How geography professors select materials for classroom lectures

Abstract

A goal of the Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype (ADEPT) project is to make primary resources in geography useful for undergraduate instruction in ways that will promote inquiry learning. The ADEPT education and evaluation team interviewed professors about their use of geography information as they prepare for class lectures, as compared to their research activities. We found that professors desired the ability to search by concept (erosion, continental drift, etc.) as well as geographic location, and that personal research collections were an important source of instructional materials. Resources in geo-spatial digital libraries are typically described by location, but are rarely described by concept or educational application. This paper presents implications for the design of an educational digital library from our observations of the lecture preparation process. Findings include functionality requirements for digital libraries and implications for the notion of digital libraries as a shared information environment. The functional requirements include definitions and enhancements of searching capabilities, the ability to contribute and to share personal collections of resources, and the capability to manipulate data and images.

Factors motivating use of digital libraries

“…al. reports that faculty members in geography conduct logical, methodological searches for online teaching or learning materials much like they do when conducting research in their disciplines [5]. They also reported that the faculty members in this study were more able to articulate search strategies for research purposes than for teaching purposes.…”

“…This research delves more deeply into the barriers to use most frequently mentioned in the literature such as time and resource constraints, lack of access to high quality materials, lack of adaptability of the materials themselves, and intellectual property [2,3]. To date, research regarding barriers to use of digital libraries has been relatively small in scale, focusing on users of individual libraries or small samples of non-users within a specific discipline [4,5]. In this study, we focused on characterizing instructors' work patterns in relation to digital learning and teaching materials and what makes an online digital library useful.…”

Keeping up with the law: investigating lawyers’ monitoring behaviour

“…For example, attending conferences and networking with peers was found to be important for music, geography and social science academics (Brown, 2002;Borgman et al, 2005;Francis, 2005). Also, humanities scholars have been found to use informal collaborative networks and the 'grapevine' to keep up-to-date with new books or articles (Brockman, Neumann, Palmer and Tidline, 2001).…”

Impact-ED - A New Model of Digital Library Impact Evaluation

“…The literature review did identify another digital library evaluation, that of the Alexandria Digital Library (ADL) (Borgman et al 2000;Hill et al 2000) where the intention was to evaluate the educational impact of the ADL on student learning, however all the published research that was found described this as a future part of the project and whilst some later research has investigated user requirements by studying how users work (Borgman et al 2004;Borgman et al 2000), there was no evidence in t~e research literature or on the ADL website to show if or how the impact of the ADL was evaluated. One other approach was in-class observation to investigate the effect the Perseus Digital Library had on how students approach their assignments (Yang 2001) but again, there was no indication of how service use was related to impact or how the library impact could be improved and no impact score was calculated.…”