Persistance, replicability, scalability and searchability are the four characteristics of digital information. In many ways we live in an exciting new age of information which opens up our world and makes anything possible. After reading much of the information in Module 2 of this course it would seem that we are on the cusp of another great revolution (perhaps as significant as the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions)-an Information Revolution. I am perhaps, according to Floridi (2017), part of the last generation to recognise a world where there is a distinction between the offline and online world. The online article “Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants” makes a clear distinction between digital immigrants (those who have known a world before digital information and have, at some stage during their adult life, had to learn about the the world of computers) and digital natives (young people born into the digital age) (Wang, et.al., 2013).

I am a digital immigrant. I have distant memories of getting presented with a new research assignment as a young primary and high school age student and racing to both the school library at lunch and my local community library that very afternoon after school to try to secure the very limited print resources available to complete the assignment successfully. Nowadays, students have a wealth of information at their very fingertips. There is no need to leave their home workspace or even race other students to the resources in a first-come-first-served basis. It is assumed that these digital natives are “inherently technology-savvy” but I do not always think that this is the case. The persistence and replicability of digital information means that information is never truly deleted and therefore “builds up” over time. This can lead to students in today’s schooling system having to wade their way through an enormous volume of content in search of the information that they seek. The negatives of this is that it can become overwhelming for many students, particularly those with special needs who require clear guidelines and scaffolding to achieve the outcomes of the subject.

The growth of digital information for teacher librarians also comes with positive and negative ramifications. One of the benefits is that teacher librarians can give less thought to the way in which they will need to physically accommodate information resources within the four walls of the library. The extended benefit of many resources now being available digitally is that they can also ease the burden on already strained school library budgets.

However, the expansion of the world of digital information has also seen an expansion in the role of the teacher librarian and subject teachers in teaching students digital literacy and the skills needed to evaluate the authenticity and reliability of the information they come across online. Far from the “inherently technology-savvy” digital natives that Wang and her fellow scholars talk about (Wang et al., 2013) students are finding it increasingly difficult to differentiate between reliable information and misinformation and disinformation. The replicability of digital resources leads to problems in identifying the original source of the information and its scalability often leads to information being manipulated and separated from its original context. The availability of digital information has transformed the way in which we educate our students, the way in which the new generations learn and has also transformed the role of the teacher librarian in schools.

References

Floridi, L. (2007). A look into the future impact of ICT on our lives. The Information Society, 23(1), 59-64. https://doi.org/10.1080/01972240601059094

Wang, Q. (Emily), Sundaram, D., & Myers, M. D. (2013, November 8). Digitalnativesanddigitalimmigrants – Association for Information Systems. Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants: Towards a model of digital fluency. https://aisel.aisnet.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1254&context=bise