I now feel that I can identify how the role of a Teacher Librarian in digital environments has evolved up to this point. I thought that librarians were now concerned with supporting students in critically evaluating online sources and discerning credible information. This course has shown me how the future of libraries in schools will mean accommodating creation using technology into classes, with the teacher librarian having a very active role in promoting literacies in a school. I think the library now has a responsibility to get students confident with using online databases, e-books, digital storytelling platforms, and educational apps to prepare students for the knowledge economy, especially in skills with multimedia and online collaboration so students experiment with technology beyond a google search. But the behavioural switch from using technology for entertainment to using it as a learning tool (Bauerlein, 2009, cited in Combes, 2012) does feel to me a premise of private education, with the efforts and hours that would need to be put into a school’s curriculum by already overworked teachers as at the moment, my places of work are based around ‘substituting’ technology (using iPads for pencil and paper) rather than using technology to expand learning (Morgen, 2023). 

Digital literature was not a genre that I had been familiar with, now I appreciate it and can see a need to create a library resource for digital literature, perhaps in a different section of the library designed specifically for this to encourage student engagement. My initial feelings towards digital literature were me wondering what the difference would be between it and a novel with additional online features? It felt very much like someone trying to develop a new genre from insubstantial material. I am a strong believer in books and I feel like the animations in book form gets in the way of my imagination. 

A turning point for me was with the video ‘PICNIC’ which contained some very sophisticated examples of the genre and made it clear that online texts do follow the practice’s own conventions, in a similar way that say, short stories do; and that by getting students to use multimedia to create. They are being prepared with soft and hard skills for the future job market, as well as experiencing and creating for a different form of reading: an aesthetic reading (reading for lived experience) rather than efferent reading (Rosenblatt, 1994). I am excited by the possibility of bridging the gap between students who like science and technology, and students who prefer the arts (Alderman, 2015). 

I chose to use Youtube.com as a focus for my students basically because they use it so much. I teach Ancient History and I often have to correct them over inaccurate information garnered from Youtube.com videos. I think I did not really consider the genre of ‘digital literature’ and was more concerned with getting my students to see how easy it is to create a Youtube.com video with inaccurate information. I did not consider the need to get the students to be creative with technology, which I now think would have covered my initial concern. I significantly missed the point of including the Australian Curriculum (2023) three sub elements to plan and design, create content and respect intellectual property. 

Based on comments and further reading of digital literature, I realised I really needed to come up with something which would encourage students to be creative – so I first changed the context and decided to create a task for my English class, and base that task into the mentality of creation rather than transferring the skills my students are using socially with technology (Zincke, 2023). I then looked at other examples of digital literature and thought that creating a child’s comic strip based on re-vamping fairy tales would be an interested inquiry learning task for our stereotypes, and would hope that students would internalise the idea of how reductive stereotyping is and how most people are very literate in this area. I chose to use app that I did as I know that this activity would be very much a starting point for many of my students. It is extremely easy to use and requires little technical skill. The main considerations are fitting images to the story and considering how to divide the story into panels and changed the ending of the fairy tale so it subverts the stereotype. 

As a result of this course, I feel that I would want to help students become more creative in their use of multi-media creation, especially by finding more examples of digital literature and analysing these for their conventions and devices.  I feel that this would be more beneficial than a lot of the basic skills that I cover on my English course (such as letter writing) as our economy now, and in the future, looks posed to derive economic value from ideas and creativity (Mortazavia & Bahramib, 2012).  

Word count: 828 

References 

ACARA (2021) General Capabilities: Digital Literacy. Australian Curriculum Review. https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/media/7024/gc_digital_literacy_ict_capability_consultation_curriculum.pdf 

Alderman, N. (2015) The first great works of digital literature are already being written. The Guardian.https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/oct/13/video-games-digital-storytelling-naomi-alderman 

Combes, B. (2016). Digital literacy: A new flavour of literacy or something different? Synergy, 14(1). https://slav.vic.edu.au/index.php/Synergy/article/view/v14120163 

Morgen, K. (2023, September 02) Authentic Digital Literacy in Primary Education. Module 5.2 Digital Tools. https://interact2.csu.edu.au/webapps/discussionboard/do/message?course_id=_68469_1&nav=discussion_board_entry&requestType=unread_user_forum&conf_id=_140370_1&action=collect_forward&origRequestId=512974501_1695962413998&forum_id=_323707_1&status=unread& 

Mortazavi, S., & Bahrami, M. (2012). Integrated Approach to Entrepreneurship – Knowledge based Economy: A Conceptual Model. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 41, 281–287. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2012.04.032 

PICNIC. (2009, September 23). PICNIC ‘09: Once upon these times – New stories for new audiences with Matt Locke and Jeremy Ettinghausen [Video]. Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/7181425 

Rosenblatt, L (1994) The transactional theory of reading and writing. In Ruddell, Ruddell, & Singer (eds) Theoretical models and processes of reading (4th ed) pp 1057-1092. Newark. DE: International Reading Association

Zincke, A. (2023, September 17) Reflecting on Creating a Digital Story. (Comment on the online forum post ‘Module 7.1 Digital Story Telling) https://interact2.csu.edu.au/webapps/discussionboard/do/message?action=list_messages&course_id=_68469_1&nav=discussion_board_entry&conf_id=_140370_1&forum_id=_323758_1&message_id=_4588797_1