Inculcating ICT Skills through a Collaborative Digital Library Initiative for Educational Use

Abstract

Digital libraries revolutionise the traditional pedagogy of providing learning resources and the way resources can be accessed. It helps students to practice self-accessed and self-directed reference learning at their own pace. It changes the conventional process of seeking information and the speed and spread of information obtained. Masullo and Mack (1996) succinctly summarize the three roles digital libraries can play in education; (a) as a resource for teaching; (b) as an environment for learning; and (c) as an authoring space. The educational value of digital libraries is in the authentic activities that they can allow students to engage in. The supportive interfaces, resource selection, organisation of documents are designed to provide learners with enough context and knowledge to enable them to use digital libraries as learning resources. Hedman (1999) pointed out that in the electronic world situation, anyone could be both an author and a publisher. This situation perpetuates the creation of communal resources in cooperation. The existing entities allow for the dynamic generation of content. This enables the creation of digital libraries from grass root levels. In the educational context, this type of collaborative venture brings about the achievement of the following objectives: a) creation of content collaboratively; b) enhance IT literacy through the very act of collaboration; and c) creative presentation of contents using multimedia elements (Stahl, 2000). These objectives are embedded the proposed digital library portal for historical resources that can be collaboratively used by educational and public institutions to develop digital resources. A proto-type system was developed and a biographical portal of selected Malaysian personalities and historical buildings is chosen as the domain for the test bed.