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The role of Digital Libraries in teaching and learning geography
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Type
Conference Paper
Citation
Paper presented at the Southeast Asia Geographers Association International Conference, Thailand, 2004.
Author
Abstract
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.
Date Issued
November 2004
Project
CRP 39/03 CCH