Mark Greenfield

Another great post from Seth Godin’s blog on web4. I love the idea that the web is about making connections. I’m currently reading his latest book small is the new big. It’s a collection of the best of his blog posts and columns for Fast Company and is fascinating. More to follow after I finish the book.

Yesterday I has the opportunity to present at the 2007 UB Libraries Information Summit. Lots of interesting ideas were explored around the topics of the Millennial Generation and Web 2.0.

In my 10+ years of teaching about the web, I have always stressed the importance of information literacy - the ability to evaluate the credibility of information on the web. Good web design helps bring credibility to a site. Users don’t have confidence in a site with misspelled words, broken links, poor visual design, and lacking in information about the author and date the content was created or updated. The growth of the read/write web has compounded the problem. More people than an ever are publishing on the web.

The question I raised at the summit was whose responsibility is it to train our students on information literacy? This will be a vital skill for students in both their academic career and as they move out into the real world. The consensus was that it should be everyone’s responsibility from librarians to faculty to staff. That being said, often when it is everyone’s responsibility it becomes no ones responsibility so someone should be designated the point person on campus to coordinate this effort.

Here are some recent articles on the topic from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative:

• How Choice, Co-Creation, and Culture Are Changing What It Means to Be Net Savvy
• Getting Past Google: Perspectives on Information Literacy from the Millennial Mind
• Ensuring the Net Generation Is Net Savvy

I end most of my presentations with the following line - “we are witnessing the move from command and control to connect and collaborate. Now I hace a good resource to expand this idea. Time Magazine has named “you” the 2006 Person of the Year for “founding and framing the new digital democracy”. 40 pages are devoted to a series of articles that explore the new web. I particularly like the diagram in the article Your Web, Your Way on page 60.  (You’ll need to buy the magazine to see it.)  I’ve also come up with yet another name for the Millennial Generation, courtesy of Brian Williams - “The User Generated Generation.”