PVLD Director's Blog

Learning and the Google Generation

Today's TimesOnline has an interesting story by the mother of a 15 year old about how her son's approach to studying (earbuds in ears, moving between homework and Facebook...) differs from how she studied when she was that age.  The article is a personal take on what has been written about many times before - that "digital natives" interact with and process information differently than "digital immigrants", but its a nice summary of the concepts.

What I found more surprising than the article were the comments, most of which were quite reactionary in tone and content.  While I too wonder what kids are missing as they live more and more of their lives online and plugged in, it seems to me that we need to face reality and figure how we are going to serve, interact with, and someday employ a generation whose minds work quite differently from ours.  Saying that it shouldn't be so isn't really all that helpful!

Library/Librarian 2.0

Are you a 2.0 library/librarian? That is the thought-provoking question David Lee King posed on his blog www.davidleeking.com back at the beginning of August. Not only did he ask the question, he had the audacity to put forward a spectrum of "2.0-ness" – and generated lots of energetic debate and discussion, including no small measure of criticism. You can see the original post at -

http://www.davidleeking.com/2007/08/01/am-i-a-20-librarian-and-the-library-20-spectrum/

After absorbing the punches David came back with a somewhat softer (watered down?) version at

http://www.davidleeking.com/2007/08/24/library-20-ripples-another-go-at-the-graph/

I admired David's courage in publishing his original version, and have to confess that I prefer it to his second attempt. Like it or not technology is transforming not only how information is organized and made available, but people's expectations about everything from customer service (why can't you tailor your services to my precise personal needs?) to information delivery (what do you mean you can't send library notices to my cell phone?) to privacy (I'm happy to post very personal photos and videos all over the Internet, but don't make me give you my Social Security or Driver's License number) to the value of "experts" (I'm as willing to believe what I read on this blog as what I read in the newspaper).

Libraries and librarians who don't recognize this and adapt their services have earned David's label of "Luddites". To follow on my post from yesterday – if we insist on holding onto "2^nd order" systems and services with their roots in the 19^th century in a world where people don't understand why the library can't be more like Amazon.com the future for libraries will be pretty grim.

The good news is that I think are staff here at PVLD have moved well to the right on David's original spectrum (and are moving towards the outer rings on his concentric circles graph – overall I'd put us between circles 4 and 5). And we are not alone…there are plenty of libraries that are further along than we are, and many more that are on the same journey.

Are all new technologies good for libraries? Of course not…we need to continue to think critically about the potential of each "great new thing" to enhance our services and make use more relevant. BUT – we need to also be prepared to continually explore and learn about new technologies and applications; be creative in thinking about how we could use them to improve our services; and be willing to try things out even if we're not 100% certain of the outcome. The risk is that some experiments fail….the risk of not experimenting is that we fail as a profession and as institutions.

Library 2.0

Helene Blowers of the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenberg County, and the originator of "Learning 2.0" is currently in Europe giving presentations on "Library 2.0".  I thought the following presentation was a terrific overview of what is possible for libraries in the 21st century, and it is chock-full of great examples of what other libraries are doing.  Enjoy - but bear in mind it is a BIG presentation and takes some time to download!

http://www.librarybytes.com/labels/Presentations.html

Congratulations Learning 2.0 Finishers

Our Learning 2.0 self-directed learning experiment concluded yesterday - 31 employees from across PVLD completed program!  Congratulations to:

Rob Vose

Debra Petersen

Merna Marshall

Jim O’Grady

Jennifer Addington

Laurie Anderson

Lanny Swallow

Justin Sabol

Ali Orr

Louise Beebe

Kathy Buchsbaum

Dallas Millican

David Campbell

Eve Wittenmeyer

Cindy Miller

Dennis Piotrowski

Susan Deo

Mary Cohen

Marge Huskins

Joyce Grauman

Erik Adams

Betty Engle

Emily Ohara

Jennifer Chaffey

Marisa Perley

Marcia O’Connor

Kristen Waddell

Susan Tsai

Colin Mitchell

Kendel Cornwell

Kali Merina

Each of these people earned a 1 gigabyte MP3 Player

Congratulations also to the winners of the Grand Prize drawings:

Nintendo Wii – Mary Cohen

Digital Camera – Susan Tsai

Microsoft Zune – Justin Sabol

Ipod Nano – Kali Merina

The feedback from participants has been great - the self-directed learning model, and the use of incentives, clearly worked.  In the process many employees became more comfortable trying new technologies, experienced some great teamwork as people helped each other through the process, got to know their colleagues better through their blogs, and had fun.  All in all a success....and although the prizes seem costly the total cost of the program was less than training the same number of people at an Infopeople or similar workshop - and we didn't have to send people away from work for a day.

Now we want to see how we can adapt this model to other training needs!

Learning 2.0 First Finishers!

Congratulations to "LA at Malaga Cove", "Bldg Engineer", "Information Please", "Jennifer's 2.0 Blog", DP's PVLD Learning 2.0 Blog" and "Executive Assistant" for being the first 6 employees to complete the PVLD Learning 2.0 Challenge.  These employees were awarded their MP3 players at our "First Finishers" ceremony last Friday.  Photos can be found on the Learning 2.0 blog at http://pvldlearning.blogspot.com/

Congratulations also to the 28 employees (35% of the PVLD staff!) who have taken up the Learning 2.0 challenge so far!

Learning 2.0 - Congratulations to our "First Finishers"

Congratulations to “Bldg Engineer”, “Information Please” and “LA at Malaga Cove Library” for being the first to complete the Learning 2.0 Challenge!  Dallas and David will be checking their blogs for completeness, and we will be presenting their MP3 Players at a special ceremony next week…stay tuned for more info!

Check out the great progress being made by all 24 participants to date at http://pvldlearning.blogspot.com/ …and for those employees who haven’t joined in - it's not too late!