looking over their shoulders

Last week I visited with three classes of 6th graders at Ron Russell Middle School in Portland. Kids mostly liked L-net or were indifferent to it, but all of them liked being asked what they think.

I have a lot of thoughts about what to do with all of this information, but for now I am simply reporting my observations.

RRMS is a fairly new school with up-to-date technology in every classroom and in the library. The teacher had brought a bank of the school's laptops for students to work on projects with during class, and all had wireless internet access.

Besides asking students a series of scripted questions, I asked follow-up questions based on their responses and spent time observing five students using L-net during class. Three of the students connected successfully, and two did not connect. One of the students who connected was disconnected in the middle of the session.

What I learned was humbling, exciting and depressing. It was humbling because my preconceptions of how students used L-net were shattered, exciting because of the overwhelmingly positive response I got from students, and depressing because some times, it just didn’t work.

Students had different approaches to starting a conversation on L-net. One argued, "you should say 'hello' first", while another pointed out that he was entering his question because "It says 'How can we help you today?'", and the first suggested that librarians wouldn’t pick up his question unless he was nice.

In the group interviews, many students complained of being disconnected before their session started. L-net is currently set to "time out" if a patron waits more than 4 minutes, which can happen if the service is busy. I asked two of the classes if they would rather keep waiting than have to start all over again, and got a chorus of yesses both times. It was clearly more frustrating to have to start over than to keep waiting.

When students were unable to chat at all, the screen had a message saying that the service was busy, but the students didn’t noticing. They weren’t necessarily reading the screen. This led to frustration, as did waiting a long time and accidental mid-session disconnects. One closed his browser and restarted his computer to try again and later used the 'reply' function for e-mail questions to send the librarian a message, which was never noticed by the librarian. The students clearly didn’t know what to do with L-net if they couldn’t talk to a librarian live, though they all said they would be willing to try again. Only one figured out how to search ‘My conversations’, and said the link was hard to find. Finding his previous conversation, he was pleased to have found a shortcut.

The idea of seeing your own transcripts and your classmates sounded good to everyone, but it wasn’t clear to me that they actually reviewed their old transcripts. None of the other kids besides the one I mention above found the 'My conversations' link on their own, so they may have interpreted my question differently than I expected.

The kids I watched echoed the range of library skills that Susan Stone and Stephanie Thomas talked about at the 2009 Oregon Virtual Reference Summit. Some knew what a keyword was, and some knew what a citation was, but most of it was jargon to them. "Queue", for example, was a meaningless term to everyone.

The students also had a range of computer skills. One student in the class not using L-net was working on a PowerPoint, and needed to be shown how to save his document. Another student I watched did not find that blue underlined words were intuitively links, or know how to use tabs in her browser. Another student could do all of this, and probably more, even figuring out the emoticons in our chat after the librarian set an example.

All of the students I watched typed by "hunting and pecking". Their speed varied from 8 to 30 words per minute.

Student use of websites varied. Part of the assignment was to cite a source, so students were painstakingly copying down URLs onto their paper. One student clicked links and was able to switch between the tabs with websites and the conversation. Another student did not seem to know she could click on them at all, and relied on typing in later the URLs she had written on her paper. After I encouraged her to click a link and switch to that tab, she was unsure of how to switch back to the conversation.

Students I watched complete their conversations went through a closing ritual – they said goodbye and thank you. In one case, the librarian hung up first, in the other, the student did. One student filled out a survey, but it wasn’t clear if it was something he wanted to do or something he felt like he had to do.

Students wanted to know if similar sites to L-net existed. I mentioned Tutor.com and several statewide reference services similar to L-net. I asked students if it would be better if the whole world should just have one site together, and heard a cheer: "yeaaaaaaaaaa!". This is a contrast to what members of the Multnomah County Holgate Library teen council had told us in the past – they liked the local branding and identified as Oregonians. These 6th graders saw no reason why the whole world shouldn’t just get along.

Kids saw the practical side of a worldwide collaborative service as well – "Then we could have 50 people to help us instead of just two!". I asked if 50 people could help 6 billion people and the same student replied, "but not all of them can read!".

Additional selected comments by students:

I liked that it was faster than other services. In California, you had to wait 20 minutes for an answer.

The websites were helpful, they were more than just yes or no answers.

I liked being able to see my transcripts because if you didn't write it down.

Librarian would send you like websites or a book that would help

I love L-net. - I would use it at home if my grandma would let me.

I like that they send all types of websites to go look at; useful in assignments

Is there a way to print?

I expected it would be video

I liked it a lot. It made my research go much easier.

It was a lot easier to get answers to my questions.

It took kind of a while (10 minutes)

I never got connected.

I waited 15 minutes and nothing happened.

Questions I asked students in the group interviews were:

1. Have you used L-net before? Why or why not?
2. Did it help that [the school librarian] introduced L-net?
3. Was L-net helpful?
4. Was it helpful to be able to see your previous chats?
5. Was it helpful to be able to see your classmates' chats?
6. What else did you like or not like? Why?
7. Were people nice?
8. Would you use it again?
9. Did you use it from home? Why or why not?

I look forward to using this information to make L-net better, and your ideas are welcome.