All teachers of today are acutely aware of the ramifications of the ever-expanding landscape of digital information. With AI, fakes, and social media as common discussion points in schools on a daily basis, teachers must drag themselves up to the front of the game whether they like it or not.
Teachers and leadership teams must stop to consider the characteristics of digital information, both positive and negative, to assess how to approach it in their classrooms. There are, like everything, pros and cons of such powerful tools at our disposal and at the fingertips of our students.
Below are the key characteristics of digital information, including some of their immediate pros and cons that schools should be considering:
Searchability: Vast expanses of data and information can be searched within milliseconds, which can be a blessing and a curse. Students must be taught ‘literacy’ in determining the reliability of information before accepting it as true, merely because it has been found on the internet.
Persistence: Digital information will not relent. It will not go away. This is a well-known pitfall of the internet, and certainly, social media, which is critical knowledge for students when it comes to cyber safety. The positive of this characteristic, however, is that we can now store what may seem like libraries and libraries of data in one machine, and now even more on the cloud. This opens up a very different world of data for the future. One ramification will require educators to be highly skilled in organising such vast amounts of data to ensure records, easy retrieval and limited loss of resources.
Replicability: It’s as easy as 1, 2, ctrl-c. Copying digital information is a positive trait for teachers, with the ability to use tools such as Google Classroom to distribute materials in an instant. But there’s a flipside: manipulation and copyright. Teachers must be well informed about copyright laws in education which can lead the school into an unlawful, dangerous territory. Secondly, manipulation of copied materials is an issue that is growing faster than our abilities to understand the technology behind them. Teacher and students must be at the forefront of new technologies, deep fakes, generative AI, and how to spot them.
Scalability: This is connected with replicability, but adds in its ability to be widely distributed. It means data can be replicated and distributed across thousands and millions of people and become disconnected from its original context. Leading to an internet full of digital information that has been decontextualised. Teachers and students must be shown how to handle this side of the internet when navigating or searching for reliable digital information.
To put it simply, pros and cons for educators:
+ A vast volume of digital information that was not once accessible, leading to more knowledgeable teachers and students.
– But this introduces a new realm of learning that didn’t exist before, including many different types of literacies (information literacy, inquiry literacy, search literacy, AI literacy, prompt literacy), which are not yet factored into the Australian Curriculum.
This is when the school must use the Teacher Librarian:
+Teacher-librarians are teachers and are also trained in digital information literacies. They can support teachers across all year levels to consider these characteristics in their planning and teaching. Teacher Librarians can teach the students directly, or in team-teaching, the various digital information literacies that are emerging, such as those listed above.
– This means teacher-librarians must be at the forefront of this understanding of the ramifications of accessing information through digital means, and how it can help or hinder students accessing the curriculum.
