Sometimes, I have article envy.  I read an article in School Library Media Activities Monthly and wish I had written something that good.  That’s how I felt when I read Janice Gilmore-See’s article “Kids 2.0.”  The envy started when I read her opening paragraph, which included:

Does your library media program look the same as it did five or ten years ago? Are you developing programs for the millennial generation or are you reconstructing programs from your generation? What are the factors that limit your ability to quickly change your library program to keep pace with the shifting student population?

And the article gets better from there, as she defines “digital natives,” the term coined by Mark Prensky (and which has recently gotten a bit of debate) to talk about students who have always lived in the age of Google.  Now I’m on the fence on this “digital native” stuff.  Our family got a Bell & Howell Apple II plus when I was in elementary school, so I hardly remember a time when computing wasn’t part of my leisure time, if not my school time.  And I crave many of the same things outlined in the “digital native” list below.  So am I really a “digital immigrant” (what Prensky claims you are if you lived in the P.G. era — Pre-Google)? I’m not so sure.

She asks if we’re familiar with these “digital natives” buzzwords:

• ubiquitous connectedness — wanting to be connected to people and information all the time via a variety of interactions
• device independence — not wanting to be tied down to a specific device, instead wanting to connect to the world via iPod, Palm, game console, TV, cameras, cell phones etc.
•  personalization — experiences that are customized to their personal interests
• wisdom of crowds — the belief that many average folks can achieve more than an individual
• “the long tail” — like personalization, “the long tail” represents a desire for materials and experiences that represent their very specific interests, not just what’s for sale at Target or Borders (Example: the student who asked me for a book that was just about labradoodles didn’t want a book on general dog breeds, a book on labrador retrievers, or a book on poodles.  She wanted a book just about that specific breed.
• “creative class” — those who have careers or amateur pursuits in the creative arts (based on Richard Florida’s book)

She asks us to look at some potential stumbling blocks when our students, firmly entrenched in the interactive, Web 2.0 world, enter our school library media centers.  Do we let students find information in their own way, or do we require that they take our path (and possibly our assigned research topics)? Do we permit the Wikipedia to be used as a source, either in all or particular circumstances? Can those in the “creative class” flourish in our school library media centers?

She also draws a parallel between our behavior as school library media specialists and the Web.  Are we Librarians 1.0, where we decide everything and impart those decisions to our students? Or are we Librarians 2.0, in which, like in Web 2.0, the students have a say and can help design and enact what happens in our facilities?   This is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot with my students lately — being explicit in my desire to have the school library be our library, not my library.  If I let kids eat in the library, will they be careful? If I let go of some control and let children design more of their own research topics, will they take the lead? If I create a writing center, will they use it? If small toys are available that represent characters in that day’s storytime, will they use them to retell the story to each other? I am happy to report that the answers are YES, YES, YES, and YES. And as my students see the library as “our” library, not “Ms. Fontichiaro’s place,” circulation rises, drop-ins go up, enthusiasm and motivation blossom, and parents report more and more that the school library media center is a special place in their child’s world.   Which reminds me of the quote I mentioned a few posts ago:

“Our library is a place where magic happens.”

Knowing our students is the first step on that magical journey.

Join the Conversation

I’d love to hear about times where collaboration has occurred between you and your students.  How did it change the relationship between student and school librarian? What was the outcome

I highly recommend that you read Michael Casey’s blog posting on Library 2.0.  He points out that a successful L2 experience starts when we think of the user experience.

From his posting:

What does Library 2.0 mean to you and your organization? What is it that you want Library 2.0 to do for your users? If you don’t know the answer to these questions, you must figure them out before you begin implementing new services and programs …

Energy focused on implementing new tools and programs is wasted if we don’t know what our users really want. Without knowing that, we create more work for ourselves with hit or miss initiatives.

In the past two years much of the discussion of Library 2.0 has been focused on little things we can do to better serve our users. We try to “get them where they are” by implementing IM reference and creating a presence on social networks such as Flickr, MySpace and Facebook. We attempt to lure them in with gaming nights and rock concerts. These can all be great tools to better serve our users. It is inspiring to see so many libraries creating new ways to reach their users.

However, we have to be careful to not flood ourselves with new projects until we have a clear understanding of what it is we’re trying to do and where we want to go. And in the spirit of Library 2.0, that means first figuring out what our users want and need.

Maybe it is time we all take a step back and have a mini re-evaluation of Library 2.0, what it is, and how it can help us better serve our users.

Library 2.0 is user-centric … constant change and evaluation … not just about technology … political …

As has been said from the beginning, the spirit and driving force of Library 2.0 is the same tenant that has been a fundamental part of library service for decades – providing our users with access to information. Library 2.0 strives to reach this goal in part through customer-driven services … If we focus too much on the details and specific programs before we can explain what it is our users want, then our communities, administrators, library boards, and staff may well rebel against Library 2.0 without ever truly understanding what it is about.

Join the Conversation

What are your users yearning for?

Professor Michael Wesch of Kansas State University, who brought us the YouTube video The Web is Us/ing Us earlier this year (a great introduction to Web 2.0), has created a new video, A Vision of Students Today, in partnership with the over 200 students enrolled in his Introduction to Cultural Anthropology class.

Wesch says on his project blog, Mediacultures.net:

It began as a brainstorming exercise, thinking about how students learn, what they need to learn for their future, and how our current educational system fits in. We created a Google Document to facilitate the brainstorming exercise, which began with the following instructions:

“… the basic idea is to create a 3 minute video highlighting the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. We already know some things from previous research (and if you know of any interesting statistics, please list them along with the source). Others we will need to find out by doing a class survey. Please add whatever you want to know or present.”

Over the course of the next week, 367 edits were made to the document. Students wrote the script, and made suggestions for survey questions to ask the entire class. The survey was administered the following week.

I then took all of the information from the survey and the Google Document and organized it into the final script portrayed in the video which was all filmed in one 75 minute class period.

Here is the video on YouTube.

The November issue of SLMAM has a great article on Kids 2.0 that discusses many of these same issues.

Join the Conversation

• What are your thoughts on this video?
• Do the statistics shared in this video ring true with your perceptions of our millennial students?
• How could this video be used in professional development for school library media specialists? For administrators? For teachers?