Glass half full or half empty?

There has been a lot of talk recently in library circles about ebrary's "2011 Global Student E-book Survey". News of the results have been coming out in bits and pieces for several months now. You can find a good summary at the No Shelf Required blog. Reactions to the results vary from--"kids don't like ebooks" to "Why bother with social media when kids don't use it for research?"--but the results don't seem to justify the reactions. O.K., so 41% of the students in the survey are currently using social media for research or study, while 59% are not. Before we start pointing out the almost 20-point difference between the two groups, we might pause to marvel that 2 out of 5 students are already using it.

For some reason many adults, including librarians and teachers, want to downplay the changes being made by ebooks and new forms of information searching. You can almost hear the sigh of relief from the media when they are able to report that teenagers aren't really crazy about new media. Surveys that give us a snapshot of a specific point in time will never give a complete picture of how people are moving. The important thing to watch is the trend over time. Reading on digital devices hasn't swept the country quite as quickly as is often predicted in Silicon Valley, but it is slowly and surely creeping into public consciousness. Considering how much bad publicity social media has received in recent months over privacy issues and lurid stories of bullying, it is surprising that so many students are intereted in using it intensely. Instead of bouncing back and forth between hailing innovations as saviors of education and denouncing them as dangers and frauds, librarians and other adults ought to concentrate on helping students learn to use all these new tools to share information and insights. They are terrific ways to collaborate with students all over the world and learn more than past generations ever could about what life is really like out there. Percentages don't matter nearly as much as the people behind them who are quietly going about their business of investigating the world they live in.

How social should libraries be?

Social media has been hotly debated by parents and other adults ever since youngsters started flocking to it and spending (it seems) hours posting silly and sometimes disturbing messages and photos on it. At first some school districts and public libraries assumed that Facebook, YouTube and Twitter were time-wasters and students should not be allowed to use them in schools and libraries. But social media crept into our lives and gradually made it difficult to separate personal fooling around from serious learning. Now there is a movement to reverse the trend to ban websites from schools and children’s libraries. The American Association of School Librarians this year inaugurated a Banned Website Awareness Day designed to call attention to the problem. In a report on the growing trend toward freer access for young people to social media and other websites and the New York Times published an article this week describing some of the ways teachers use social media to advance studies. For example, in one Advanced Placement Biology class, lab groups created a Facebook thread to share data and collaborate on projects. Many educators believe that today’s young people will work in environments where shared projects are the norm and they will have to learn to use the tools of collaboration. By exposing young people to social media and to websites that might be considered offensive in schools and libraries, teachers can help students learn how to use the Internet safely and where to draw the line on offensive material. As generations of adults have learned over time it is almost impossible to shield young people from questionable information; it is far better to help them learn how to evaluate it. Librarians have been in the front lines of the fight against book censorship for many years; now is the time for us to extend our concern for books to other materials. As digital material in many formats becomes more and more a part of the life of young people, we should help them to decide how to handle it rather than try to build walls around our libraries. We are all interconnected now, so we might as well get used to it.

Keeping up with the flow

Once again we can thank the Pew Research organization for giving us useful information about how young teenagers (13 to 17) use communication media. As reported in School Library Journal, the research group found that social media sites are the most popular place for young teens to post. Blogs are fading in their appeal, perhaps because blogs are based on the idea of longer posts, which might strike some teens as almost like an assigned paper for school. Facebook is filled with short twitter-like posts, although the twitter site itself is not a favorite choice for teens. As usual, what librarians probably want to take from this is to be sure to keep up a Facebook, or other social media, presence until the trend turns. And whatever you do, don't turn in love with any one format. When the kids move on to something else, we have to be ready to move too.

Separate and not equal?

The difficulty of communication between parents and their preteen or teenage children has often been noted. Now that many young people spend much of their time online, is the gap becoming better or worse? Check out the blog hosted on the Digital Natives website and you can read about another website full of complaints about parents who joing Facebooks. Librarians and teachers may want to consider the implications of this. Will setting up a library page on Facebook be seen as a friendly gesture by young library patrons or will it be an intrusion into their space? Probably the best way to find out is to talk with the kids. In this world of interactive media, we adults should do our best to focus on honest interaction--asking kids what they want and listening to what they say.