Social media is turning education upside down. “Kids are coming to the Columbia University library now mostly to use the coffee bar,” says Kate Wittenberg, Director of Columbia’s Electronic Publishing Initiative (EPIC). “This upsets librarians. Yet the Columbia Library page on Facebook has over 1,000 friends. They are coming to the library in new ways.”

Wittenberg, who is also co-PI of NSDL, has been urging academic publishers and librarians to extend their operations into “social media,” which is the term for the places students visit to talk and play on-line. Her article on the subject is summarized in the post “Across the Generational Divide,” below. The vast and rapidly expanding world of text messages, instant messages, e-mail, multiplayer games, Facebook, and MySpace is too important for academics to ignore, she says. At the Thursday morning discussion Wittenberg moderated, “Meeting Web Kids On Their Own Turf,” four experts shared their thoughts about how the NSDL community might plug in.

(l-r) Kate Wittenberg, Julie Evans, Karon Weber, Eric Rosenbaum, and Jennifer Groff at the Webkids panel. Click for larger image.

“Students no longer believe that the teacher is the font of all knowledge and students are the vessels to be filled,” said Julie Evans, the CEO of NetDay/Project Tomorrow. Evans’ organization conducts large national surveys with K-12 students and teachers about educational technology. Here are some of the highlights from those surveys:
* The three most popular online applications for students are games, music, and communications.
* Sixth grade is the point when more than half of girls and boys report having weekly access to e-mail and instant messaging.
* Middle school students are more sophisticated users of social media than high school students are.
* Students say that instant messaging is their preferred means of communication with peers. They say that e-mail is a “storage medium.”
* Cell phones and text messaging are even more popular with students than are computer-based instant message programs.
* The most technically advanced students are the least likely to spend time updating a MySpace page. MySpace is for beginners.

Evans made several conclusions. First, grown-ups who send e-mail to students are signaling that they are not within the student’s circle of friends. Second, students view online research as more accurate, efficient, and fun than listening to teachers. They feel they can’t rely on school libraries because books are likely to be outdated. “Fifth and sixth graders told us they share web pages with each other at lunchtime,” said Evans. “They don’t have access to computers, so they write the URLs on their lunch bags.”

Students and teachers view social media differently, says Evans, and this difference reduces students’ access to information during school hours. When asked to name the biggest barrier to online communication in school, teachers said they needed faster Internet connections. Students said there are too many rules restricting access. The bottom line, said Evans, is that students are native dwellers in the digital landscape. While students grew up online, their teachers have to learn new habits. This means that many students are ahead of their teachers. They are shaping the digital environment outside of school while teachers struggle to learn and argue over the rules.

“I see a huge upticks in rules and regulations on use of the Internet at school, and it worries me,” said Evans. “Someone needs to show how these rules are handcuffing the technology. I was in an affluent high school that had a great laptop program, with ninth graders bringing their laptops from home and logging into a wireless network. But the network code changed daily and teachers had to waste enormous amounts of time putting the code into the computer every day. They were forced to do this because the principal wanted to keep kids from accessing the code outside of school. Other schools have filters that cut out all commercial .com sites.

“As a result of these rules, the relevance of the school as a learning environment is fading away. There are pockets of great things happening, but in most schools the power of this new technology is being squashed by the principal’s fear of the unknown.”