ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2012

The new ECAR study is out!  From their website:

ECAR has surveyed undergraduate students annually since 2004 about technology in higher education. In 2012, ECAR collaborated with 195 institutions to collect responses from more than 100,000 students about their technology experiences. The findings are distilled into the broad thematic message for institutions and educators to balance strategic innovation with solid delivery of basic institutional services and pedagogical practices and to know students well enough to understand which innovations they value the most.

Concordia Study looks at effectiveness of classroom technologies

A new study looks at how students and faculty perceive the effectiveness of technologies used in the classroom – check out the press release 

…and if you can read French, the study.

ECAR 2011 study released

The ECAR National Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2011 was released last month. Some interesting findings about students’ views on online learning (most don’t prefer completely online), use of/skills with creative technologies (many want to learn how to use these) and of course not so surprising findings about use of social networking. All interesting stuff!

Great article in Campus Technology – the “digital native” 10 years later

Last month’s issue (Oct. 2011) of Campus Technology featured a great article: Will the real digital native please stand up? by John K. Waters. (Thanks for the tip, Kathy!) In it, Waters looks at Prensky’s idea of the “digital native” 10 years later. (Yup, it’s been 10 years since Prensky first coined the term!) So how does the term stand up today? I won’t spoil the article for you – go read it! 🙂

 

Check out The Chronicle this month – special report on Online Learning!

Looking forward to reading The Chronicle of Higher Education’s special report – Online Learning (once the embargo is up on our library’s online subscription, grrr embargos!) Two articles look particularly interesting:

Why ‘Digital Natives’ Aren’t Necessarily Digital Learners by Brian Cowan and The Myth of the Tech-Savvy Student by Ron Tanner. (Thanks for the tip, Wee Librarian.)  There are teasers on the website – check it out!

Nielsen Social Media Report released

Nielsen’s Social Media report was just released – interesting that the average social media site visitor is a female aged 18-34. Just behind the 18-34 year olds are the 35-49 year olds with the 2-17 year olds a distant 5th (even behind the 65+ crowd!) Where are the netgens if not on the social networks and blogs??

Where as this blog [Net Gen Skeptic] been all of our lives?

Just catching up with this great blog – Net Gen Skeptic – where has it been all of our lives! Love this post in particular about the state of educational research, something we lamented in our article a few years back. Lots of great reading here…off to go read.

New report – do today’s students like e-learning?

Interesting to see this new report: The State of E-Learning in Canadian Universities: If Students are Digital Natives, Why Don’t They Like E-Learning? In my opinion, it’s more the implementation of e-learning and the various definitions of e-learning that we are all using that are at issue – but an interesting snapshot of student perceptions nonetheless.

Thanks for the tip from weelibrarian!

What Students Don’t Know

This isn’t really news but interesting & important nonetheless:

News: What Students Don’t Know – Inside Higher Ed.

From the article:

The goal was to generate data that, rather than being statistically significant yet shallow, would provide deep, subjective accounts of what students, librarians and professors think of the library and each other at those five institutions [DePaul University, Illinois Wesleyan University (IWU), Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU), the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and the University of Illinois at Springfield (UIS)]. The resulting papers are scheduled to be published by the American Library Association this fall, under the title: “Libraries and Student Culture: What We Now Know.”

Exciting stuff! Also, check out the excellent ERIAL Project page!

 

How Does Age Affect Web Use? Great Infographics!

How Does Age Affect Web Use? is a posting on SiteJABBER Blog from yesterday – they have taken the data from the recent Pew Study and displayed it graphically. Cool!