Living and learning with social media

by Wendy Stephens

Our learners differ

Since Cicero first uttered, "O tempora! O mores!," the contrast between generations has provided fodder for comedians and evangelists alike. The rate of innovation struck a new pace in the 20th century with technological intervention, which became a part of popular culture when Ricky Nelson listened to a transistor radio while doing homework. Now, television and computer interfaces are increasingly complex, multiple appeals for our notice, our waking experience plagued by continuous partial attention.

Perhaps, in the long term, we will develop neural pathways or physiological mechanisms to handle increasingly simultaneous inputs. In the meantime, new hybrid digital resources balance the customization and personalization of social media with the authority and structure of traditional reference sources.

These carefully organized and maintained data streams incorporate digital audio, video and new-media components, which extends and enhances learning in an engaging and effective way and allows learners to integrate audio and video directly from the search point into the sort of 21st-century products teachers are assigning.

Expectations have changed

Digitally savvy users value customization, especially when it appeals to their ability to generate content. Students, like academics, want to share their research with their peers. And those nascent researchers are no longer content with a self-curated site:

• Peer-mediation, participation and response are increasingly necessary for participation in the larger world of scholarship.
• Students also want to connect to their own localities, even neighborhoods.
• The ability to manipulate database features using Google maps, the same interface reflecting their own neighborhoods at street level, makes the connection with otherwise remote regions suddenly intensely personal.

Resources differ

The new electronic databases push beyond electronic versions of analog counterparts. Earlier generations of digitized books migrated onto disk and then online relatively unchanged. Now, new-media students expect interactive features to incorporate in their projects. Gale's new Grzimek's Animal Life, for example, builds upon but goes far beyond a digitized version of an established reference book. Its scope is one that lends itself to hyperlinking for a wonderfully prismed representation of the animal world.

Increasingly, the provision of resources in subscription databases must deliver both sufficient added value and research time-savings to justify the continued expenditure. When users conduct a Google image search for an animal, the results are often strikingly similar.

In contrast, the images in the Grzimek's Animal Life portal considers animals from multiple vantage points, in their own habitat, and demonstrating their natural musculature and range of motion.

That content is presented with a real sense of integration with digital lifestyles, in particular the .mp3 audio file download capabilities that allow wired, on-the-go students to "take it with them." Users can toggle between display and navigational choices, alternating the common name and the scientific with a click. Hyperlinked breadcrumbs provide a visual indication of location within the database, as well as how that classification relates to the whole of the animal kingdom.

As with any web-based database, new media requires a commitment for robust computer hardware, for compatible browsers and plug-ins, and for networks up to the challenge of delivering a media-rich research experience. But the ample mechanisms for user interactivity will ensure a new, ongoing and reiterative relationship between the researcher and the database.