Teens using the internet

Two complementary blog posts on teens & the internet from Stephen Abram, library visionary, bring up questions about how skilled they really are on the internet. Stephen posts about two very recent reports:

Teen Content Creators is a report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project (Dec 19, 2007) that shows how very involved teens are with internet-related activities. A few of their statistics:

• 93% of all teens use the internet with 27% having their own personal webpage
• 64% of online teens ages 12-17 create content for the internet (journals, webpages for hobbies, fansites, blogs, with 39% of all online teens posting creative work such as fiction, art, videos, etc) and 55% of this same age group have Facebook or MySpace accounts
• girls that go online blog more (35%) than boys (20%), but boys post more video content (19% vs 10%)
• 47% of all online teens have posted photos.

About 28% of all teens use landline phones, cell phones, texting, social network sites, instant messaging, *and* email to keep in touch with their family and friends.

[Your reaction to all of this may vary, based on whether or not you currently have a teen in your life, as I do.]

Then there’s the Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future.

It's a study by the British Library and JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) that was just released Jan. 11, 2008 that seeks to identify how researchers of the future are likely to access and interact with digital resources in five to ten years. They hope to help libraries anticipate new behaviors in the `Google generation’ (those born since 1993, who’ve grown up with the internet). Some consistent themes they’ve discovered:

• the information literacy of young people has not improved with the widening access to technology
• the speed of young people’s web searching means that little time is spent in evaluating information
• young people have a poor understanding of their information needs and thus find it difficult to develop effective search strategies
• they exhibit a strong preference for expressing themselves in natural language rather than analysing which key words might be more effective
• faced with a long list of search hits, they find it difficult to assess the relevance of the materials presented
• many young people do not find library-sponsored resources intuitive and therefore prefer to use Google or Yahoo instead: these offer a familiar, if simplistic solution, for their study needs

There's some excellent information on how people actually use virtual information sources - skimming, "power browsing," downloads - that would be helpful to anyone designing a website that is intended to provide valuable content.

So, my conclusion? We have a hard row to hoe ahead of us. Teens are not the easiest people to convince that they don't know what they need to know, so we're going to have to dig down deep to provide concrete assistance so they can see and experience the value of learning better research techniques. Which means we'd better know what we're doing ourselves.

I'm reminded of Michael Stephen's story about the public librarian who goes to his local Panera's every day with his laptop and puts out his sign that The Librarian is On Duty. If you can find quick and quality answers under those conditions, you're primed to work with teens. Those of us who've been off the floor a lot lately may want to do some refresher work before tackling them.

Currently Reading: "The Tale of Tom Kitten" by Beatrix Potter
Currently Listening to: "Jack Fig" by Leo Kottke (blues/jazz/bluegrass acoustic guitar)