The title of this year’s NFAIS Annual Conference is Barbarians at the Gate? The Impact of Digital Natives and Emerging Technologies on the Future of Information Services.
So, when I arrived at the conference early, I headed across the street for lunch at Borders (it’s raining and it was closer than the library) and picked up a copy of Grown up Digital to skim before the conference started. I read the introduction and a bit of the chapters on revamping our education system to meet the needs of the digital natives – and I found it very interesting! The author mentions that our current educational systems were built around the industrial worker – who was expected to listen to his superiors and just do his job. In that model – the one we all experienced as students, the teachers lecture and the students write down what they’re told to regurgitate on the test.
Last week I saw a piece on the news about a school in our area that is having students (young students) attend morning meetings in their classrooms where they talk about themselves a bit, then do a group project of some sort, and generally learn to get along, work together and learn together.
This is the model that seems to be right for the digital natives – a classroom where the students collaborate with each other and learn to work in groups – and have their own opinions. It’s a great model and I hope that more and more schools are following it – because today’s youth are used to having a voice and being allowed to collaborate with those around them – and around the world for that matter.
Well, the conference is about to begin – so it’s time to see if any of the speakers touch on the points found in Grown up Digital.
