Kenshi Hyodo

Staff Development of Academic Librarians to Improve Information Literacy Education in the Digital Age

Digital game-based learning has grown rapidly in recent years, including in information literacy (IL) education. However, many efforts have failed because users are not involved in the design process. The present study adopts a user-centered design approach to evaluate an educational IL game prototype, with data analyzed based on Pedagogical Playability Heuristics.The proposed study is in the area of data curation and knowledge representation. It focuses on the issues and methods of curating quantitative social science data, to advance the methodology of data curation, and data reuse and integration in the social sciences. Socio-economic data will be the object of the study. They are defined as data that is related to people, organization and society which can be stored in a tabular format.Museums are highly specialized cultural institutions. Obstacles exist between the knowledge and terminology of the museum professionals and that of the general public. Topical analysis of museum collections can reveal topical similarities and differences among museums and facilitate museum tours with recommended professional guides. In this study, 7177 French artworks collected by 90 art museums worldwide were investigated. The Self-Organizing Map (SOM) technique, an unsupervised artificial neural network method, was applied to visually analyze similarities and differences among the museums. The Treemap technique was also employed on a large dataset to reveal the distribution of the specific themes among the investigated museums. Finally, a comprehensive museum tour recommendation mechanism is established for tourists.For enhancing skills related to information literacy instruction in the digital age, we developed an education program for academic librarians, based on knowledge of learning science and educational technology. We evaluated the program in practice and discovered that: 1) academic librarians want to acquire basic knowledge of learning science and instructional design, 2) lectures about theory alone are insufficient, but the combination of theory with practical workshops is effective for promoting the integration of participants’ knowledge, and 3) some practical examples support understanding of the theory.Web 2.0 technologies have paved the way for self-directed online learning. YouTube, in particular, is a viable Web 2.0 platform that can be used to disseminate educational content and in the process empower users to take charge of their own learning. Through the lens of self-directed learning theory, we perform qualitative content analyses on comments contributed by learners after watching educational videos on YouTube. Results indicate that YouTube can play important roles in facilitating a self-directed learning platform.