I have posted some links on generations lately (see “Enter the Millennials“, “About youth“) ahead of the upcoming sessions on the matter at Lift10. Here comes further information from a University College London study, on the now called Google Generation, those born after 1993 and referred below as the “young people”:

• the information literacy of young people, has not improved with the widening access to technology: in fact, their apparent facility with computers disguises some worrying problems
• internet research shows that the speed of young people’s web searching means that little time is spent in evaluating information, either for relevance, accuracy or authority
• young people have a poor understanding of their information needs and thus find it difficult to develop effective search strategies
• as a result, they exhibit a strong preference for expressing themselves in natural language rather than analysing which key words might be more effective
• faced with a long list of search hits, young people find it difficult to assess the relevance of the materials presented and often print off pages with no more than a perfunctory glance at them
• young people have unsophisticated mental maps of what the internet is, often failing to appreciate that it is a collection of networked resources from different providers

This graph on article discovery strategies is also interesting:

Link (thx Bruno G)

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