John Naughton on email

Direct quote, 'Zuck says: email's end is nigh. I say: LOL'.

Precisely.

US students prefer paper books, apparently

Press-released survey research by the US Book Industry Study Group (Student Attitudes Toward Content in Higher Education) reveals that 75% of the students surveyed preferred paper textbooks over e- versions because of "print's look and feel, as well as its permanence and ability to be resold." Much about students' evaluation of the 'worth' of different kinds of learning material (of course, this is important for the industry to know), but less about their impact on learning.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Digital media (potentially) making us smart

"The basic plan of the brain's "wiring" is determined by genetic programs and biochemical interactions that do most of their work long before a child discovers Facebook and Twitter. There is simply no experimental evidence to show that living with new technologies fundamentally changes brain organization in a way that affects one's ability to focus. Of course, the brain changes any time we form a memory or learn a new skill, but new skills build on our existing capacities without fundamentally changing them. We will no more lose our ability to pay attention than we will lose our ability to listen, see or speak."

From LA Times article by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. They argue that 'the human-computer-Internet collective' is far smarter than the individual alone, although there is danger in that easy access to knowledge can fool us in believing we already have that knowledge and understand more than we do.

[via Alex Pang (who will be working with Microsoft on interfaces for sustained concentration)]

When young people use voice

Much of my own research and that of others, such as Stefana Broadbent, has mapped out the sharing of communication across different channels and, in particular, the migration of much that was previously communicated by voice to text channels, particularly among young people. In Wired last week, Clive Thompson wrote on 'the death of the phone call', commenting that his phone bills were now much 'smaller', i.e. shorter in length, as fewer calls were itemised.

So it was interesting to see, in contrast, results of a survey by Lisa Campbell Salazar, of young people involved in political activism (e.g. environment, human rights or peace campaigns). Survey participants made heavy use of voice communication. The tasks they described using their phones for were to: 'share their message globally, mobilize protests, fundraise, educate their peers and spread solidarity'.

Not too much detail of the survey itself so it's hard to unpick this. And results were combined across several countries so we don't know how different cultural traditions are contributing to choice of channel. All these caveats aside, the finding fits with my characterisation of voice as having more 'heat' than the relative coolness of asynchronous channels such as SMS or email, or text channels where one can control one's availability. And hence it's the channel people resort to when they need to persuade, negotiate in detail, and get things done.

[Thanks to Pat Kane for the Broadbent reference, to Kristina Langhein for the Thompson reference; Salazar research via Putting People First]

Digital Nation

PBS's much heralded Digital Nation showed yesterday. I'm not sure it tells us anything new but it includes some excellent interviews (Sherry Terkel, and a discussion of IBM's use of Second Life for large scale meetings). Also a chilling clip on the impact of remote warfare, 'Taking out the Taliban; Home for Dinner.'

Younger and older extremes of media consumption

Kaiser Family Foundation have reported an in increase in digital media consumption by young people (8-18) over the past five years due, it seems, to media access on mobile devices. Digital multi-tasking (usually music, computer and TV) increases the number of hours racked up, with an average of 10.75 hours consumption packed into 7.5 hours. TV viewing on TVs has slipped slightly but increased overall through viewing on computers and phones.

(As an aside, a phenomenom I've noticed is digital 'infill.' If the stream of watching or listening broadcast media is interrupted by advertising young people immediately surf to get the best alternative content. It's irritating for their parents, but then you wonder what is their attachment to the interrupting ads?)

At the other end of the spectrum Pew Research Centre has found that older people lag significantly behind the rest of the population in internet access: 38% of over 65s use the internet compared to an overall average of 74%.

[Kaiser data via Putting People First; Pew data via John Naughton]

Monitoring children's web use backfires

AP report that software used by parents in the US to monitor their children's web use (brand names Sentry and FamilySafe) is also collecting data about kids' IM conversations, which it is selling to advertisers to assist their targeting. Ugh. There is an opt out for parents but it's not exactly obvious (you could imagine particularly not to an over-anxious, not very web literate parent). There's a sort of irony in this, given current sentiment about over-protective parenting on the web. But it still sounds unacceptable.

[via Boing Boing]

Teens and Tweeting continued

Following intern, Matthew Robbins', Morgan Stanley report on teens' media use, and claims by Nielsen that teens don't tweet (Nielsen's data are trashed by danah boyd), Geoff Cook guest blogs at Techcrunch about whether teen antipathy to Twitter is real, or data artefact. Having crunched through some comScore data and surveyed 10,000 US teenagers, he concludes that actually there is a higher proportion of teenagers among Twitter users (still a niche service) than among Facebook users; but that, at least in the US, teens don't tweet en masse because their needs are met by other services, such as Facebook and MySpace. The picture's slightly coloured in the UK by charges for sending text messages but, otherwise, it's rather what I'd thought.

Fickle political campaigning via social media

Friend, Mark Barratt, tweets

Fickle I guess describes Twitter users. Do we no longer support Iranian dissidents? All my followees have dropped green pics. So last month.

Indeed.

Reply from Barney Carroll

HELLO? Michael Jackson died! Get with the times, Mark.

21st Century Literacies

Connect here to Howard Rheingold's lecture at Reboot Britain on 21st Century Literacies. The talk is packed full of ideas but at its heart Rheingold proposes five key literacies for using collaborative technologies/social media (rather than skills, he sees literacies as skills plus social awareness in using them). The five are: attention, participation, cooperation, critical consumption (which he describes with Hemingway's words 'crap detection') and network awareness (Rheingold seems to have missed the recent de-bunking of 'six degrees of separation' but that's a small point).

Rheingold is sceptical about the idea of young people as 'digital natives' who slip naturally into using networked technologies effectively, although he thinks they still learn a huge amount through peer to peer experience. At the same time he questions how effectively the literacies can be taught in conventional education. He aims to increase his own digital media students' literacies and, in this talk, describes some of the techniques he uses in order to do so. Relevant to my post on backchannels are the techniques he uses to build students' understanding of how they deploy attention (he sees attention as fundamental to all the other skills). His exercises range from almost meditative stillness for short periods of time (indeed he uses the term 'mindfulness'), to allowing use of computers in his class, but with limitations e.g. only five students (of a class of forty) may have their laptops open at one time (in his words 'that really woke them up a lot').

En passant he shows a demonstration project of learning tools that he has been working on, with tabbed access to different streams of networked information (wiki, blogs, chatroom) and notes how the tool needs to be revised as Twitter has (at least among Stanford students) moved in to replace chat rooms.

His final point was the importance of 'Keep[ing] your eye not just on the technologies, but on the literacies [needed to use use them].' Fair point. Although understanding those literacies seems almost by definition to lag behind the technologies themselves. That makes things particularly tough for educators who have to account for the tools they use and the impact of using them in ways that business people and individual members of the public usually don't.

Surfing backchannels in lectures

Great rant by dana boyd, after being 'bitchslapped' by the person sitting next to her at a conference, for surfing the web for 'backchannels' of information whilst listening to a lecture. I'm absolutely on the fence on this. Yes, great to be able to access information instantly whilst you're listening (dana's happy to admit this distracts from listening to the flow - but who's listening to the flow 100% anyway). But sometimes there's also much to be said for just listening. One of her comments (Christopher Sessums) quotes the following:

To waste all day
in the busy town,
Forgetting the treasure
in her own house.

Teens and Twitter

Following Matthew Robson's comments on teens' antipathy to Twitter Techcrunch has further debate. According to some the antipathy is due to concern for privacy: Twitter can't be as closed as a group of Facebook friends (I'm not sure I buy this). For others it's simply that teens are not interested in news, but like stories about themselves and their peers, supported by photos, comments,links etc. that can't be achieved by the more linear Twitter (this (and cost) is more compelling for me).

Teen view of media consumption

The Guardian carries the text of a report on teen media consumption written by Matthew Robson, a 15-year-old intern at Morgan Stanley. Apparently (this piece has been blogged all over the place) the Robson's bosses were surprised to learn that teens don't have time to read or money to buy newspapers, avoid paying for their media as far as possible, and do not use Twitter (because of the cost of tweeting, and the discovery that no one follows them anyway). The report seems a pretty good snapshot of young people's media use, at least from my experience...

...and what an inspired choice of task for an intern. Beats filing.

Michael Wesch on YouTube culture

I first came across Michael Wesch almost a year ago when his Digital Ethnography class at Kansas State University produced a 5 minute, dystopic video, A Vision of Students Today. It's now had almost 3 million hits on YouTube. I watched a response to it today (which I now can't find), from a fairly recent graduate running his own business. The drift was: stop wasting time social networking, use school to learn. (Given this and yesterday's post I suppose I must be entering the sisterhood of grumpy old women.)

Whatever. Via John Naughton's blog I've now come across a lecture by Wesch to the Library of Congress in June, An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube. One, of many, interesting insights was that 25% of YouTube videos feature someone of 35 and over. The same proportion as those featuring someone in their teens. Most YouTube presence currently is 18-24s, and 25-34s. Wesch doesn't discuss this distribution, but I suppose it's not surprising, perhaps, given the skills, confidence, access to technology etc. that appearing on YouTube requires.

Berkeley/USC Digital Youth study

A three-year ethnographic study of how young people use digital media (two page summary here) has reported that most use messaging, social networking etc. to extend existing, off-line friendships. The study describes a social, digital world in which (as with the off-line, social world) adults have little place. In addition to social media use, the study also reports a smaller group of young people using the on-line world to develop interests, connecting to peers beyond their local friendships.

The researchers point out that valuable media and communication skills are learned, informally, in both friendship- and interest-driven activities and challenge schools to play a role in both: first by facilitating access to social exploration tools, even though they are not currently part of the education curriculum (indeed often banned in UK schools); secondly by stimulating learning in interest-driven access.

There's a tension here for the ICT curriculum, at least as it plays out in the UK. Currently it prepares students for the world of work (at its most limited, a Microsoft curriculum, struggling at the moment to catch up with Vista). Often it appears academic and irrelevant to students, especially when compared to the visceral experience they have with their personal computing. But if people are making such a good job of learning social tools anyway, do they have to feature in the school curriculum? To me there still seems to be some point in trying to increase appeal and relevance in teaching more formal computing tools.

Youthful views

Report from Pew Research Centre on American teens and on-line networking, which implies that while many develop an on-line presence in social networking sites, they take considerable care to protect them and limit access to them. Additionally touching survey by the Scouts Association of UK teenagers' attitudes found that the adults they admired most were their parents, and not the celebrities they see in the media.

No time for talk

Nice rant by Charles Arthur in Thursday's Technology Guardian about the inefficiencies of voicemail, not from the usual perspective of the caller stuck in 'voicemail jail', but of the recipient for whom voicemail messages are time-consuming to manage. Seems like the impatience phenomenom is spreading.

Teen media literacy

This week Ofcom released a survey of young people's media use (covering children aged 8-15). Striking amongst its findings was the wider use of media among girls than boys - with the exception of interactive games. Girls aged 11-15 are more likely than boys of the same age to own a mobile phone, use the internet for communication and read newspapers and magazines. More boys than girls have TVs in their bedrooms.

See these patterns intensify as world World Cup fever sets in.

Generation impatience

Usability News reports research by easyMoney that 18-29 year-olds in the UK neglect themselves because they're too impatient to wait for doctor, dentist or hairdresser appointments. Apparently queuing is a thing of the past and the blame for this is laid at the door of the instant access to services via the internet that this generation has enjoyed. I'm sceptical. Would this generation have been any different in pre-internet days? And is service access via the internet really so instant?