I’m young. I’m just 26, and I normally feel pretty cutting-edge. I was part of the first generation to prefer IM to phones and was in college during the transition from personal-computer-as-luxury to personal-computer-as-necessity. I was in college when we all actually believed Napster was probably okay.
However, over the last few years I’ve begun to realize that not only am I not cutting edge, but that I needed to work on it in order to operate in the sphere of cutting edge. I was just talking with a friend who is in her second year of high school. She said that people don’t pass notes any more: they text message. She explained some Google behavior and talked about what gadgets she wanted. And that made me realize I need to pay a lot more attention to what’s going on in her generation. In just 4 years, students just like her will be sitting in my classes, and I’ll need to know how to make information literacy relevant for them.
Services like Google’s Short Message Service may be a whole lot more useful to the incoming students than even Facebook is today. Those of us who are interested in information literacy at the university level probably ought to pay attention to, or conduct research on, the information seeking (and communication) behaviors of the next generation of college students.
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