Chang, Chew Hung

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.

Our paper provides an introduction to, and context for, the 10 papers that comprise this special volume: Waterscapes Asia: Concepts and Practices. We discuss the various interpretations of what is meant by a “waterscape” and suggest some ways forward that may provide a bridge between the theoretical waterscapes framework and practical considerations that we hope will make the waterscapes concept more broadly useful. These 10 papers, representing contributions from India, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Indonesia are decidedly applied and consider issues of inequitable socio-hydrological conditions that are impacted by flows of capital, political relations, and policy. Yet, they also represent efforts in quantifying water quality and quantity within the human-natural system nexus, and most importantly, the central theme of familiarisation as a path to more effective waterscape management.

In balancing the role of assessment as an integral part of the curriculum and teaching process and that of a measurement and reporting tool, practitioners are often challenged to design good assessment tasks that fulfil these purposes as well as developing cognitive skills and abilities. While there are many research studies on inquiry in fieldwork and on assessment in geography education, there is little recognition on how the whole process of inquiry acts as a form of fieldwork assessment within geographical education. This chapter proposes that inquiry can be a mode of assessment for and as fieldwork and need not be solely administered at the end of fieldwork activities.

Research literature on climate change education has been primarily focused on reporting how programmes are designed to help students learn the topic of climate change better. The aim of such education programmes invariably endeavours to educate a globally informed citizenry in response to the contemporary climate crisis through effective teaching and learning. While there have been literature to show how students’ knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviour have changed for the better with effective teaching and learning, this article seeks to curate some of these practices, especially those published by the author to exemplify how we can achieve the UN Delors report’s (1998) suggestion that education needs to help students to learn to know, learn to do, learn to be and learn to live together. These desired outcomes are also aligned with the aspirations of geographical education as set out in the International Charter on Geographic Education (CGE, 2016). The article will draw on published works by the author, review the relevance of these studies and compare them with other published works to provide an argument for using the Delors Report to help teachers in their curriculum planning and lesson designs. While education is inherently future-oriented, there needs to be some coherent and contiguous treatment of the way education practices can be used. To this end, the article’s approach to curating the published work will provide a critical discussion using a known framework to advance the discourse on best practices for climate change education. Ultimately the aim of climate change education should be to provide students with the capabilities and opportunities to flourish in society now and in the future, particularly in the face of the challenges brought about by global climate change.

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.

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.