It has been a bumpy start to ETL505. There is so much information that is covered in only the first couple of weeks of the course that it is hard to get my head around! I have gone from not even knowing what the term “metadata” is to understanding its meaning and being able to analyse resources according to the metadata they include. At times I have found the concepts covered in the prescribed text to be overwhelming and a little confusing but the textbook and the course itself has certainly given me an appreciation of the sheer importance that library systems and tools play in our ability to find, identify, select, obtain and explore educational resources (particularly digital resources). My head is swimming with so many new definitions and concepts!

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

Wow! What a start to my career in Teacher Librarianship! This first week of the course has been a real wake up call. I haven’t studied formally for some twenty years so getting back into the routine of university life has been both daunting and exciting. I have enjoyed the first week of readings and it has opened my eyes to just how integral the role of teacher librarian is in schools but also solidified my desire to transition into this role. This is the first step of my journey…

References:

11,032 feeling overwhelmed images, stock photos & vectors. Shutterstock. (n.d.). https://www.shutterstock.com/search/feeling-overwhelmed