Student Smartphone Use Doubles; Instant Messaging Loses Favor - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education
Student Smartphone Use Doubles; Instant Messaging Loses Favor

By Kelly Truong

Smartphone use among college students has almost doubled since early last year, a study by a researcher at Ball State University found.

The study confirms what has become common knowledge: cellphones are almost ubiquitous on college campuses, with 99.8 percent of students owning one or more. But in the national survey of about 500 students—which has been conducted twice a year since 2005—new details emerged on the kind of phones they own and how they use them.

How the World Is Spending Its Time Online [STATS]
Brenna Ehrlich

So… whatcha doin’ over there on that laptop, denizens of the world? Well, according to a new study from Nielsen showing Internet usage in April 2010, 22% of the time, you’re engaging with social media.

Yeah, 22% might not seem like a mammoth percentage, but you have to take into account the fact that this finding is on a global scale. Also, a few more telling takeaways from the report:

* Currently, three quarters of Internet (Internet) users worldwide visit a social network or blog when they go online — that’s a 24% increase over last year.
* Joe Average (the international version) spends 66% more time on these sites than he did a year ago — for example, your average user spent 6 hours on these sites in April 2010, while last year he spent 3 hours, 31 minutes.
* Facebook (Facebook), YouTube and Wikipedia (Wikipedia) make an appearance among the world’s most popular brands.

We’ve seen ample proof of the burgeoning popularity of social media in the past — just two months ago, Nielsen reported similar growth — and it makes sense. Facebook has been giving Google (Google) a run for its money when it comes to traffic, and YouTube (YouTube) recently surpassed two billion views per day.

The Souls of the Machine: Clay Shirky’s Internet Revolution - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

The Souls of the Machine

Clay Shirky says the Internet revolution has only just begun.

This is worth reading, I think. Enjoy!

• A Pentax DS Mobile 600 document scanner
• DevonThink Pro by Devon Technologies
• Time Machine for backup to an external 500 Gig HD
• BackBlaze online backup for $5.00 per month

With this configuration, I am able to easily scan documents into my MacBook Pro, run them through Adobe Acrobat’s OCR program and then save them either into specific folders on my computer or simply dump them into the database program DevonThink Pro. Once this is done, my Time Machine and BackBlaze backups make sure that the files are backed up.

So far, the system works well for me and my workflow. Now if paper comes in, it gets scanned and then the paper either gets destroyed or it gets filed away for later use if I absolutely need to have the paper copy. My desk is very clean and I at least give the appearance of being organized. One of the consequences of running a system like this is that I am, in a way, forced to be more organized with all of the items on my computer. I use tags in DevonThink Pro to tag documents for easy retrieval. I have a clean desktop and try and go through my “Downloads” folder weekly.

Paperless–I like working this way so far.

Summary:
The granularity of user decisions is much finer on the Web, which is dominated by the instant gratification of the user’s needs in any given instant. Content must cater to this rapid pace.

I enjoy reading Jakob Nielsen’s website so I thought I’d pass this link along. In comparing television to the web, Nielsen posits that television is “easy” as the programming is all presented to us whereas on the web we are constantly making decisions about what to do–read, click, watch, etc.

I’d be curious as to how this might apply to gaming, too.

Over the coming days I hope to update this with some of the work projects that I have going on and try to explain my understanding of the world of higher education, as brief as my time has been here. I have been a little reluctant to try and do that as I have just really gotten started with all of this. I might change my mind, too, but I do think this is a good place to start. So, bear with me.

I want to say thanks to all of my friends in Virginia who I will miss greatly at the VSTE Conference and at other events, but I also know that we’ll see each other in this online world, which is a very nice thing. It makes the leaving and the change not-quite-so-hard as it might have been.

Cheers!

This article caught my attention today. I wonder if/when there will be competition with Amazon’s Kindle? The ideas in this article aren’t bad I think and at the same time, the Kindle really is its own reading “ecosystem,” which will be a tough act to change.

It’s here that Kindle’s rivals will find it hard to compete. Amazon is the Internet’s master retailer, and the Kindle’s killer feature is its convenience. When you buy a Kindle, it comes pre-loaded with your Amazon account info; you don’t even need to enter your credit card number to buy any books. And then there are all those customer reviews and the amazing recommendations—not to mention the huge selection of popular, cheap titles.

How could anyone compete with that? Here’s one idea: Pull down the restrictions. The Kindle’s biggest problem is its “Hotel California”-content model: You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. Because Amazon uses its own proprietary eBook format, every book you buy is tied to the Kindle and other devices Amazon deigns to approve, like iPhones and iPod touches. Sony recently embraced the ePub document format, which—though it’s still copy-protected—works on multiple devices. This lets you buy a book for your Reader but be assured that your library won’t get deleted if you get some other gadget in the future. The ePub format also lets you hook into other sources for books—for instance, the Reader lets you borrow eBooks from your local library. Google just put 1 million public-domain books online—these will work on all devices that read ePub, which means everything but the Kindle.

Cheers!