Derek Baird reports on the Digital Media and Learning Conference

From http://www.ypulse.com/guest-post-four-insights-for-youth-marketers-from-dml-2010 useful for information literacy librarians:
A guest post by Derek Baird for Ypulse ( http://www.ypulse.com/ ) on the Digital Media and Learning Conference in San Diego., February 18-20, 2010. Baird comments on a June 2010 Common Sense Media survey on Hi-Tech Cheating. Among the key findings: 19% of the students surveyed said that downloading a paper from the Internet to turn in was not a serious cheating offense. Other interesting data for information literacy champions packed into this nine page report as well. Keynoter Sonia Livingstone ( http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/whosWho/soniaLivingstone.htm ) suggests that we overestimate the skills of digital natives. Margaret Weigel from Project Zero ( http://www.pz.harvard.edu/index.cfm ) notes that many teachers are using new technology in old ways. S. Craig Watkins reports that the digital divide is about social/cultural skills as much as access to the Internet. (See The Young and the Digital http://www.theyoungandthedigital.com/ )

Average College Kid's Social Sphere Across Digital Channels

Online Media Daily reports on a study on U. S. college students' use of social networking and communication. "Without factoring in contact overlap, that means every student in the nation has a potential reach of 671 consumers, according to a new "University of Media" study conducted by Mindshare's Business Planning group in partnership with Alloy Media + Marketing and Brainjuicer" Does this mean that if we could teach one college student about use of library resources we could potentially be reading 671 consumers of information? We can dream, can't we? And for all of you "mobile librarians" out there, the study reports that text messaging is the most common method of communication among college students. My friend Drew Smith reminds me that the average number of cell phone contacts reported is about the same as reported for the number of friends that humans tend to have - around 150. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number for a theory about that. (Thanks to YPulse for the info about this article.)