In a post on ACRLog, Marilyn R. Pukkila, Head of Instructional Services at Colby College Libraries, asks Just How Connected Are They?, “they” being her undergraduates.

She says that she asked a few students in student government about podcasts and Second Life. Their resonse was a resounding “hunh?”

So she asks:

If they don’t know anything about these technologies, and if they feel that librarians in MySpace or Facebook are peering through the open curtains of their (perceived) student-only spaces, then why would I want to spend all the time it would take for me to become fluent in them? Is it to get ready for their younger siblings (according to the Pew study)? Or would I be better off spending the time asking students how THEY want to receive information from me?

The first two comments on the post back up her observation with anecdotes of students not knowing what del.icio.us is or even asking “what is MySpace?”

Then Stephen Downes comes in and says that making judgments based on these sample sizes is not worthwhile.

I agree with Stephen. Because if you asked one of those student-government and student-publications movers and shakers at my college, you would find that, in addition to the seeming mandatory Facebook account, he has a del.icio.us account, a Flickr account, and that he has just set up a wiki for the campus publications group. Which might lead you to believe that Colorado College kids have just skipped merrily on to web 3.0 or something.

Which would be a false impression. Another small sample of CC kids would lead you to believe they are all barefoot, dreadlocked, white kids, drinking water out of Mason jars and saying that they think technology is somehow opposed to their idea of the liberal arts.

Sample size aside, I think that it is a huge mistake to conflate all these social software sites and expect that they will somehow help us better relate to our students.

For some sites and some students, that may be the case; in a very small way, my Facebook account has helped me keep up with a few students and meet one or two that I wouldn’t know otherwise. When I find out about student blogs, I take a look, and learn more about what it means to be a student at CC today.

But in other ways, can’t we use these tools to teach students? Isn’t it our job to be out in front of them, and not always be catching up? I don’t expect my students to already know about del.icio.us; I expect that when I show it to them, a few will say “holy crap, that’s cool!” Like the student who used PBwiki for his notes for his thesis last year after he and I spent a little time talking about online productivity tools.

As for Second Life, one of Pukkila’s students says “Why would anyone want to spend time with that?” That sounds like a research question to me. Why indeed? Next time that student is in a sociology class he should get an avatar on there, talk to people, and find out!

If your approach to social software is to get an account and then cry into the ether “anyone wanna talk about libraries here?”, you shouldn’t be surprised if no one takes you up on it. Instead, get in there and make something that you yourself (as William Morris might say) know to be useful or belive to be beautiful. And let those experiences change and shape you as a person and as a professional, and affect how you think of the potential of the web, not just for “outreach” but for teaching and learning and collection development and providing services of all kinds.

And have fun, damn it! If your attitude is “why should I spend all this time learning how to do this stuff,” you have lost before you’ve begun.