Supporting Information Literacy Practices In Digital Information Environment: An Approach Using A Collaborative Digital Library For School Projects

Abstract

Project-based teaching methods are increasingly used in Malaysian secondary school classrooms with the expectations that students will be engaged by the chance to use different information sources creatively and will especially benefit from the use of various presentation types to improve learning. In project-based learning (PBL) students exhibit information literacy (IL) skills: they formulate authentic, meaningful questions; plan tasks; gather resources and information; evaluate information; collaborate with others; and report findings. This paper examines the affordances that a collaborative digital library (CDL) can bring to bear on supporting IL practices in the digital information environment (DIGIE). The CDL supports solitary information seeking, interaction among users as well as working with information. The collaborative environment provides the platform for the students to participate in e-publishing of reports and digital resources that can be shared by others. It also allows students to organize their project reports in various presentation styles, cite the references they use in the appropriate format as well as submit the report and other resources in various formats, in order to create materials for publication in the digital library. The CDL places much of the responsibility for managing the digital library workflow into the hands of students, teachers and teacher librarians. Student responsibilities include the application of metadata, as well as conventional IL skills such as ascertaining information resource provenance and investigating intellectual property rights before depositing digital resources within the library. Findings regarding students’ and teachers’ reception of the digital library are encouraging.