Chang Chew Hung

Environmental identity or how we orient ourselves to the natural world, leads us to personalize abstract global issues and take action (or not) according to our sense of who we are. Indeed, the often emotional nature of environmental conflicts can be associated with our sense of personal and social identity. Are we willing to give up our SUV for a more fuel-efficient car albeit our knowledge about the enhanced greenhouse effect? (Clayton and Opotow, 2003). In an era where web-based student-centred inquiry is gaining popularity as a mode of teaching and learning about environmental issues and potentially developing students’ environmental identities, the role of digital libraries as delivery trucks (terminology by Clark, 1983) needs to be understood better. An obvious affordance of such a digital library is that it organizes information around themes for problems to be solved. A developmental project to build a first digital library for Geographical assets was undertaken. This digital library (G-Portal) serves an active role in a collaborative learning activity in which the students conduct a field study of an environmental problem, within a geospatial context – in this case, beach erosion and sea level rise. G-Portal not only functions as a digital library of information resources, it also provides manipulation and analytical tools that can be used on the information provided. The concept of personal project space allows individuals to work in their personalized environment with a mix of private and public data and at the same time share part of the data with their team members. This allows students to explore the information, process the information, solve the problem posed and perhaps even form new understandings and reflections of their role in the natural environment.

Unlike learning management systems that allow the instructor to organize resources in a predetermined structure which prescribes a fixed learning strategy, G-portal was developed to provide digital assets that will are used by students to solve an authentic problem based on real world resources. In contrast to learning management systems (LMS) that allow the teacher to organize resources in some predetermined structure which then prescribes a fixed learning strategy, digital libraries such as the G-portal provide users the opportunity to take control of their choice of resources, ways of representing and using these resources, creating new resources and even developing their own learning strategies. The G-portal developmental project was initiated as an attempt to improve on the existing capabilities of digital repositories and the move into multimodal representations, in that it hosts In order to effectively deploy the G-portal at local schools and test the effectiveness of the various capabilities of G-portal and the associated learning styles, a project was conducted to develop digital assets and to examine the usability and capabilities of the G-portal.

This paper will focus on pedagogical considerations and practical issues of designing web-based constructivist learning activities for Geography and Social Studies topics. Specifically, WebQuest designs will be used to create authentic constructivist learning activities. The strategies discussed are most suitable for Upper Secondary Geography students.

In the official launch of Singapore’s “IT Masterplan 2” on 24 July 2002, the Ministry of Education has announced that the efforts in implementing Information Technology into Education should move beyond providing and sustaining Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure into effective pedagogical practices using ICT. It is how these ICTs are used rather than what is used that is important. Indeed, one such aspect of ICT use within Geography education – information seeking within web-based learning will be examined in this paper. Much of current literature on web- based learning highlights the flexibility of the web in providing information and enabling students to perform self-guided exploratory learning (Scott 1996 and Kahn 1998). Little empirical research has been done on the actual information-seeking behaviour in web–based learning, especially in Singapore. This paper examines the interactions between the learner and the web through the browsing behaviours of 16 Secondary 3 students when given a task that requires them to search for information on the web to solve a problem. One of the major conclusions from the data analysis is that the students tend to be engaged in rudimentary information-seeking behaviour that does not extend beyond simple keywords searches and following sequential links from search results.

The personalized project space is an important feature in G-Portal that supports individual and group learning activities. Within such a space, its owner can create, delete, and organize metadata referencing learning objects on the Web. Browsing and querying are among the functions provided to access the metadata. In addition, new schemas can be added to accommodate metadata of diverse attribute sets. Users can also easily share metadata across different projects using a “copy-and-paste” approach. Finally, a viewer to support offline viewing of personalized project content is also provided.

Digital libraries have been rather successful in supporting learning activities by providing learners with access to information and knowledge. However, this level of support is passive to learners and interactive and collaborative learning cannot be easily achieved. In this paper, we study how digital libraries could be extended to serve a more active role in collaborative learning activities. We focus on developing new services to support a common type of learning activity, field study, in a geospatial context. We propose the concept of personal project space that allows individuals to work in their personalized environment with a mix of private and public data and at the same time to share part of the data with team members. To support the portability of the resources in our digital library, the selected resources can be exported in an organized manner.