asked to describe what research meant to them before the ses­sion and responses included, ‘headaches,’ ‘work I didn’t want to do,’ and ‘school work.’ The responses to the same ques­tion after the ses­sions showed a dra­matic change in per­spec­tive and included, ‘mak­ing sure one is get­ting accu­rate infor­ma­tion,’ ‘com­par­ing and know­ing where I’m get­ting my infor­ma­tion,” and “fun work.” While the ‘fun work’ might be a stretch when home­work is involved, it does show a change in per­spec­tive and aware­ness about research. One stu­dent first said that before the ses­sion, research meant ‘school,’ but after­wards he responded, ‘everything.’

In addi­tion to the change in per­cep­tion of research, the stu­dent ath­letes were asked about their per­cep­tion of librar­i­ans. Prior to the fan­tasy foot­ball ori­en­ta­tion ses­sion, the stu­dents had a 66 per­cent ‘very pos­i­tive’ impres­sion of librar­i­ans. After the ses­sion, the stu­dents “very pos­i­tive” per­cep­tion was more than 90 per­cent. While these results are not sci­en­tific and large enough to gen­er­al­ize, they show a dis­tinct change in stu­dents’ impres­sions of libraries and their own abil­i­ties. One stu­dent stated, ‘I made the fan­tasy foot­ball con­nec­tion to look­ing up school stuff quick, it worked well.’ ”

And if you haven’t seen it, Paul’s chart illus­trat­ing which of the ACRL Infor­ma­tion Lit­er­acy Stan­dard are involved in play­ing Final Fan­tasy, Halo, and Mad­den (foot­ball) is also well worth your time.

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