I’ve really been feel­ing my Gen Xness the last few months. I dis­like fram­ing Web 2.0 or Library 2.0 as gen­er­a­tional issues (I think it has far more to do with whether you’re used to cre­at­ing and shar­ing con­tent over­all), but the rise of Twit­ter and Friend­Feed in par­tic­u­lar have made me feel like even more of a bridge because I get stretched thin try­ing to explain both sides of an issue to two groups who aren’t really talk­ing to each other about these things. Like Johnny Cash, I walk the line.

As a GenX bridge, one side of me under­stands the Boomer con­fu­sion at these pub­lic posts and won­ders why these folks can’t just call, email, or text a per­son who could actu­ally do some­thing about the prob­lem they’re encoun­ter­ing. Recently, I felt this most acutely when Jason Grif­fey took the time to write a blog post dis­agree­ing with two rules for sub­mit­ting ques­tions to ALA pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates on YouTube. I’m close enough to the tra­di­tional, Boomer norms of com­mu­ni­ca­tion that when I first read Jason’s post, my imme­di­ate reac­tion was to sigh and won­der why he couldn’t have just con­tacted some­one at MPOW to request that the rules be changed. The “direct” approach seems like the log­i­cal one for affect­ing change and hav­ing your voice heard.

And then the Mil­len­nial side of the bridge kicked in and I chided myself, because Jason actu­ally cared enough to take the time to write that post instead of just a 140-character rant. He explained his rea­son­ing in what has (sur­pris­ingly) become a long-form medium online (blog­ging). In hind­sight, his post helped change one of the rules he dis­agreed with, so it was bet­ter that he posted pub­licly where every­one could read it and com­ment, includ­ing us. And hon­estly, some of the com­ments on microblog­ging sites are com­plaints that some­one did try to call or email a human being and didn’t get a good response, so it’s not that these gen­er­a­tional pref­er­ences are exclu­sive. Writ­ing a blog post these days is a pretty high level of engage­ment, and car­ing enough to post a tweet or Friend­Feed com­ment is right behind that in terms of try­ing to get our atten­tion (hey, at least MPOW isn’t mediocre).

My per­sonal les­son from these recent expe­ri­ences is that it’s impor­tant for asso­ci­a­tions (and libraries) to under­stand that every blog post, every tweet, every FF com­ment is like a let­ter to the edi­tor or some­one stand­ing up in a mem­ber­ship meet­ing and voic­ing a com­plaint. They’re the 21st cen­tury equiv­a­lent of a phone call or a con­ver­sa­tion in the hall­way at a con­fer­ence, and we have to take them just as seri­ously and respond to them the same way we would those 20th cen­tury meth­ods of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. It’s not that Boomers want to help any less, but I think they’re used to help­ing peo­ple one-on-one, even online. For many mem­bers who likely trend younger, the new chan­nels are their pre­ferred ones for these types of com­ments, and not just for com­plaints. There isn’t any­thing wrong with either approach, but they’re ships cross­ing in the night, and they don’t lead to con­ver­sa­tions between the two sides that would improve communication.

Some­times I think attack­ing MPOW is a national sport, so it can be depress­ing being the per­son con­stantly relay­ing what’s being said about us online. But it’s impor­tant for those of us in the mid­dle to be that bridge and find com­pro­mises that work for every­one. So I espe­cially appre­ci­ate those folks who take the time to com­ment online in a con­struc­tive way (regard­less of the chan­nel), because it helps me build that bridge.

This strain isn’t new, but I’m curi­ous to know if other Gen Xers are feel­ing an increase in this area due to microblog­ging sites? Have you found suc­cess­ful strate­gies for improv­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion around these new chan­nels? I have some ideas that I’m going to try to imple­ment at work, and I’ll report back here over time, but I’d love to hear how oth­ers are han­dling being at this intersection.

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