🌳 Purpose of this guide

Hello! In this guide, my aim is to introduce my fellow teacher librarians (TLs) to digital gardens, their main features, and their advantages (and some problems). I hope to convince you to create your own digital garden and to share it with the TL world!

🌳 What is a digital garden?

A digital garden is a personal website that contains notes, ideas, writings, creations and lists that are never really 'finished': they're - mostly - posts that you will continue to develop and add to over time (Appleton, ca. 2021a).

Using hyperlinks, you can create connections between ideas, creating a fertile creative environment for more ideas to grow and deepen (Caulfield, 2015).

Learning in public, or "with [the] garage door up" (Matuschak, 2021), you'll receive feedback and contributions from others that will help you learn effectively (Le Cunff, 2020b) and collaboratively (Kiu, 2021).

Watch the short clip Digital Gardening: Explained (Keep Productive, 2020) embedded below for an additional brief overview.

🌳 Digital citizenship

Digital gardens are a great way to model the content creation, and critical and creative thinking that are important, and sometimes overlooked (Heggart, 2014), aspects of digital citizenship (New South Wales Department of Education, n. d.).

As stated in the Digital Literacy General Capability of the Australian Curriculum (Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA], 2022, 'Practising digital safety and wellbeing'), students should "create and curate their online identities to positively tell their stories".

Unfortunately, not everyone has that opportunity. Globally, only 63% of people are digitally connected, and in the least developed nations that figure plummets to 27% (United Nations, 2023). Although Australian digital access is steadily improving and, at 73.2%, is above the global population average, a digital gap remains, with 9.4% of Australians highly excluded from digital life (Thomas et al., 2023).

However, increasingly, the majority of people in Australia and globally will have an online identity. As a teacher librarian, creating your own digital garden can help you enact important aspects of digital citizenship  such as actively adding to the professional online conversation (Oddone, 2023) and modelling a positive online identity for students (Sackson, 2015).