Introduction: The increasing digitalization of society means that digital competence has acquired a key role for today’s citizens and for their participation in social life and democracy. Public libraries are considered as an important institution that can give access to this competence as well as help citizens improve their media and information literacy, since one of the libraries’ tasks is to promote and protect democracy and access to information. To do this, librarians must possess fundamental digital skills and knowledges. In Sweden a national project called Digitalt först med användaren i fokus was launched between 2018 and 2020 and it gave birth, among other things, to a digital learning platform for public librarians called Digiteket. This online resource offers both scientific arti-cles and courses aimed at improving the librarians’ digital competence. With our thesis we want to try and expand the still underdeveloped research around this pedagogical resource. By focusing on a selection of courses, we aim to achieve a better understanding of how their learning process is designed and what type of learning is made possible. At the same time, we want to analyse how the authors chose to organize the course texts, address the target group and make meaning through the texts. Method: Our approach has been to develop a series of questions linked to seven fundamental concepts than belong to two theoretical frameworks focused on learning and communication: didactical design theory and multimodal social semiotics. Three courses from Digiteket were chosen and treated as a didactic and communicative resource constructed as a semi-formal learning design sequence. The courses’ didactic design and metafunctions have been analysed with the help of the questions mentioned above. The instructions contained in Digiteket’s course guide and a short email-interview made with one of the authors responsible for Digiteket’s content helped us add nuance to the analysis. Analysis and results: The didactical design analysis revealed that the courses have a very clear and defined structure with explicit goals and expectations. However, the participants’ possibilities regarding the production of ma-terial as a part of learning is almost non-existent as is also the possibility to discuss one’s learning process. Interaction with the didactic tool and communication between course participants, along with reflection on the learnt subjects and references to further readings are present to a certain extent although mainly situated outside the learning platform. The semiotic analysis of the course texts has shown a pattern in how the course subjects and their relevant aspects are presented, where the subjects are initially seen as influential in the reader’s life. The roles then get inverted, and the reader is shown how to take control of the subject. The texts use several strategies where language and text disposition are involved, and it positions the readers either centrally or as a part of a bigger context of individuals (society as a whole or public librarians). These and other strategies, like the at times playful language, coherence between different courses and internal logical cohesion in each course manage to construct solid pedagogical texts connected to the target group in a varying extent.Conclusions: Digiteket shows a consistent application of fixed pedagogical principles developed with the target group (public librarians) in mind, even if there seems to be room for the integration of more social activities and of different types of didactic tools and media. The platform is in a developing phase and has the potential to become a national hub for boosting librarians’ digital competence and subsequently enable them to transmit knowledges to the public, in accordance with libraries’ societal task. This is a two-year master’s thesis in Library and Information Science.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-484942 |
| Date | January 2022 |
| Creators | Petrarca, Eleonora, Cerny Ros, Robin |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för ABM |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | Uppsatser inom biblioteks- & informationsvetenskap, 1650-4267 ; 863 |
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