Chang, Chew Hung

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.

Information Technology is commonly referred to by its acronym IT. But just what does IT encompass and what are the "technologies" of IT that are useful for learning? How will IT enrich a lesson and enable learning? In particular, the question of how different the advent of new ITs such as the World Wide Web (WWW) is from existing ITs such as the video or TV will be examined. Since learning arises from a constructive process of reflection on the material provided and interaction with it, the mere use of IT in lessons may not be a sufficient condition for learning to occur. It may not even be a necessary condition for learning to occur. Furthermore, IT refers to an extremely varied spectrum of "technologies" ranging from plain electronic manifestation of printed material to self-contained, highly interactive, communication-enabled and multi-mediated materials. There exists a problem on the choice of IT for learning. Examples will be drawn from the comparative study of two University Geography courses, one pre-service and one in-service, on the infusion of interactive online web-based courses to enable learning.

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.

This paper describes G-Portal, a geospatial digital library of geographical assets, providing an interactive platform to engage students in active manipulation and analysis of information resources and collaborative learning activities. Using a G-Portal application in which students conducted a field study of an environmental problem of beach erosion and sea level rise, we describe a pilot study to evaluate usefulness and usability issues to support the learning of geographical concepts, and in turn teaching.

For many years learning management systems have been focused on providing resources for students. More recently, the growth of digital repositories has provided resources that can be tagged and searched independently of a course structure. G-portal provides resources specifically tagged for geographical learning tasks and provides a project space in which students can collaborate, create resources and share these resources amongst themselves. This paper reviews the research issues surrounding G-portal using activity theory as a framework and defines a research agenda based on the capabilities of G-portal. In particular, issues of information organisation, issues of usability, search strategies and retrieval techniques, multimodality of representation, transduction of information and representation of geographic and spatial information will be examined. The research agenda focuses on three areas: information organisation and representation; the capabilities of the G-Portal application and its ability to integrate and retrieve information and geographical task; and the ease with which students are able to undertake and complete learning tasks about geographical phenomena.

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.

Adopting a problem-centred approach helps students to learn Geography more effectively as they are able to identify and generalize about where different resources or activities are spatially located and they learn to associate certain patterns and processes with geographical changes. In an era where web-based student-centred inquiry is gaining popularity as a mode of learning Geography, the role of digital libraries as delivery trucks (in Clark’s terminology, 1983) needs to be better understood. An obvious affordance of the digital library is that it organizes information around themes for problems to be solved. This paper describes a developmental project to build a digital library for Geographical assets. This digital library (G-Portal) serves an active role in collaborative learning activity in which 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 operate on the information provided. This study examined two specific case studies as part of a larger study which explored the possible the ways the students can use the G-portal find information, create learning artefacts, construct arguments and explore their awarness of the modality of information sources and in the learning artefacts they created. G-portal was sucessful in providing resources which supported the students in finding information and supporting multimodality in the construction their artefacts.

We often assume that when we engage a student in a constructivist learning activity on the internet, the student will be more motivated, learn more effectively and attain higher-order learning outcomes. However, little empirical research exists to confirm these assumptions. The central research question of this study was to explore what happens when a student is engaged in constructivist learning in a small group using resources from the web. Within the framework of an activity system, this study investigated how the student (subject) interacted with the web (tools) in the learning process (production) to generate the observed learning outcomes (object). This involved the views of teachers as stakeholders (community) and the way the students worked in a group (division of labour). Concepts from existing studies such as Borgman et al. (1990) and Kuhlthau’s (1993) study of information-seeking behaviour were used to explore some of these elements in the activity system conceptual framework. In essence, a Creswell (1998) and Guba and Lincoln (1989) adaptation of the Wolcott (1983) conception of a quasi-ethnography was used as the qualitative methodology for this study. In general, the results indicated that the students may be more motivated by assessment marks than the use of the internet. Students also felt that searching for information on the internet was frustrating, especially when information was in non-summarised and non-extracted forms and thus preferred to simply receive information from the teacher. The information-seeking behaviours noted were largely in the starting and chaining categories in Ellis’ (1995) terminology. Although some higher-order learning outcomes such as attitude and evaluation were present, the students were proficient with simply reproducing facts. The students also felt that working in a group was difficult which possibly indicated a lack of experience with working in groups. Time constraint to meet was a reason cited by the students that has hampered their learning together. The teachers also felt that such an activity was limited in its effectiveness and rather impractical as curriculum time is limited. Amidst the rather unpromising results arising from using the internet in this learning activity, the findings do provide useful information on how future constructivist learning activities, such as the use of WebQuests (Dodge, 1997), can be designed.

Students learn Geographical concepts more effectively if they can identify and generalize about where different resources or activities are spatially located and when they associate certain patterns and processes with geographical changes. Digital libraries can be used to support web-based student-centred inquiry as a mode of learning Geography. This study explores the affordances of a geographical digital repository (the G-Portal) which organizes information around problem tasks. Two phases of the project were to build a digital library for Geographical assets and to develop a place-name assignment algorithm which automatically determines the names of places embedded in web pages referenced by these assets so as to augment them with the appropriate location semantics. This G-Portal digital library serves an active role in collaborative learning activities in which students conduct a virtual field study of an environmental problem, within a geospatial context – in this case, beach erosion and sea level rise. GPortal also provides manipulation and analytical tools that can operate on the information retrieved.