Do you like the picture above?
A beautiful recreation of an Egyptian temple complete with imposing statues of Anubis, colourful artwork celebrating a variety of gods and the achievements of the pharaoh and the iconic obelisks to the side. and besides that, Anubis, the jackal god of the dead is everyone’s favourite as he oversees the embalming process and guides the dead through the underworld.
Year 7 students think Anubis is pretty awesome as well. So awesome that this temple was continually added to their assessment on Ancient Egyptian religion.
The only problem was that the temple did not exist and Anubis himself did not have a temple. And when you think about it, why would you build a temple for the living to the god of the dead? Far better to build the most spectacular temple to the gods of power, such as the Temple of Edfu, below, dedicated to Horus, the god of the pharaoh. However, despite its colossal entrance, it is not as inviting as the imaginative game temple above.
And here lies the contradictions of the information age. Schools can offer a vast amount of amazing information at the touch of a keyboard, but students will be drawn to the intrinsically more engaging and fun side of the wide offering a plethora of distraction and boredom from prescribed work.
The benefits of instant information are endless. It can deliver access to a greater variety of timely content to students that a library cannot provide. It allows students of all socio-economic backgrounds to access the same information regardless if they come from a marginal school in remote Australia or the most elite school in the metropolitan areas. It provides instant information to issues and events that are constantly updated. It provides access to students with low reading levels to access information by using tools such as PDF reader or YouTube.
However, just because a student can access these services does not mean they will. In my experience as a classroom teacher, students tend to access the first piece of information rather than the best piece of information meaning that there can be huge inaccuracies. Students also tend to choose pieces of information from the Google search page and the image search page rather than opening the websites to access the information. The other problem is that students do not have the same level of access, students may not have stable internet in remote or regional areas or they might not have access to a computer or device.
Librarians have the chance to improve student access to information through sites such as Libguides where students have links to reliable information that directly links to their assessment/research work. Librarians also need to allow access to other digital resources that are not possible to obtain from the internet such as Journal articles, AV material (clickview) and ebooks. Despite being digital these sites need to be maintained to ensure currency, stability and changing assessment or syllabus focus.
However while schools and TL tend to focus on reliable sources that tend to be like an encyclopedia in a digital format, students have their digital eyes facing a completely different direction. The infographic, Data Never Sleeps from Domo revealed that Tik Tokers watched 167 million videos and streamed nearly 700,000 hours on YouTube every minute in 2021, compared to a paltry 5.7 million Google searches. This is incredible compared to the 2013 data where Google reigned supreme at 2 million searches (just under a third of current viewing, YouTube was only 48 hours of viewing and Tik Tok had not been created yet.
So who is to say what will be the fads and what will be educationally constructive in the years to come. The challenge to TL will be to adapt and apply the changes to artificial intelligence, virtual or augmented reality and the metaverse in the best way that to suit the needs of the learning environment and the students and teachers.
The broader information landscape is a huge challenge to how school libraries meet the needs of engaging student learners in the 21st Century. The Teacher Librarian should provide information in both a classical and changing technology setting that will improve a quality education and provide engagement and deep learning opportunities to students.
Domo (n.d.) Data Never Sleeps, Retrieved July 30, 2023 from https://www.domo.com/data-never-sleeps