Is the “digital native” a myth?

We’re doing a research project on political parties of the 1840s and 1850s, and we’re in the library – this means I get to interact more casually with the kids, and it means the Kick-ass Librarian and I get to bounce off each other as we observe how the students research. The K.L., however, missed the following interaction between me and one of the juniors, and I would have liked a witness.

“Can we use Wikipedia?”

“Sure, as a starting point – but you can’t cite it, and you need to fix any errors you find.”

“Fix… errors?” He turned away from the screen (no small feat there) and looked at me.

“You know, no-good vandals trashing the page, misspellings, factual mistakes, obvious bias. Lots of stuff.”

“But… fix?”

Then it dawned on me. This young man did not know he, personally, could edit Wikipedia. He’s 17, well-educated from an early age, a pretty good reader, and he seemed very comfortable mousing around Word and a browser. He knew Wikipedia is somehow suspect – hence his asking me if he could use it – but I think the extent of his knowledge was that teachers seem not to like Wikipedia because teachers want to make his life hard and Wikipedia wants to make his life easy. In other words, Wikipedia is sketchy for the same reason Cliffs Notes are sketchy.

I wish I could wrap this complicated problem up in shiny rhetorical paper and curl the ribbons with a pithy phrase describing how to rethink information literacy. Nope, tonight I’m all problem, no solution; maybe I’m just feeling demoralized by the fact that, when I then showed my student how to edit Wikipedia, his voice said “that’s cool,” but his expression clearly said, “now why would I want to do that?”