Forging Information Literacy Skills with ANVIL

“Forging Information Literacy Skills with ANVIL” was presented by David Hietpas, Web Developer, and Ted Mulvey, Information Literacy Librarian, both of the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. Hietpas and Mulvey created ANVIL, which stands for “Active Instructional Videos on Information Literacy” and is an innovative game-based approach to teaching information literacy to first-year college students. It was designed as a competitive tutorial to meet the high school to college transition. They talked about the reason for going with a bar trivia-style of game for their information literacy tutorial because it is an identifiable format for games and the competitive aspect encourages students to take the quiz multiple times to try to get the highest score. The tutorial is based on ACRL Information Literacy standards focusing on IL basics and is broken out into six modules: The Information Cycle; Understanding Your Assignment; Searching Information; Evaluating Information; and Citing and Using Information. The team has made their product open source, and it's licensed under Apache and Creative Commons. They are now making it available for download to other institutions under the name QuizSmith.