For the past nine years, the library has recognized students who demonstrate growth in information literacy through independent study or research. Students are nominated by faculty and the award winners are chosen through an application and review process. This year’s winners are Jona Lieberman ’20, nominated by Grant Scott, and Anthony Fillis ’19, nominated by Irene Chien.
Anthony’s research focused on virtual reality in education, which resulted in a more nuanced understanding of the roles of VR affordances in relation to accessibility, and what exactly is “successful” VR.
Anthony wrote:
My research was an exploration of virtual reality (VR) in education. . .the idea of accessibility in VR education emerged as a vital aspect of educational affordance theory that was largely overlooked. By comparing the discourses, I was able to identify points of friction between the two on accessibility. This friction pointed to the multi-faceted nature of accessibility that was largely undocumented. . . However, both accessibility discourses hold gaps and overlook certain facets of access. Therefore, I called for educators to address the following: accessibility of cost, disabled access, mismatching users skill with the hardware/software, and shifting students from consumers of educational technology to producers of content. This research resulted in a more nuanced understanding of the roles of VR affordances in relation to accessibility, and what exactly is “successful” VR.
Anthony’s description of scholarly communication set him apart.
. . .Prior to this deep dive in VR education research, I knew that I had something to say about VR and accessibility. However, establishing a true level of immersion in the scholarly text was what enabled me to see scholarship as a conversation. This information conversation held gaps, which I found myself ready and able to fill due to the iterative and back and forth nature of my inquiry. The scholarship became very familiar to me, allowing me to find the authoritative scholars in the conversation. I was able to see their web of influence and citation across the rest of the discourse, finding moments of other scholars challenging and adding onto the authoritative and dominant ideas in the field. However, with my specific style of inquiry, which weaves scholarly and industrial sources, I was able to bring a new perspective to the conversation and shine light on aspects that were largely overlooked, or left as an implicit idea, rather than being made prominent and explicit in their conversation. . .
Jona’s project involved the Martin Fetherolf WWI memoir housed in Special Collections, bringing his memoir to life and making it visually accessible by incorporating her research into Storymap, an interactive mapping tool.
Jona wrote,
My independent study focused on the memoir of Martin Fetherolf, a 1914 Muhlenberg College graduate who served overseas during World War I as a supply man. He spent several years in France during the war before returning to Allentown. The goal of my independent study was to bring to life his memoir and to make it accessible as a more visual medium. . .In addition to mapping where he went, I also added in historical information to clarify certain aspects of his journal and found photos that helped bring his words to life.
Jona emphasized the choices that she made in her research process, impressing the committee with her awareness that these choices affect the final product.
The concepts that resonate with me the most from my independent study are the idea of information creation as a process and scholarship as a conversation. When I first started the independent study and the research component, I did a lot of reading. I began with Fetherolf’s memoir, but then moved to other first-hand accounts of World War I, and then finally to secondary sources. . .The memoir of Fetherolf chronicles his day to day life during the war and rarely talks about specific strategies . . .Due to the fact that I was focusing on his experience, and his memoir, I chose to not follow up on the strategy element in exploring World War I. My conscious choice to exclude that line of thinking shows how the information creation process is rooted in acts of exclusion. . .Who gave me the authority to make those decisions? Frankly, no one did explicitly. However, because I had chosen to follow Fetherolf’s journey and I had been researching for months, I felt that I had enough information behind me to begin to make that type of decision. . . By purposely choosing to exclude information, I brought Fetherolf’s memories to the forefront of this project and I hope I paid homage to his experiences.
