Paula’s E-Musings

In the past couple of days the media have been buzzing about YouTube and its use in the academy. The Wired Campus  recent post is about how many campuses are using YouTube for a variety of purposes, including marketing, course casting and other presentations. According to a recent Chronicle of Higher Education  article, several colleges and universities have signed agreements with YouTube to set up official channels. At SUNY Cortland we have posted technology training videos on YouTube to make them more accessible to our own students and to reach out to a wider audience.

Both the New York Times and The Chonicle of Higher Education have featured articles about Big Think, a website about ideas and intellectual discourse that hopes to be a “YouTube for ideas.” Big Think features interviews with scholars from many disciplines and provides opportunities for users to participate in discussions. According to the NYT article Big Think was developed by Peter Hopkins, a former student of Harvard Ex-President Larry Summers, and his partner Victoria Brown. Dr. Summers and others provided seed money to develop the website.

Colleges and Universities, including SUNY Cortland, have been posting videos on iTunesU for several years now, and YouTube is another venue to reach today’s students who frequent social networking sites to socialize and learn. The impact of this electronic medium on higher education remains to be seen.

Happy new year to all. Earlier today a colleague sent me a link to a survey conducted by Eduventures to determine technolologies used by full-time college students aged 18 to 24 years. Results indicate that 79 percent of students own laptops, 49 percent of students own desktops, and 30 percent own both. Not surprisingly 97 percent of those surveyed own cell phones and 73 percent own media players.

These statistics most certainly have implications for higher education and the resources and services that we provide. Students expect wireless access across campus. As more faculty are podcasting lectures and uploading presentations we can be assured that most students have their own mp3 players. (Nevertheless our Memorial Library continues to loan out mp3 players and peripherals such as microphones.) As cell phones that are ubiquitous are becoming more sophisticated it’s not surprising that the most recent Horizon Report cited the cell phone as an emerging instructional technology to watch.

The 2008 Horizon Report will be issued in the next month or so. I wonder what technologies will be highlighted this year and what we can expect to see our students using in 2008.  No doubt there will be more mobile technologies emerging that will continue to challenge us to create new applications for learning.

First there was Web 2.0, then Business 2.0 and more recently Library 2.0. In a recent issue of Educause Quarterly I’ve just read about Commons 2.0 that “brings together a wide range of elements to foster student learning in new and creative ways….[with] the freedom of wireless communication, flexible workspace clusters that promote interaction and collaboration, and comfortable furnishings, art, and design to make users feel relaxed, encourage creativity, and support peer-learning.”

The evolution of the 2.0 world corresponds with the evolution in the way we provide services and resources. The 2.0 concept also reflects the variety of collaborative ways and spaces in which learning takes place. It certainly reflects the learning styles of our millennial students who are comfortable with new technologies, communicate electronically, and use social networking sites to create their own learning experiences. Commons 2.0 author Bryan Sinclair suggests five guiding prinicples for Commons 2.0: open, free, comfortable, inspiring, and practical.

At SUNY Cortland we have an extended area on first floor of the library designated as the Learning Commons. Our Commons meets Sinclair’s 2.0 criteria and is consistent with his 2.0 principles. Our Commons is close to the library cafe so students can easily bring food and beverages with them. The Commons has wireless access and is attractively designed with chairs that are comfortable and furniture that is flexible.  However, students must leave this appointed area to find books and periodicals, check out laptops, use mobile technologies, and create media projects — all part of the 2.0 experience. Hence our library director maintains that the entire library is the Learning Commons. Should that notion be extended to include the entire campus? Beyond the campus? Anywhere formal or informal collaboration and learning are takes place? Diana Oblinger’s 2006 e-book Learning Spaces is an excellent resource for examining the convergence of space, technology and pedagogy in the 2.0 environment.

The 2.0 world is changing as new technologies and media formats foster greater opportunities for interaction and shared learning. As providers of technology and information we must continue to understand our students and how they learn. We need to engage others on campus to assure that spaces being built and redesigned do encourage the 2.0 approach to education.

As we continually evaluate our services we are always looking for ways to measure how students use instructional technologies and how our services impact the educational experience. ECAR (EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research) has just released a comprehensive Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology that includes a literature review and information gathered in surveys and focus groups. This is the fourth annual study and there are some interesting longitudinal data about student use of technology and emerging trends. The report validates what we already seem to know —  the increased use of the Internet, and especially social networking sites. Although the Millennials use many forms of technology in social and interpersonal situations, there is still ambivalence about its instructional application, and students report that they still enjoy some traditional classroom interactions. 

There’s lots of information in the ECAR report which is a good barometer of student use of technology. As always I find the EDUCAUSE Resource Library an excellent respository of information and this study is no exception.

A recent posting in The Wired Campus had a link to The Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies’ list of the Top 100 Tools for Learning compiled from lists of learning professionals.  There are many of the expected sites, such as Google, YouTube, Flickr,  del.icio.us, and Wikipedia.  Google Scholar was also included, but as the posting points out there are few scholarly and library resources on the list.

Librarians and faculty are acutely aware that too often students do not use library databases in their research, and educators are always looking for strategies to promote these resources and encourage their use. Information Literacy is a critical skill that students must have to take full advantage of the new information resources. Within the SUNY System Information Management is among the general education requirements that students must satisfy in order to graduate.  

Millennial students know all about social computing and other technologies they are comfortable using. In fact they often perceive their facility with technology to be so thorough that they tend not to be interested in learning the information literacy skills necessary to effectively locate, evaluate and use the information they glean from the Internet.

The librarian’s role as facilitator of the research and information retrieval process has expanded and become more complex. The challenge for all educators is to broaden students’ e-horizons and familiarize them with the world of online scholarly and peer-reviewed literature so they are knowledgeable about how to find, use, and evaluate electronic information.

Just who are these students that roam our campus, enroll in our classes and visit (or don’t) our libraries? On our campus the majority are Millennials or Net Genners who were born between 1982 and 1994, who are digital natives, growing up with technology and expecting its immediacy, and who are confident, determined, achieving and view themselves as special and expect others to treat them as such. 

Their values and life experience are so very different than many of us baby boomers who are digital immigrants, learning to use technology in our adult years, and who teach classes, work with students in the library, and provide their technical support. Weren’t we the generation who changed the world and always thought we were ahead of the curve? Weren’t we the leaders and trend setters who didn’t “need a weatherman to know the way the wind blows?” How do we deal with the net genners, many of whom are more tech savvy than us, but don’t necessarily have the depth of what lies beneath the technology? 

As I began to think about the differences between us and our students, I referred to Neil Howe and William Strauss, who have co-written books and articles about generations, and in particular the generation of students who are attending our colleges and universities. Check out their website and read more about them in Wikipedia. I recommend reading their Millennials Go to College  along with Jean M. Twenge’s Generation Me for some excellent insights. 

The EDUCAUSE website has a lot of good information about creating learning environments for our students. I have found Educating the Net Generation, a compendium of essays edited by Diana and James Oblinger, particularly useful.

Together the “Me” generation of Baby Boomers, and the “Net Generation” of Millennial Students, along with the Generation Xers, will transform the educational culture that we seem to be shaping. “The Times They are e-Changing.”