Beyond Passive Learning: Utilizing Active Learning Tools for Engagement, Reflection, and Creation

The twenty-first-century student frequently engages with mobile environments to fulfill his or her information needs. Reports from the Pew Research Center (Duggan, 2015) indicate an increasing trend in the use of mobile social media platforms in the US adult population. According to the report, Social Media Usage: 2005–2015 (2015), 65 percent of American adults use social networking sites, and young adults (ages 18–29) reported the highest social media usage for all age groups, at 90 percent. Among the young adult age group, social media usage in 2005 was reported to be 12 percent (Perrin, 2015). This sharp 650 percent rise illustrates the increasingly networked environment inhabited by young adults. In an effort to engage students in the online environment they frequent, educators at the University of Massachusetts Boston utilized iPads to integrate mobile technology into library instruction and other teaching initiatives. This chapter will discuss activities that integrate iPads into library instruction and highlight the use of research guides, web-based polling, gaming pedagogy, online surveys, and other web-based applications for academic research that participants directly engage with, reflect upon, and use to create information in transformative ways