Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

11.21.06 | Will the traditional arbiters of content quality, such as scholarly publishers, step up to propose new mechanisms, or will younger users establish systems for assessing credibility on their own? If the library and publishing communities can incorporate students’ reliance on collaboration and community-based trust in designing new scholarly and educational resources, they may be in a much stronger position going forward.

Developing these new resources, however, will require a change in mind-set within the established library and publishing communities. Professionals in these fields will need to initiate conversations with new players and partners. Developers of web-based communities, commercial search engines, manufacturers of electronic devices, and high school students might become advisors and collaborators. Market research (for publishers) and outreach (for libraries) should perhaps now include arranging focus groups with teenagers, personally exploring the sites where our students and readers spend their time, and observing college, high school, and middle school students socializing and studying in their digital communities in order to understand the world in which they live and work.

Navigating the changing methods by which users establish credibility will require innovation and agility on the part of teachers, librarians, and publishers. It will be crucial to engage in experiments that test out various possibilities for use of information.

For example: A publisher might create web-based resources that allow easy transitions between an instructor’s teaching, a reference to the same material through a more formal library, and a further reference to a networked community in which peers offer their perspective on the text or subject being studied. In such an environment, students might have a choice of reviewing class materials, searching or browsing resources in a traditional digital library, asking for guidance from a librarian, or communicating directly with peers regarding the value of a particular resource or piece of information. As students have the ability to examine the provenance, authenticity, and the multiple contexts from which items in their educational environment arise, it may be possible to understand what helps them become more effective learners.

Such an experiment might also help us understand the relative value that students attach to the evaluation of information by peers, teachers, librarians, and publishers.