Dear Colleagues,
Attending ALA 2013 in Chicago?
I am working with David White of Oxford University, Dr. Donna Lanclos of University of North Carolina, Charlotte, JISC, and Erin M. Hood of OCLC on the project, “Digital Visitors and Residents (V&R): What Motivates Engagement with the Digital Information Environment?”, to identify what motivates learners’ engagement with the digital information environment. This project is one of several at OCLC Research being conducted as part of the User Behavior Studies & Synthesis activity to better serve library users’ needs now and in the future (http://www.oclc.org/research/activities.html).
The V&R project proposes a new way of understanding students’ engagement with technology, and offers a balanced alternative to the “digital natives”
metaphor. When in Visitor mode, people treat the web as a series of tools. They decide what they want to achieve, choose an appropriate online tool to do the job, then log-off. They leave no social trace of themselves online. When in Resident mode, people live a portion of their lives online, and approach the web as a place where they can express themselves and spend time with people.
When acting as a Resident, people will have a profile on a social networking platform, and aspects of their digital identity maintain a presence even when they are not online.
The premise of V&R is presented as a continuum whereby individuals’ modes of engagement will be more Visitor or Resident depending on their personal motivations and their context. By identifying learners’ habits in this way, we hope that our findings will allow schools and universities to respond more effectively to the challenges of learning through technology. We also anticipate that the study will provide insights into the different ways in which people engage with and respond to technology.
There are several phases of the project and we currently are conducting a series of participatory design sessions with a variety of stakeholders within academic libraries and the higher education information technology sector, to inform the development of a V&R toolkit, which. This self-paced toolkit will focus on learning about patron modes of behavior, and using such knowledge to build more effective, engaging service configurations in digital and physical library spaces. The proposed toolkit will be disseminated widely to the global library community and focused on educating and training library and IT staff.
It will provide structure for the creation and configuration of services that integrate the V&R paradigm.
During ALA 2013, we are convening 2 participatory design sessions with different groups of librarians and library IT staff to produce data, case-studies, narratives, and best practices. We plan to use the information that we gather to develop the library toolkit.
If you are attending ALA 2013 and are interested in learning how individuals engage with technology and would like to participate in the participatory design session please sign up here – https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1nWc0EieHxqhvS6L3Zwpl-NoKnIF_iHi9Pk-obVP39Bg/viewform.
To facilitate scheduling we are asking you to choose all of the dates that work for you. However, we only will schedule you to participate in one of the 2 participatory design sessions during ALA 2013. Refreshments will be provided as well as an incentive of $30.
If you have questions about this research, please feel free to contact me by email ([log in to unmask]).
Thanks in advance for your time and consideration.
Sincerely,
Lynn
Lynn Silipigni Connaway, Ph.D.
Senior Research Scientist
OCLC Research
@LynnConnaway
Cell: 303-246-3623
Fax: 614-718-7378
http://www.oclc.org/research/people/connaway.htm