Digital Repositories and Preservation

Joan Lippincott of CNI was on Mason campus today and gave a talk concerning “Net Gen” students (aka Millenials, Gen Y, Digital Natives). I suppose the most concise way to put this is that I disagree with the fundamental premise of an argument that relies around the following points:

• The scholarly output of K-12 and undergraduate students is making a shift to a multimedia “remix” culture and this trend will continue on as these students progress into graduate/PhD education and into faculty positions.
• Gen Y students learn far more from audiovisual information sources and collaborative environments than older generations do.
• The library and university need to adapt to these new learning models in order to best serve their users.

I respect Joan Lippincott. She is obviously well-versed in the subject area and well-regarded in the field. However, I have to respectfully disagree with this type of thinking. I don’t believe that Gen Y students have fundamentally different educational needs from students like myself. I’m 28 years old, barely disconnected from Gen Y in age and not at all disconnected in their “connectedness”. I use online social networks, I do the vast majority of my research online, I watch (and even post) videos on YouTube, I read RSS feeds of blogs and share posts with friends, I post on a few forums, I instant message my friends and family as my main form of communication. I’d wager I’m more active online than a substantial portion of Gen Y, and a number of my friends (both younger and older) could make the same claim.

I feel that these types of discussions focus on the social and entertainment desires of students and masking them as the educational needs of this “new generation” of learners. Learning Commons-type discussions always mention the requirement for group work spaces and collaborative environments, to support the way that Gen Y’ers actually work. You know why young people (including myself) work this way? They don’t suddenly become MORE productive in a group, they simply want to hang out with their friends to distract them from the drudgery that is the reality of academia. You know why students are using social networks or playing MMORPGs? Well, besides to communicate with their peers and have fun, to NOT do anything academic. You know why a student would prefer to look at a picture or watch a video? Because it’s way easier than reading something that would nearly always be more informative about the subject at hand. You know why a student would be more interested in producing, say, a video than writing a paper? Because writing well is DIFFICULT and it’s far easier to gloss up poor research by packaging it in a video format that appears to involve a lot of work.

Yes, older people who think that games, social networks, collaborative learning environments, and the creation audiovisual mashups are the future of education, the basic message I’m sending here is that young students don’t want to learn, they want to play, and presentations like the one I saw today essentially seem to be saying that we need to support this play (masked as educational needs) as much as possible in order to try to get some learning in there.

Why should the university and library spend so much time (not to mention MONEY) to support the production of multimedia products that will in almost near certainty be less informative than a well-crafted research paper on the same subject? Especially as students potentially enter a graduate and post-graduate environment, they will be reading and expected to produce quality research. Why should the library be expected to (potentially) slack on something like high-level research support, as they spend time and staff resources on audiovisual support? One thing I imagine nearly all reference librarians would agree with is that most students DO NOT KNOW how to do research, not even high-level undergraduates or graduate students, let alone analyze the information they acquire and then write a cogent argument or research paper. Joan responded to a statement of mine about traditional scholarly output being textual by saying that a very small population of students will progress into graduate education, and instead enter the work environment, where things happen differently. While I doubt they will be writing 25-page research papers in their job, the fundamentals of analyzing information, processing it, and creating meaningful output are still the problems at hand. I fail to see how this is solved by creating a suite of media creation stations - it requires instruction and support, not technology.

I asked Joan why things like games and online environments should be explored when the traditional educational model has functioned so well for so long. Her response centered on an example of beginner Electrical Engineering students (I believe) who were unable to pass the required math courses of the program. She explained how in a lecture-type class they employed a clicker system, where a professor asked the students to choose from 3 answers to a question. Students were getting the answer right about 1/3 of the time. The professor then told them to talk to someone near them and convince them their answer to another question was right, and then they answered again. This time 2/3 were correct. Therefore, the traditional system must be flawed in some way and new ways of instructing young students are required (in this example, I’m guessing the new way is collaborative learning).

This doesn’t say anything about the educational models that have been employed for QUITE a long time now, it says something about the state of education in the United States. Our schools are producing students that don’t have a high level of knowledge, reading comprehension, and analytical skills. Why must these weaknesses be supported in higher academics?

A colleague of mine mentioned that simply because Gen Y students are supposedly “connected” at all times and may expect information instantaneously doesn’t mean that the long-standing processes of research suddenly become quick and easy. Research is NOT instantaneous, it’s an interative process that takes a lot of WORK. I agree with this.

If you talk to most students, they will say that their use of things like FaceBook, hanging out with friends at the library, and game playing actively interfere with their educational output a large percentage of the time(a recent study at GWU that involved speaking with students about a library presence on FaceBook backs this up). I don’t think it’s the library’s role to somehow teach students that school is HARD, but it certainly shouldn’t be to support their expectation that it’s EASY.

I think it’s interesting that most of the people I know who are vocally opposed to things like, say, the academic use of Second Life, are primarily slightly older than Gen Y’ers. We are almost universally heavy net users and recent graduates. We understand that school is frequently difficult and requires effort. I am of the opinion that older individuals frequently think of younger people as dramatically different from them, and I’d wager the primary difference is that the older people know how to put in a good day of work and younger people don’t. Please realize that I consider myself a slacker and a procrastinator, and I certainly don’t have callouses on my hands from years of tending fields. However, I did manage to get through two somewhat difficult educational programs while spending 80% of my waking hours on the ‘net without a learning commons or a Wii in the study room.

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