Two articles worth reading

Although this blog usually focuses on religious resources, these articles are worth reading back to back or side by side for their views of our students. If fact, you may have already read them. If so, you may have begun deciding how they fit the purpose of academic libraries in religious institutions.
Marc Perensky's article on Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants identifies the shift in attention of current students whose environment is more technology oriented than the professors or perhaps even the librarians' and the problems this shift brings to educating these students. Because if you don't have their attention, the student won't learn.
On the other hand, the 21st Century Information Fluency Project has a series of five articles identifying problems digital natives have. These problems include "turn questions into queries," " choosing the right database, recognize information when they find it," find better keywords," and "verify the credibility of the information." So while your students are merrily posting to Flickr, Twittering their hearts out, and facebooking, they aren't doing research.
As I noted to a another librarian last night after looking at a Web 2.0 application: "This really has little to do with scholarship, but it sure is fun." In the world of scholarship, we are the natives. Our goal is to bring the two world's together.