John Palfrey, one of the two authors of Born Digital and law professor (among other things) at Harvard, delivered the keynote speech, presenting several assumptions that we have about digital natives and the realities around them…
Assumption: All students are comfortable with technology. Not all children are digital natives — students from lower socioeconomic status homes are less likely to be technologically savvy.
Assumption: There’s a difference between online and real life. For those that are born digital, there isn’t a differentiation between online life and offline life, because they don’t remember a time before everyone had an online identity.
Assumption: Students can multitask. He noted that at Harvard, he would not be speaking to a group looking at him — every one of his students would be looking at their laptops instead. But he has also had students ask him to ban laptops in class to save them from themselves. (He also noted that it’s more likely “switchtasking” than true multitasking that we’re doing.)
Assumption: Everyone wants electronic books. Yes, students want digital materials, but he did point out one important anomaly: students (and many non-students!) still like books for long form arguments.
Assumption: All students are content creators. Again, he found that only some students are content creators — not all of them are. There is a long tail distribution; some create a lot of content, while others just tweak their MySpace pages.
Assumption: Students are getting less credible information and that they can’t tell the difference between false information and truth. When he investigated where students go for information, he found that students went straight to Google, then to Wikipedia. At this point, naive students copied and pasted Wikipedia content into their papers… Smarter ones didn’t trust it. Very few looked at the discussions about the development of the page, but some did go to the references at the bottom and used them as jumping off points.
Assumption: Kids will suffer from information overload and shut down. Think not about the risk of overload, but think instead about the way this can be an opportunity to teach digital natives about information.
Assumption: Students don’t care about intellectual property. In reality, it’s a confusing topic, and some just don’t understand it. So much of what students are doing when they’re creating content may be fair use or it may not be.
Next he showed a clip from the Digital Native created version of the book which included the story of a student who had been sued by the RIAA. (Fascinating clip! This version of the book is forthcoming, and I look forward to it.)
So, what should we — in the library world — do? What do we collect? How should we help students navigate this environment in this “digital plus” era? How do we spend our money more efficiently?
He pointed out that it’s difficult because we have presented getting information as a maze, not a logical process. How do we help students in a hybrid learning environment?
Find out what students are experiencing when they come to your building and come to your web site. At the law library, they recently did a user survey of their web site to glean some of this information, and have separately undergone a reorganization. They have also re-examined their collection development policy. (He emphasized that collection development is relevant to instruction because we have the role of teaching students how to use these resources.)
From here he discussed the serendipity of walking through the stacks — at their library they are working on a visualization tool called “Stack view,” which shows the spines of the books (with what looks like accurate thickness based on number of pages!) as they would be on the shelves, with a “circulation heat map” that shows how often the books were checked out.
Next, he discussed opportunities. We are close to having the digital library of Alexandria, and this is a time to encourage students to think about credibility and creation. He wrapped up with a few comments. We should watch the Google Books developments and the move to print on demand books. Finally, he asked us to consider what we need to do to architect the learning environment for these digital natives.
Q&A Period:
There was a brief discussion of the successes of Yale’s personal librarian program — graduates are still calling their personal librarians after they’ve left!
On the Google Book Settlement, he noted that the ALA has created a guide to what could happen with the settlement.
The reorganization has led to a more team-based format, where people work one job four days a week, and do another one day a week.
Amanda Izenstark
Reference & Instructional Design Librarian
University of Rhode Island