College Bound Students

This week I attended a meeting called "Independent School Libraries & College Bound Students."  It was to discuss what library information skills students should have in their "backpacks" to be successful in college.  A good question.  The meeting was held at the Harvard Graduate School of Education library and there were librarians from Tufts, Boston College and Harvard.  But first, we heard from John Palfrey, author of Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives, which I'm sorry John, I have not read.

John spoke about how there are many challenges facing young people, but these challenges present opportunities for instruction.  Although people who are born after 1980 often are referred to as "digital natives," they aren't all "digital natives" (duh).  Not all kids grow up with cell phones and computers, because not all families can afford those kinds of things.  Also, some adults use technologies just as well, or as poorly, as kids do.

It is vital to make libraries cool and important, not just serious.  John spoke a bit about how kids these days are multitaskers, and how we know that when kids multitask they don't learn as well, but they're going to multitask anyway.  We need to embrace this and work with it.  While students want newspapers, magazines and journals to be digital, the majority still want print books.  The major issues students have, says John, are figuring out credibility, dealing with too much information, and understanding intellectual property.