Selfie as Guide: Using Mobile Devices to Promote Active Learning and Student Engagement
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One of the most common requests academic librarians receive is to host library tours. At Texas A&M University, these tours often involve leading a group of students through the library space, with a librarian serving as the tour guide and disseminating information about library services and spaces. These types of tours correspond to a lecture format in the classroom, with the librarian serving as the sage on the stage and the students acting as passive recipients of information about the library. In 2015, a group of librarians decided to revamp the library tour for the Universitys Gateway program, a group of incoming first-year students, in order to make the tours more engaging. This chapter discusses how the librarians supporting the Gateway course redesigned the librarys standard Gateway tour with an interactive, selfie-guided tour. This new tour required students to form teams and use library-provided mobile devices to tour the library on their own by answering assigned questions about different library spaces and services and taking selfies in different library spaces, which were then shared with the class as a whole. The selfie-guided tours challenged students to navigate library spaces on their own, to actively engage with library staff and faculty in order to successfully answer their assigned questions, and to work together and use their creativity to take interesting selfies.
