As part of a larger message to faculty returning from winter break, our CIO offered this summary of how he sees advancing internet use affecting higher education:

Are you familiar with blogs and podcasts? Google them, or look them up in Wikipedia. Some of you may already be using these new tools. Others may think these terms are the latest in a sea of techno-jargon. Regardless, your millennial students — the NetGens — are using these new technologies — along with the ubiquitous cell phone — more and more. Google is a first step in most research and you’ll be seeing more references and quotes from Wikipedia. They have more access to more technology than our generations could have ever dreamed of… and more of it is coming right to their cell phones! I’m not suggesting that you suddenly change your teaching processes, but you should be aware of how this generation gets and interacts with information. And to know them is to understand better how to work and communicate with them. Help them to be discerning with the wealth of information they have.

There are lots of studies and research written on our students today. Here are some of my own observations, as a parent and teacher.

• Students’ span of attention may be short, but their capacity to absorb more information and multitask is significant.
   
• Google is the first point in their research. Wikipedia is fast becoming a knowledge base of choice.
   
• This generation of students has vast amounts of information at their fingertips and phone, but they tend to trust too much of what they find as valid.
   
• Students tend to spend more time on their phones and text messaging than they do in email.
   
• Students walk to classes with their MP3 players in their ears. They walk out with cell phones dialed.
   
• They spend significant time online and connected, yet they know or care little about the underlying technology.
   
• They share personal information far more readily in blogs, Facebook.com and other web sites.
   
• Sales of watches are declining because young people have clocks on their cell phones.
   
• All the above are generalizations. Not all students are as ‘wired’ as we assume. We need to be mindful that some students come from homes where there is no internet, no computer and no cell phones.
   

internet, internet and education, higher education, internet and higher education, internet use, students, faculty, learning, millennials, netgen, netgens, millennial students, library, libaries

Ryan beat me to reporting on the interesting new services at the Ockham Network (noted in this Web4lib post). The easiest one to grok is this spelling service, but there are others that are cooler.

He also alerted me to a Perl script to proxy Z39.50 to RSS. Though for those more into PHP (like me), I’d like to point out the YAZ extension from the folks at Index Data.

This extension offers a PHP interface to the YAZ toolkit that implements the Z39.50 Protocol for Information Retrieval. With this extension you can easily implement a Z39.50 origin (client) that searches or scans Z39.50 targets (servers) in parallel.

The module hides most of the complexity of Z39.50 so it should be fairly easy to use. It supports persistent stateless connections very similar to those offered by the various RDB APIs that are available for PHP. This means that sessions are stateless but shared among users, thus saving the connect and initialize phase steps in most cases.

Clearly, if I wasn’t so lazy, I’d get around to compiling YAZ into my PHP and actually build something with it. Though without Z39.50 on my own ILS, the incentive is understandably diminished.

Finally, I’ve gotten an answer about indexing cat dates in III so they can be used in searches or sorts. The answer is mostly “no,” but I go into a little more detail at LibDev.

tags: cat date, ils, index data, information retrieval, libaries, library, library catalog, library systems, ockham, opac, perl script, php, rss, search by cat date, sort by cat date, xml, yaz, z39.50, z39.50 proxy