UNDERSTANDING INFORMATION SEEKING BEHAVIOR IN TECHNOLOGY PERVASIVE LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS OF THE 21ST CENTURY

ABSTRACT This research reports findings from a study on information behavior to indicate educationally relevant activity, such as information seeking and sharing, in technology pervasive information environments of the 21st century. Adult learners who are social media users (n = 147) completed an online learning preference survey battery that included the Social Media Learning scale, the Technology Affinity Survey, the Computer Attitude Questionnaire, and the Information and Communications Technology Learning survey. Findings revealed that 23% of the variance in information seeking behavior for this sample was explained by a multiple linear regression model, based on reported perceptions of creative tendencies, attitude towards school, learning with social media, and degree of daily technology use/immersion. Participants with higher preference for information seeking were found to have more positive attitudes toward school, a stronger sense of having creative tendencies, and a higher preference for learning with social media while they also had a lower preferences for continuous immersion in digital communications. Implications of these findings and future research directions are discussed. Keywords: social media tools, guided inquiry, information seeking, instruments INTRODUCTION Information and communications technology (ICT) are coming of age to play a central, commonplace role in formal and informal learning. Educators and learning technologists are interested in understanding how new ICT tools, such as social media will be used by students. Of particular interest is the role of ICT in the information inquiry process used by students to seek information, collaborate, and also to communicate thoughts and content. While Web 2.0 technologies provide a wide array of ICT tools that can be applied to information seeking for knowledge construction, immediate access to a wide array of digital content will not necessarily result in the use of ICT and social media tools for educationally relevant learning activities. The popularity of social media tools and the great interest in their potential for use in education prompted this research, which examines the attitudes and preferences of students in higher education towards learning ICT. Survey data were gathered from using an online survey battery that included four instruments: the Social Media Learning (SML) scale, the Technology Affinity Survey (TAS), the Computer Attitude Questionnaire (CAQ), and the Information and Communications Technology Learning (ICTL) survey, for a research study designed to examine learner preferences for technology in order to better understand how ICT/social media tools are used by individual students. This article reports findings regarding student preferences that may align with information behavior supporting learning activities, such as information seeking and sharing, that are associated with educationally relevant activities that can support knowledge construction