The future can be found in the virtual stacks of the International Children's Digital Library.
The "simple search" feature at the Web site, which was designed in part by schoolchildren, provides as many as 50 choices to find the right title while displaying large buttons that link to fairy tales, adventure stories or books designed in favourite kid colours. It also offers personalised bookshelves and three types of software to read them, including a child-inspired viewer that shows pages in a spiral rack so that kids can jump to any page.
It's hardly a sophisticated algorithmic index, but it makes perfect sense to children who may not know how to search like an adult or spell a keyword. That is precisely why the University of Maryland, which built the site, continues to invite children to test its software and suggest new designs.
"If there's only one way to find or read a book, to a child it doesn't make any sense," said Allison Druin, associate professor of the university's College of Information Studies and director of its book project, which was started in November 2002. "Our traditional educational tools limit how children access information to learn or fit us into one way of learning things."
The library offers an important view into the minds of what some sociologists are calling "the millennials" — a generation of children and teenagers who came of age at the dawn of the millennium.
Members of this generation are thought to be adept with computers, creative with technology and, above all, are highly skilled at multitasking in a world where always-on connections are assumed. Their everyday lives are often characterised by immediate communication, via instant messenger, cellular conversations or text messaging. No member of this generation, it can be assumed, would ever wait on a street corner for a late friend.
The changing ways that members of this generation can learn, communicate and entertain themselves are a primary reason behind the viral popularity of socially oriented technologies such as blogs, wikis, tagging and instant messaging. Children who were born when Netscape Communications went public are now 10 years old and have been raised on a steady diet of digital technologies that have fundamentally shaped their notions of literacy, intelligence, friendship and even the anxious adolescent process of learning who they are.
For their grandparents, the bicycle was a symbol of childhood independence. Today, for many kids and young adults, it is the Internet.
"It consumes my life," said Andrea Thomas, a senior at Miami University. "If I'm not texting my friends over the mobile phone, I have my laptop with me and I'm IM'ing them. Or I'm doing research on Google. Honestly, the only reason any one of my college friends use the library is for group meetings."
Jonathan Steuer, technology consumer strategist for Iconoculture, a research firm, said those like Thomas are simply using today's technologies to express a sense of belonging that young people have always desired. "What sets millennials apart is that they use technology to push the boundaries of the values that have been associated with their generation in ways not possible before."
Youth statistics
By only their seventh birthday, most children in the US will have
talked on a mobile phone, played a computer game and mastered a
TV-on-demand device like TiVo, much to the amazement of technically
challenged parents. By 13, researchers say, the same children will have
gone through several software editions of instant messaging, frequented
online chat rooms and downloaded their first illegal song from
BitTorrent.
College-age millennials are likely to own a laptop and take for granted ubiquitous broadband Internet access. They may also be intimately...
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