The Role of digital libraries in teaching and learning geography

Adopting a problem-centred approach helps students to learn Geography more effectively as they are able to identify and generalize about where different resources or activities are spatially located and they learn to associate certain patterns and processes with geographical changes. In an era where web-based student-centred inquiry is gaining popularity as a mode of learning Geography, the role of digital libraries as delivery trucks (in Clark’s terminology, 1983) needs to be better understood. An obvious affordance of the digital library is that it organizes information around themes for problems to be solved. This paper describes a developmental project to build a digital library for Geographical assets. This digital library (G-Portal) serves an active role in collaborative learning activity in which students conduct a field study of an environmental problem, within a geospatial context – in this case, beach erosion and sea level rise. G-Portal not only functions as a digital library of information resources, it also provides manipulation and analytical tools that can operate on the information provided. This study examined two specific case studies as part of a larger study which explored the possible the ways the students can use the G-portal find information, create learning artefacts, construct arguments and explore their awarness of the modality of information sources and in the learning artefacts they created. G-portal was sucessful in providing resources which supported the students in finding information and supporting multimodality in the construction their artefacts.