Ars, not usually a place to look for reviews for things other than technology posted this report out of the UK about the Google Generation. Essentially… they are not the computer gods that the generations before them are fearing them to be.
I’m thinking Ars is chuckling about this in a way, maintaining some level of geek superiority, but that aside, it does offer an interesting look at the generation of students who will be entering post secondary within the next ten years and who are currently in Jr. High or entering High School. From the article:
- They like to cut-and-paste. “There is a lot of anecdotal evidence and plagiarism is a serious issue.”
- They prefer visual information over text. “But text is still important… For library interfaces, there is evidence that multimedia can quickly lose its appeal, providing short-term novelty.”
- They multitask all the time. “It is likely that being exposed to online media early in life may help to develop good parallel processing skills.”
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But libraries, generally headed by members of “the greatest generation” rather than the Google generation, need to be careful about how they try to meet the needs of the next generation. Jumping headfirst into hot new technologies like social networking can easily backfire. The report notes that some librarians are opening MySpace and Facebook pages, trying to make their services hipper to students, but that “there is a considerable danger that younger users will resent the library invading what they regard as their space.”
Taking a look at the last comment first, this is something that I’ve warned people about as well. You can’t go into public places with your academic content and expect not to get some level of push back. This goes hand in hand with the blurring of lines between professional and personal spaces online. Regardless of where content is located, there needs to be a reason, time and place for it to be accessed. Social networking is taking off because it is a completely social space, free from work related emails (official anyway… unless you work for Facebook or whoever) and other non social concerns. People enjoy “me time” there and connect with people, not papers and other stressors. Instructors need to put their course materials in a place that only deals with the course, so things stay contained for the duration of that experience as well. This is the ideal, but not the only way to go by far.
Finally taking a look at the bullet points, the second point is key and essentially points to the impact of novelty. People pay attention to novelty, regardless of it’s media. Sinking money into a novel user experience without providing content isn’t going to get you anywhere. Just take a look at all the mess that is on a typical MySpace page and after the shock wears off, you’ll as likely as not find little or no content. Compare this to a message forum where there is little Flash (;)) and more substance. The key is to find a balance between the two.
So what about the natives that are starting to show and will increase in size? Well it seems to me, that they see “technology” as a tool or an appliance, needing only to understand the basics to get the job done – much like the factory worker who needs to know only enough to complete a task or recover from a malfunction. These new students will have experience from a different set of sources than their parents and instructors will have had, but this is no different than any generation that has come before. So what are we worried about? I’m not really sure, but I know that the bottom line that many people dealing with instructional technology have to contend with. Students expect content to be delivered in a convenient manner and to be appealing. We have to make sure we can meet those demands, using whatever technology is appropriate.
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