E-learning, Digital Libraries, and the Role of Academic Libraries in the 21st Century
Christine L. Borgman
Professor & Presidential Chair in Information Studies
University of California, Los Angeles
cborgman@ucla.edu
Extended Abstract of Talk
APEC Workshop on e-Learning
and Digital Archives
at the Academia Sinica,
Taipei
17 December 2002
Libraries are rapidly evolving social institutions. They are both leading and responding to
changes in the role of information in society, in the uses of information
technology for education and for scholarship, and in policies for intellectual
property. Information technologies
have many applications in libraries, from operations to service delivery. Most importantly, IT can be employed to
enhance teaching and scholarship.
We have a new generation of students who are very sophisticated in
their uses of IT. These students live in a
high-tech world and have high skills and high expectations for the use of IT in
their education. They are
accustomed to learning by doing , by participating, and by creating. While lecturing and solo reading remain
essential elements of education, they can be complemented by tools that extend
students’ participation in the learning process. A key question is
how colleges and universities can build upon students’ skills, habits,
and enthusiasm to enhance their learning.
In the digital age, teaching and learning can be more like scholarship. Students can have access to primary information sources which can be employed in “inquiry learning.” Students learn by doing, asking questions, navigating, exploring, constructing and testing hypotheses. In the process, students can learn to “think like” or “work like” scientists, social scientists, humanists, or practitioners in the fields of their choice.
Most of the talk will discuss two current research projects in the use of digital libraries for education.
Exploratory research on uses and users of digital libraries is best accomplished via large, long term, collaborative ventures. We found this opportunity in the Alexandria Digital Earth ProtoType Project (ADEPT), a five-year effort (1999-2004)[1] involving scholars of geography, computer science, psychology, and information studies. Our concern in the Education and Evaluation component of ADEPT[2] is the efficacy of geographical digital libraries for undergraduate instruction. Despite the policy juggernaut to place computers in classrooms, the effectiveness of technology-based instruction to improve learning is far from proven. Digital libraries have great potential to enrich learning by providing access to new forms of content. They also can support independent, guided, or collaborative learning (Criddle, Dempsey, & Heseltine, 1999; Twidale & Nichols, 1998a, b).
Geography is a fruitful area of study, because the discipline depends heavily on primary source data such as observations from satellites and sensor networks. Many geographers gather and analyze these dynamic data for their research, yet students typically learn about geography from static, processed forms of data such as textbooks, slides, maps, and displays on overhead projectors. If students can use and manipulate the primary source data available to scholars, they may learn to “think like scientists” and to develop a much richer understanding of geographic concepts.
We began the project by identifying the users and uses of ADEPT. The system will serve faculty members in their role as instructors to gather and organize geo-spatial resources for instruction and in their role as researchers to gather, manipulate, and display geo-spatial data. Teaching assistants will use ADEPT to assist faculty members in assembling lectures, to reinforce concepts in laboratory sessions, and to assist students in performing interactive course assignments[3]. Students will attend lectures and laboratory sessions that incorporate ADEPT resources and will use ADEPT modules to manipulate geo-spatial data and to learn scientific concepts. This project is among the first to go beyond studies of searching to look at multiple uses of digital libraries, including creating and using new information resources.
A central concern of our research is whether scientific learning is taking place. We are applying theories of mental model to study students’ comprehension of the digital library and of the geography modules for course instruction (Borgman, et al., 2000). Our team members in psychology are leading this part of the effort[4]. Another guiding principle is that of least effort on the part of our users (Gilliland-Swetland & Leazer, 2001). We assume that students (and probably faculty members) will spend no more than 30 minutes learning to use the ADEPT technology. The technology should be a minimal barrier to learning the scientific concepts that are being conveyed.
The second central concern of our research is building a technology that instructors will want to use. No matter how useful and usable ADEPT may be from a technological perspective, it must offer sufficient advantages over present practices that university faculty members will choose to employ it in their teaching. Thus we are interviewing faculty about their motivations and requirements for implementing information technology in their teaching, and then conducting iterative assessments of prototypes in their classrooms. We also are studying their teaching styles, to determine what behaviors are common to multiple instructors of the same course and what styles are unique. We are observing classrooms to identify instructors’ use of concepts and the relationships among those concepts. These observations provide a basis to determine requirements for metadata and for functionality of the ADEPT digital library.
A complementary thread of our research is studying the information-seeking behavior of geographers in support of their teaching and research. While the scholarly activities of university faculty have been studied extensively (Meadows, 1998), surprisingly little research has been done on how faculty locate information resources for their teaching. We are currently analyzing these data and expect to report on them in early 2003.
We are pursuing research questions similar to those of ADEPT, but with different content and different populations, as part of the Center for Embedded Networked Systems (CENS), a new National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center based at UCLA (http://www.cens.ucla.edu). Our role in CENS[5] is to deploy scientific data in school classrooms, grades 7-12 (ages 12-18), studying course design and inquiry-based student learning. CENS consists of research teams at multiple universities, in multiple disciplines, who are embedding sensor networks to gather data for biology, physics, environmental sciences, seismology, and other applications.
Some aspects of the uses, users, and usability of information systems in CENS are less difficult to study than in ADEPT and some aspects are more difficult. Studying the uses is somewhat easier because course design follows educational standards established by the State of California. Thus the requirements for educational content are relatively well understood. However, inquiry-based learning is a new approach that is far more difficult to implement than textbook-based instruction. Students are given the opportunity to construct and carry out experiments, and these experiments may be longitudinal, extending far beyond a single class period. Teachers must design an environment in which students can explore and in which answers may be ambiguous. The challenge here is providing primary source data to support inquiry learning.
The aspect of CENS that will be even more difficult than in ADEPT is that we must support streaming data, rather than data that has been processed and organized into manageable packets such as documents. Digital library technology should help us to manage these data and to provide content and services to this diverse scientific community. An important sub-project of CENS is to assess how researchers will gather and use these data, what standards for data and metadata are required, and how these data can be organized for use by CENS scholars and by high school students[6]. The use and re-use of scientific data for multiple audiences that have a diverse range of domain knowledge (e.g., scholars and high school students) is one of the great challenges for digital library research. Data management decisions made early in the project will determine what questions can be asked, how the content can be searched, how it can be displayed, and what types of longitudinal data analysis will be possible.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ADEPT: The ADEPT web sites at UCLA (http://is.gseis.ucla.edu/adept/) and UCSB (http://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/adept/) will provide links to continuing reports of ADEPT research.
Borgman, C. L. (2000). From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in the Networked World. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Borgman, C. L. (in press). The invisible library: paradox of the global information infrastructure. Library Trends, Special Issue on Research Questions for the Field.
Borgman, C.L. (in press). Challenges in Building Digital Libraries for the 21st Century. In: Lim, E-P.; Foo, S.; & Khoo, C. (eds.). (2002). Digital Libraries: People, Knowledge & Technology: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Asian Digital Libraries (ICADL 2002), Singapore. December 12-14, 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag. http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/index.html.
Borgman, C.L.; Bates, M.J.; Cloonan, M.V.; Efthimiadis, E.N.; Gilliland-Swetland, A.; Kafai, Y.; Leazer, G.L.; Maddox, A. (1996). Social Aspects Of Digital Libraries. Final Report to the National Science Foundation; Computer, Information Science, and Engineering Directorate; Division of Information, Robotics, and Intelligent Systems; Information Technology and Organizations Program. Award number 95-28808. Available at: http://is.gseis.ucla.edu/DL/.
Borgman, C.L., Gilliland-Swetland, A.J., Leazer, G.L., Mayer, R.; Gwynn, D.; Gazan, R.; & Mautone, P. (2000). Evaluating digital libraries for teaching and learning in undergraduate education: a case study of the Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype (ADEPT). Library Trends, Special Issue on Assessing and Evaluating Digital Library Services, 49(2), 228-250.
Borgman, C.L. Leazer, G.H., Gilliland-Swetland, A.J.,
& Gazan, R. (2001). Iterative
Design and Evaluation of a Geographic Digital Library for University Students:
A Case Study of the Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype (ADEPT). In P.
Constantopoulos and I.T. Sølvberg (eds.): Proceedings
of the European Conference on Digital Libraries, Darmstadt, Germany, 5-7
September, 2001. Lecture Notes in
Computer Science 2163, Springer-Verlag.
Center for Embedded Networked Systems: http://www.cens.ucla.edu
Criddle, S.; Dempsey, L. & Heseltine,
R. (1999). Information
landscapes for a learning society.
Networking and the future of libraries, 3. Bath, UK: UKOLN, the UK Office for Library and Information
Networking and London: Library Association.
Gilliland-Swetland, A.J., Leazer, G.H. (2001). Iscapes: Digital Library Environments to Promote Scientific Thinking by Undergraduates in Geography. In Fox, E.A.; & Borgman, C.L. (eds.). Proceedings of the First ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries. June 24-28, 2001, Roanoke, VA. New York: ACM. Pp. 120-121.
Leazer, G.L., Gilliland-Swetland, A.J., Borgman, C.L., & Mayer, R. (2000). Classroom Evaluation of the Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype (ADEPT). In D.H. Kraft (ed.), Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science Annual Meeting, 37, November 12-16, 2000, Chicago. Medford, NJ: Information Today. Pp. 334-340.
Leazer, G.L., Gilliland-Swetland, A.J., Borgman, C.L. (2000). Evaluating the use of a geographic digital library in undergraduate classrooms: the Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype (ADEPT). Proceedings of the Fifth ACM Conference on Digital Libraries, San Antonio, Texas, June 2-7, 2000. (pp. 248-249). New York: Association for Computing Machinery.
Twidale, M.B.; & Nichols, D.M. (1998a). A survey of
applications of CSCW for digital libraries. Technical report CSEG/4/98, Computing Department, Lancaster
University, U.K.
Http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/research/cseg/projects/ariadne/docs/
Twidale, M.B.; & Nichols, D.M. (1998b). Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Information Search
and Retrieval. In Williams, M.E.
(ed.), Annual Review of Information
Science and Technology, 33, pp.
259-319
[1] Funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, Digital Libraries Initiative, Phase II, grant no. IIS-9817432, Terence R. Smith, University of California, Santa Barbara, Principal Investigator.
[2] The current members of the ADEPT Education and Evaluation team are Christine Borgman, Anne Gilliland-Swetland, Gregory Leazer, Laura Smart, Rich Gazan, Kelli Millwood, and Jason Finley at UCLA; and Richard Mayer, Rachel Nilsson, and Tricia Mautone at UCSB.
[3] Results of a study of the role of teaching assistants in geography, by Rich Gazan et al, will be available in early 2003.
[4] Richard Mayer, Rachel Nilsson, and Tricia Mautone at UCSB.
[5] The education and evaluation team of CENS initially consists of Christine Borgman, UCLA Information Studies; William Sandoval, UCLA Education; Kathy Griffis, biology teacher at Buckley School; and Joe Wise, physics teacher at New Roads School.
[6] The data management research project of CENS is led by Kalpana Shankar, UCLA Information Studies.