| Young Adult Literature and Multimedia--Resources |
Teens Online All the Time
by Joanne Griffo
UW-Stout: Young Adult Literature
Teachers and librarians are grappling with the increasing amount of time teenagers spend with technology. They appear to be online all the time and determining exactly what they find so compelling becomes confusing. Determining how to connect teens and library services gets tricky. Anytime you want to establish a connection with young people, you must listen to them and identify their interests.
Teens use libraries as places to socialize, study, and relax. While most adults use technology to get their work done, teens use it for entertainment, to keep in touch with friends, to gossip, to display their personalities and show everyone who they are (Goodman, 84). As everything online becomes more interactive, teens want to be online all the time. MySpace, FaceBook, YouTube and Instant Messaging—most teens consider e-mail outdated—are immediate, and personal. Blogging permits teens to create online diaries or journals that are interactive and elevate their personal musings to the level of global publishing (Goodman, 85). Free websites like Blogger.com make it easy for anyone to create a blog.
Multi-tasking millenials—those born between 1980 and 2000—find even voice mail is too slow. Being in the same room is not close enough to talk, or else it’s too close, so they communicate with quick finger-work and abbreviated phrases, and messages from one teen evolve into contacts with networks of friends (Brody, 8). The technology is also associated with self absorption, narcissism and isolation and Brody reminds us that information flows from the computer straight to marketers of teens’ preferences in music, clothes and food. I think librarians should act like those marketers to learn what teens would like libraries to provide them.
Consider the suggestions coming out of Library Camp NYC (librarycampnyc.wikispaces.com) which relied on participant-driven discussions, held in August of 2007. Attendees urge librarians to create personal and library pages on Facebook and MySpace to engage students (Teens, 26). The Cleveland Public Library (twitter.com/Cleveland_PL), recognizing that e-mail has become too slow for teens, is using Twitter (www.twitter.com), a free Web-based texting service. The library uses it to communicate with teen patrons with teaser messages about library events, available resources and more, with appropriate links to the library. It uses Twitterlit.com, to provide the first line from selected books and links to the titles on Amazon (Teens 26).
These ideas reminded me of the county-wide, networked system my own school library is part of. BCCLS, the Bergen County Cooperative Library System (http://www.bccls.org), would make a great link on a school library page. It includes a <teens> page with wonderful features like <shush> the online forum for teen book discussions which sometimes has author chats with YA authors; <book bonanza> for the Garden State Book Awards winners; <speak out> for a six-week book discussion program; <slam> for poetry submissions and critiques; <teen ink> written by teens for submissions to its print magazine and website, and much more.
Librarians, who were some of the first users of listservs, should not find these new types of communities difficult to create or work in (Goodman, 85). We know that teens are thoroughly engaged in their virtual world. Now we have to get them to include the library in that online world.
References
BCCLS: <teens>. Retrieved February 12, 2008 from http://bccls.org/teens.
Brody, M. (Dec 2006). Guest Commentary: Understanding teens in this age of digital technology.
Brown University Child & Adolescent Behavior Letter. 22(12), 8. Retrieved February 12, 2008 from EBSCOhost Academic Search Elite database.
Goodman, J. (June 2007). Click first, ask questions later: understanding teen online behaviour.
Aplis. 20(2), 84-86. Retrieved February 12, 2008 from EBSCOhost Academic Search Elite database.
Teens all a twitter. (Oct 2007). School Library Journal. 53(10), 26. Retrieved February 12, 2008
from EBSCOhost Academic Search Elite database.
These lesson plans, guides, and other resource materials for young adult literature topics were created by participants in a professional development course in young adult Literature. Each resource is copyrighted by the individual educator who developed the material. The present course being taught is titled: Teaching Young Adult Literature in the Classroom from the University of Wisconsin-Stout (Sharron L. McElmeel, instructor)