Millennial students

[deborah]

One of the new big things in librarianship is the notion of the millennial students (those born after somewhere between 1976 and 1981, depending on who's defining). In theory, there's a whole new set of challenges in reaching these students -- and wonderful things we can learn from them about collaborative learning and information seeking behaviors. In theory. Mostly -- but not entirely -- I disagree.

Disclaimer

First of all, I understand the difficulty with taking too much to heart to broad generalizations called "generations". Depending on who's counting, I was born some time between three years and eight years before the end of so-called Generation X (or "Thirteeners"), so it's not surprising that almost nobody I know fits well into that categorization. Most of my peers fulfill a cross-section of the traits of Generation X and the Millennials, which makes sense given both the difficulty with any generalizations and the fact that most of my peers were born on the cusp. I'm Leo on the cusp of Baby Boomer. If I look at a list intended for educators to understand these aliens called their students, about half of the items apply to me, or might as well.

(I'm only addressing the information seeking, communication, and collaborative learning strategies of the so-called millennials. I'm not addressing any of the contradictory and hotly debated cultural definers. They're fascists! They're liberals! They love the environment! They trust authority blindly! They love community! They're nationalists! They're pro-queer! They're super-Christian!)

Late GenX Nerds

I'm atypical, I know. I grew up around computers; my mother, who programmed with punch cards for the London City Council as a teenager, spend over a decade of my childhood at DEC. I wrote my fifth-grade papers (in 1983 -- now you all know how old I am) in WPS-80 on a DEC Rainbow. Before she got the Rainbow, I had to use Scripsit on my father's TRS-80 Model III. I played computer games on both those systems as well as on our TRS-80 CoCo. </nerd>

But it's not just me. Many of my friends who are now not in the slightest bit geeky were BBS users back in the day, complete with handles and acoustic coupled modems. We grew up with word processing, but more than that, we grew up with online communities. Sure, it wasn't ubiquitous. There's a major difference between a world populated with wikis and blogs and a world populated with Gopher, Archie, and CompuServe accounts. But how many people my age were MUSHers, or spent all of our time in college on Usenet (or VAX Notes)?

Intellectually, I still note that there are two major differences. First of all, current 20-year-olds are starting much younger with more ubiquitous forms of instantaneous communication. We didn't have cellphones, though we spent all night on the phone. We didn't have text messaging. We didn't have instant messenger, though many of us, in college, had Send and Talk functionality. We didn't have blogs, but we had Usenet. We didn't even have web pages, although we made do with Finger plans (remember those animated ASCII art finger plans, written entirely an escape sequences? Those were incredible. Several years later I saw an animated ASCII art with the author's note "I'm writing this in Java, and I'm not sure how people wrote these before Java became common. Maybe in C?").

But the more important difference is that the communication changes aren't limited to nerds.

"New" Technologies

Many of the new traits librarians are claiming they should learn from aren't new -- at least not among nerds. In Kurt Squire's recent article about gamers, he waxed rhapsodic about the "university" created as a collaborative learning space in a MMOG. It's true, end-user created and maintained collaborative learning is a wonderful thing, and when it happens online, there's vast possibility for global information sharing. But I have to ask if Mr. Squire ever visited Usenet? Or, since his focus is on recreational activities, a MUSH or MUD? Laypeople using the power of computer networks to share information needed for recreational purposes is decades-old. What's new is the visual richness surrounding the experience (a facet I found somewhat irrelevant), the age of the people with this experience, and most importantly, the ubiquity of the experience. Now any 12-year-old playing EverQuest can answer a reference question for Curt Schilling, pitcher for the Boston Red Sox, and also an EverQuest player.

Online information seeking isn't just for nerds anymore.

Instant messaging is a convenient way to gain information? How old is the "talk" protocol? How long people been using online conversations as a way to avoid the inconveniences of picking up the telephone or walking down the hall. Again, the change here is the ubiquity. The instant message way of communication is no longer only available to people in universities, at high-tech companies, and on BBSs.

None of this is to say that these aren't useful technologies from which libraries should learn, just to say that they aren't new. It's wonderful the libraries are finally picking up on the possibilities.

Some Real Differences

Of course, some differences are real, though I don't yet know if they are important. It's true that a group of people who grew up with Google (or at least AltaVista) at their fingertips probably needs more training as to what value libraries can bring. <rant>(This, of course, comes back to one of my bugbears: that librarians need more training as to what the Internet can bring. There are uses for which Google is appropriate and correct, and uses for which Facts on File is correct. Hell, there are uses for which the appropriate resource is, say, the Gale Directory of Publications and Broadcast Media online, and other uses for which the appropriate tool is Gale in print. Knee-jerk reactions that the Internet/electronic resources or print resources are always right/wrong hurt everybody.)</rant>

It's just as irrational to assume that since all 20-year-olds know how to text message that it's the correct way for libraries to be communicating with 20-year-olds as it is to assume that because text messaging is new that it's a useless method of communication. But we should discover if there are aspects of text messaging which would be useful to us.

It's Not about Generations, It's about Time

See, the thing is, it's not about generations. New communication technology comes in, and will always be our job to learn it, in order to discover if it will make our jobs easier or not. And yes, even if we don't want to make our jobs easier, we need to learn the new forms of communication technology. If people are going to be communicating with us, we should be able to communicate right back. Yes, the onus should be on the person attempted to speak. But we're librarians, so it's very reasonable for patrons to assume that we know how to listen.

It's easy for me to say all this. I'm Leo on the cusp of Millennial, and more than that (or because of that), I love technology. I love being given better tools for my work and my recreation. I understand that I'm atypical, and we need real training and understanding. I understand that these are important issues and worth talking about. But sometimes it seems that our focus on "millennial students" is just displacement. Displacement at our discomfort at this group of kids who are more comfortable than we are with the technology that we might need to do our jobs. And the answer is not focusing on how the students are different, but on our place in a changing world.

Bibliography

"The Millennial Invasion: Are You Ready?" John J DiGilio, Gayle Lynn-Nelson, Richard M Reis. Information Outlook 8. Nov 2004.
"Meet the Gamers". Kurt Squire, Steinkuehler, Constance, Library Journal 130. 15 April 2005.
"IM Me" . Aaron Schmidt, Michael Stephens. Library Journal 130. 1 April 2005.
All articles in special issue of New Directions for Student Services, Summer 2004.
"The Click and Clash of Generations". Lynne C. Lancaster. Library Journal 128. 15 October 2003.

Comments

[cavlec.livejournal.com]

Okay, so you're about my age. :) You got into the tech earlier than I did (the first 'puter I ever worked with, other than the mostly useless Apple IIs at school, was a Commodore 64).

What bugs me about the whole librarian vs. tech thing is a strong unwillingness to experiment. Yeah, you know, maybe IM in libraries is a stupid idea. But how are we gonna know for sure unless we try?

And obviously we can't try everything. And obviously we should think it through before we try. But I keep seeing these two obviosities trotted out as reasons not to try anything new at all, and that makes me sad. And sometimes angry.

[bookishfellow.livejournal.com]

Yeah, you know, maybe IM in libraries is a stupid idea. But how are we gonna know for sure unless we try?

My experience is that libraries/librarians in general want to take advantage of the new technologies, but what they really want is a product that tailors those new technologies to the specific needs and functions of a library. IM is great, as far as it goes, but a reference librarian really wants a co-browsing application in which he can not only push web pages but highlight text or areas of the screen for coaching, so that the remote patron will become more resarch-enabled herself. On top of which, it needs to be at least 99% server-side tech, because you can't count on a patron downloading and installing a huge application when Google is a click away.

These technologies exist, but they're not cheap and they don't all work very well. The tendency is for most libraries, who don't want to spend scarce budget dollars on dud tech, to sit back and watch the few early adopters until some clear winner emerges. Then within a short period that winner's application will be bought up by half the libraries in the country.

In the meantime, there's no specific technological reason they couldn't be using IM as a stopgap. There are often other reasons, though. Where I work, they boil down to staffing issues. We don't want to make it the on-duty desk person's job (there's enough else to do); we don't want to make it any one person's job all the time; and we don't have the budget to assign someone to it outside of normal operating hours, which would be when it's most in demand. So until we sit down and have a big brainstorm session about it (which may happen soon), we'll be sticking with the phone and e-mail. Which we do try to make as easy as possible for our patrons.

[deborah]

Exactly. And then on the other hand I see the opposite: "the kids are using instant messenger and text messaging! We'd better do the same thing because clearly the only way to communicate with these wacky kids is through texting them on their cell phones or they will never listen to anything we say!" This without doing any surveys, or use analysis, or discussion of whether introducing library marketing via text messaging will actually add any value at all. And that makes me laugh. And sometimes angry.

And what do you mean about the useless Apple ][s? Don't you remember Logo? Oh, the antics of that wacky turtle. And did you have the Lemonade game, to learn math

[bookishfellow.livejournal.com]

This may sound incredibly pre-millennial of me, but you should consider submitting a version of this as a guest column to LJ or American Libraries I think you sum things up very nicely, and you'll reach those who need to hear it better in a print source. Besides, hello. Résumé! (Who said that?)

[deborah]

... Wow. These were just my bored ramblings. Okay, I yield that most people probably don't go on to Academic Search Premiere and do article research to back up their bored ramblings, but that's just because I'm a freak librarian.

What an interesting idea. I'm about to have a lot more free time, and I think I'll move forward with that. Thank you, you pre-millennial Luddite, you.

*thoughtful*

[sambony.livejournal.com]

Nicely said! I agree that you should submit it for publication in LJ or AL.

[deborah]

Thank you! I'm floored. And given that two people made the same suggestion, I think I'll see how I feel about polishing this baby up.