Digital information literacy: explorations of history tasks in Singapore schools

Pedagogy of the 21st century is focusing on visible thinking of the students. Educators today are creating learning environments and processes where students' learning is self regulated, active, collaborative and self-directed. The visibility of students' cognition is important for effective mediation and facilitation by the teacher whose role is more of a coach. With the emergence of the internet, new possibilities for learning and teaching have evolved (Tan, 2004). The internet provides access to a plethora of information which is multi faceted and multimodal. Digital Information Literacy promotes 'self-regulated', self-directed' and 'exploratory' learning. It also focuses on information problem solving strategies, the research process and the related skills that make up these information-seeking processes. The Digital curricular Literacies project (DCL) focuses on the key initiatives of the Singapore Ministry of Education (MOE) on the use of ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) in school learning. This paper is based on the data from one section of the larger study, which looked at some of the students' online usage skills when working on history and science tasks. Secondary 1 students from 6 Singapore local schools participated in this project. 13 pairs of students worked on the digital experiment. Each computer was equipped with the screen capturing software Snapzpro that produced a real time video of the students working on the task. Audio recorders were used to capture the discussion between the pairs of students as they worked to complete the task. This paper is a case study of 7 pairs of students working on history tasks. Kuhlthau's (1993), Pitts/Stripling's (1988) and Eisenberg/Berkowitz's (1996) models of information literacy are compared. The data of this case study was analyzed qualitatively using the framework of Eisenberg/Berkowitz's Big6 model. It was found that the students were making conscious choices on selection of websites. They spent most of their time thoughtfully searching and scanning for relevant information on the topic in a broad sense. In most cases they used phrases from the task. They did not spend time to evaluate the sources they had selected for authority, the credentials of the author and the accuracy of the information. The students' artifacts produced did show evidence of multi-modality with a combination of images and text and the resulting artifacts were good examples of exploratory, self-regulatory and collaborative learning.