Digital Natives

John Palfrey and Urs Gasser have just published a book called "Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives." In this interview, they talk about some of the concepts they cover in the book. Here's a really interesting description of how digital natives gather information:

"Digital natives gather information — as a building block in any learning process — through a multistep process that involves grazing, a deep dive, and a feedback loop. Digital natives are good at grazing through the vast ocean of information online. While browsing the Web, digital natives might decide to go beyond the headlines of a story and to take a deep dive, for example by following a hypertext link, listen to a commentary, or download a video clip on the topic of interest. In this way, they are searching for what’s behind the bit of information that got their attention in the first place. The feedback loop, finally, includes some sort of enhanced interactivity with the content they’re interested in."

There are also some suggestions for how institutions should adapt to handle digital natives including:

• having libraries figure out how to best "acquire, catalog, and make e-resources accessible to users"
• educating student in basic digital literacy that goes beyond the standalone computer class by being integrated into what people learn throughout their educational experience.