Joan Lip­pin­cott started out by speak­ing about net gens — “If we were cre­at­ing aca­d­e­mic libraries today, what would they look like?”

Oxford, San Jose State Uni­ver­sity?
would they only have print col­lec­tions, spe­cial collections?

or would we cre­ate learn­ing com­mons?
would they look like Google Book Search or iTunes Uni­ver­sity where the librar­ian mostly deals with licens­ing, totally online?

can we cre­ate libraries with con­tent, tools, and ser­vices for today’s students?

looked up “what’s in my bag” pool on Flickr to see what today’s stu­dents carry (not books)

net gens — born between 1982–1991 who grew up with com­put­ers and other media at home and in school from ear­li­est ages
Joan has two Net­Gen daugh­ters, although their friends are bet­ter infor­mants
also calls them mil­len­ni­als, dig­i­tal natives, gen y, next gen, Dot­Nets
when asked what comes next, she uses the term “screenagers” :-p
– the gen­er­a­tion that will have had com­put­ers and mobile devices since birth

char­ac­ter­is­tics of Net­Gens (a pop­u­la­tion, not a gen­er­a­tion)
using “Born Dig­i­tal” def­i­n­i­tion, a highly edu­cated sub­group has the fol­low­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics
– always con­nected, multi-tasking
– ori­ented to work­ing in groups (doesn’t mean they love “group­work,” but they like hang­ing out with their friends and social­iz­ing while work­ing; you used to go to the library, do your work, & go back to the dorm to social­ize. now they social­ize at the library with friends who are there and who aren’t there)
– expe­ri­en­tial learn­ers (like the shift to hands-on learn­ing from lec­ture)
– visual (ori­ented towards visual cues, although they do still read; when they’re doing a his­tory paper, they may embed a map or cre­ate a video — they don’t just use text)
– pro­duc­ers as well as con­sumers (they cre­ate some­thing of their own)

even if you have 50% adult learn­ers at your cam­pus, many of these char­ac­ter­is­tics still apply
(kids today call them “cam­eras,” not “dig­i­tal cam­eras”)
any­one work­ing in dig­i­tal human­i­ties is work­ing in groups
adults are active learn­ers — they want hands-on
think of any pro­fes­sion — they are all pro­duc­ing web­sites, word doc­u­ments, or pro­duc­ing some form of dig­i­tal information

so our tools need to be ori­ented towards these char­ac­ter­is­tics because they’ll need the skills using them going forward

char­ac­ter­is­tics of “deeper learn­ing” (edu­cause)
– social
– active
– con­tex­tual
– engag­ing
– student-owned

libraries are per­fectly posi­tioned to take advan­tage of this
it’s the projects they do out­side of class that gives them the skills in class
– gives them con­text, they own their prod­uct, and engages them

it’s not just hype and it has rel­e­vance to learn­ing
have to think about how we do this in our own institutions

are all stu­dents really tech-savvy?
stu­dents are con­nected
98.5% of respon­dents own a com­puter, 82.2% own a lap­top (doesn’t mean they are new com­put­ers or that they bring them to class)
spend 19.6 hours a week doing work online (Joan thinks that’s low)
almost all are using social networks

har­vard med­ical school sur­vey of stu­dents in 2007 found 52% own a PDA
app with most use is ref­er­ence!
have to think about the next gen­er­a­tion of pro­fes­sion­als and how we serve them

they love the inter­net and would give up TV & radio before inter­net (because they’re doing those things on the web)
col­lege kids increas­ingly live in the online and offline worlds at the same time
has impor­tant impli­ca­tions for how we struc­ture services

JISC study found that learn­ers who are effec­tive in online envi­ron­ment also cre­ate con­tent, seek peer sup­port using infor­mal net­works & social tools — an under­ground world of net­work­ing that is invis­i­ble to institutions

they may know how to build a web­site, but “we’re more inter­ested in the art and flow of argu­ment“
have to teach them how to use these tools in their dis­ci­plines, not their per­sonal lives
we want stu­dents to con­nect bet­ter to library col­lec­tions and services

Henry Jenk­ins’ “selected core skills“
– col­lec­tive intel­li­gence
– judg­ment — the abil­ity to eval­u­ate the reli­a­bil­ity and cred­i­bil­ity of dif­fer­ent infor­ma­tion resources
– net­work­ing — the abil­ity to search for, syn­the­size infor­ma­tion
– sim­u­la­tion — abil­ity to inter­pret & *con­stuct& dynamic mod­els of real world processes
– appro­pri­a­tion
– mult­task­ing — a pos­i­tive thing when can shift focus to salient details

MIT Photo Diary study

there will be an increas­ing empha­sis on data for visu­al­iza­tion (how do we rep­re­sent this in our find­ing aids)
con­tent opti­mized for mobile devices

Cor­nell has put images from their dig­i­tal col­lec­tions on their com­put­ers as screen­savers so that when stu­dents ask where the images came from, the librar­i­ans can tell them

Seat­tle PL visu­al­iza­tion of books being checked out

need to think about embed­ded con­tent and trans­form­ing text data into more visual formats

- adopt and adapt
– assess
– hir­ing new types of staff
– train exist­ing staff
– let go of things you don’t need to do

these stu­dents are our future and it’s our role to recre­ate aca­d­e­mic libraries

Notes from John Palfrey’s talk for the MacArthur Foun­da­tion at Google Chicago

point of the book Born Dig­i­tal was to bust some of the myths and look at dif­fer­ences in behav­ior between dig­i­tal natives and peo­ple like their grandparents

shouldn’t treat every­body the same way just because they have the same tech­nol­ogy — may not use it the same way
how they define this spe­cific group of kids (not all mil­len­ni­als) — born after 1980, access to the tech­nol­ogy (only 1 bil­lion peo­ple), skills to use it

5 char­ac­ter­is­tics

1. “I blog there­fore I am“
express their iden­tity online and offline — they don’t dis­tin­guish between the two
avatars as another ver­sion of iden­tity
one dif­fer­ence is “sub­scribe to *me*”

2. mul­ti­taskers
a lot of debate over mul­ti­task­ing and what it is, but they’re doing mul­ti­ple things at once
exam­ple of game in which boys tried to main­tain as many IM con­ver­sa­tions with as many girls as they could at once

3. con­sumers to cre­ators
inter­act with dig­i­tal for­mat — seems self-evident, but pre­sump­tion is imme­di­ate access because dig­i­tal (eg, dig­i­tal cam­era vs a dis­pos­able one); movie the­ater vs YouTube, print vs search­able text
pre­sump­tion of media in dig­i­tal form and that it’s social and shared

held a con­test to design the logo for “Dig­i­tal Natives” project at Har­vard Law School — got 136 entries (32 from the kid who won), just for the glory (no prize)

4. mash up dif­fer­ent media, putting dif­fer­ent forms of media together

comes down to a series of tech­nolo­gies — RSS, Google Docs, light­weight col­lab­o­ra­tive tools

5. an inter­na­tional per­spec­tive
“couch­surf­ing” Google Maps mashup — 89,000 friend­ships created

(I think these were the five char­ac­ter­is­tics, but I wasn’t pay­ing atten­tion to num­ber­ing until later)

Issues: Secu­rity

secu­rity — Inter­net Safety Tech­ni­cal Task Force (Texas is the only state not par­tic­i­pat­ing in this!)
“stranger dan­ger” is num­ber one fear
data shows kids are not any less safe than they were 10 years ago (fewer inci­dents), although some kids do meet their attack­ers online (it’s become a pub­lic park in some ways)

bul­ly­ing is borne out by the data, though — clearly an increase in this, although maybe it’s more that adults can see it now, as opposed to in the past (it’s asyn­chro­nous and per­sis­tent now)

social net­works:
– unin­tended audi­ence
– replic­a­bil­ity
– per­sis­tence
– search­a­bil­ity
– unin­ten­tional contributions

adults on dat­ing sites are just at bad as post­ing too much per­sonal infor­ma­tion as kids are on myspace, etc.

his big fear now is “dig­i­tal dossiers,” which start as early as sonograms

side­bar: what is a book? why take dig­i­tal infor­ma­tion about dig­i­tal behav­ior and put it in print?
didn’t write the book for kids, because they won’t read it
the book started as research posted in Base­camp
put chap­ters on a wiki

Issues: Pri­vacy

kids like 3–5 minute videos, so this sum­mer they gave some money to a few interns and had them remake each chap­ter into a video that they then put on YouTube
showed the video on “dig­i­tal dossiers”

Issues: Intel­lec­tual Property

copy­right piracy — notion of “stick­ing it to the man” still an excuse
kids that did get music from iTunes used gift cer­tifi­cates (often from par­ents), so they were actu­ally kind of down­load­ing it the same way — for free

remix issues — enor­mous con­fu­sion on this score
once a kid sees the artist, or once they become a cre­ator, they start to think dif­fer­ently about piracy
but there’s an enor­mous range of under­stand­ing about this
played the video of the piracy chapter

Issues: Cred­i­bil­ity

mis­in­for­ma­tion, cheat­ing, hid­den influ­encers, blogs, wikipedia
gen­er­ally, kids don’t go to the library unless forced to go there
“I went to the library on a field trip once“
Har­vard libraries are packed but with kids using lap­tops, not books

infor­ma­tion over­load — is it real? can you get addicted to this stuff?
thinks we have to take seri­ously the idea that you need fil­ter­ing tools for all of this

Oppor­tu­ni­ties

there are cor­re­spond­ing ben­e­fits and oppor­tu­ni­ties in each of these prob­lem areas
cre­ativ­ity, media lit­er­acy, social pro­duc­tion, semi­otic democracy

a world where peo­ple can remix cul­ture and his­tory — it’s much more pow­er­ful out­side the US but still impor­tant for democ­racy here

knowl­edge cre­ation, equity/democratic, participatory

empow­er­ing indi­vid­u­als, access to infor­ma­tion, infor­ma­tion creation

digitalnative.org
join the Face­book group

ended book on the chap­ter on activism — some young peo­ple are very involved with using these skills and tools to change the world and par­tic­i­pate
Obama cam­paign as an example

have to choose how we embrace these things while fight­ing the worst of them

Ques­tions

- what was the cut­off point for the upper age of kids since those born in 1980 would be in grad­u­ate school now
– older kids were actu­ally more sophis­ti­cated and thought­ful about issues like pri­vacy, show­ing that kids do learn; big­ger con­cern might be the gap in the under­stand­ing of par­ents and teachers

- par­ents who didn’t go to col­lege have less expe­ri­ence in this area for edu­cat­ing kids about this stuff or show­ing them how to be cre­ative with these tools
if this is a cru­cial life skill, then we need to rethink this

- atti­tudes from the data about news?
– they asked a lot of ques­tions, and kids don’t read the NYT cover to cover or watch the evening news (this is a big gen­er­a­tional dif­fer­ence — every­body doesn’t get the same truth any­more); they graze for head­lines (which might be through RSS, a Face­book feed, on a mobile device, etc.) — get­ting lots and lots of facts; a smaller num­ber of them would “deep dive” and click on the link; fewer still engaged in a feed­back cycle (post it, cri­tique it, etc.); if the net effect is that we have every­body get­ting a shal­low ver­sion of the news & the most sophis­ti­cated ones are doing the most with it (tri­an­gu­lat­ing data, etc.), then that’s prob­lem­atic; asked if any­one has ever edited a Wikipedia page — only a few had ever done edits, and they were usu­ally to fix typos — didn’t find this recre­ation of the knowl­edge store

- did your research show what might hap­pen when dig­i­tal natives become old enough to change our IP law, fair use for exam­ple?
– copy­right law used to mat­ter only to map mak­ers, etc., but now it mat­ters to every­one; long way from being changed