Episode 105 - A fast February with some research

Welcome to Episode 105 of TechTalk4Teachers, I'm Tom Grissom.

In this episode I share some of the research findings regarding a college-level student technology use survey.



Right Click Here to Download MP3
(7 minutes 30 seconds)

Technology Pick of the Week
My technology pick of the week this week is a visual presentation tool called Prezi, a link is available in the show notes.

Prezi
http://prezi.com


I have also included a link to my first Prezi with information about some of the research findings I shared earlier in this podcast in a visual form. Be sure to check it out at:

Student Technology Use (College-Level) Prezi Presentation
http://prezi.com/hmqyr-j_zju3/

That wraps it up for episode 105 of TechTalk4Teachers. Show notes for this episode and archived episodes are available on the web at the EIU Instructional Technology Center website at http://www.eiu.edu/itc To leave a comment or suggestion please send an email to techtalk@eiu.edu or leave a comment on the TechTalk4Teachers blog. Until next time this is Tom Grissom, keep on learning!

Full Transcript Episode 105 Tech Talk 4 Teachers:
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Episode 105 - A fast February with some research

It’s Thursday February 25th 2010 and welcome to Episode 105 of Tech Talk 4 Teachers. I’m Tom Grissom. Welcome to an abbreviated edition of Tech Talk 4 Teachers, as I wanted to get one quick podcast in before the month of February slipped away from us. I do have a little bit of cleanup work to do, as last episode, I have asked if anyone from India was listening. I didn’t receive an email from India, however, I did receive an email from Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates from someone who used to live in India. And Teeshen wanted to make sure she said hello and let you know she appreciated your email comment.
Now onto this week’s content. At the beginning of this week, we had a research fair here in our college and we recently completed a survey and we had 451 people respond, out of a little over 500. It works out to about an 83% participation rate. So, we did have a large number of students complete the survey and it was well represented.
To give you an idea, this is student college technology use. So we did have pretty good representation from all levels of college. Of the respondents, 12% identified themselves as freshman, 20% as sophomores, 30% as juniors, 23% as seniors, and 15% as graduate students. So pretty good representation across the board of the different levels. We of course ask about computer use and we’ve been at 90% plus computer ownership for awhile. But in this survey 98.4% of respondents reported owning a computer. To further break that down, we asked about the type of computer that they had and 12.7% reported having a desktop computer, 65.9% having a laptop, 19.8% said both a desktop and a laptop, and as I said 1.6% reported not owning a computer.
As far as operating systems, 91.2% reported owning a PC running Windows and 8.8% running a Mac with OS 10. We ask a general question, do you know how to burn a CD? And 92.4% of respondents said yes. Regarding social networking, we ask about Myspace and Facebook accounts. To break it down further, 51% reported only Facebook, 2% reported only Myspace, 33% reported both Myspace and Facebook, and 14% said neither Facebook or Myspace. In the question, do you own an MP3 player, 83% of respondents said yes, they own an MP3 player. Do you own a cell phone? 99.8% of respondents, so it looks like approximately one person out of the 451 did not own a cell phone. That one surprised me a little bit. I didn’t think it would be nearly 100%. Of those, of course, 95% reported having a texting service.
We ask a question about how often do you backup your data and this one surprised me and is probably a little frightening for the IT folks out there. 44.3% said I never backup. The question regarding listening to audio podcasts, 66% had reported that they had listened to an audio podcast. When we asked how they listened to an audio podcast, this is a little surprising. 90% said they listened on a computer and only 10% reported listening on an MP3 player. We asked if the students had iTunes installed on their computer and 77% reported yes, they did have iTunes installed. But going back to the podcast question, only 13.4% had ever subscribed to a podcast. Then we ask several questions about frequency of use of just some of the common technology tools. I won’t bother to sit here and read all of the different things. I will have a little bit more information coming up in my technology pick of the week however. It was an interesting survey. We had 83% participation rate and it’s interesting to see how the college use, or the technology use by college students has evolved over the years.
In general tech news, since our last episode, two big developments have occurred. Apple announced a new iPad device, which is going to be targeting use as a Ebook reader/audio-video consumption device. It’s not out yet. They just made the announcement late last month and the other thing that’s been in the news a lot lately is Google Buzz. If you have a Gmail account, you may have seen some information about this. This is something that Google kind of surprised users with and it’s not been getting very good reviews due to some privacy concerns. On my Droid phone, I do have Google maps and there is a new function that allows you to layer Google Buzz on top of your map. There are a lot of privacy concerns, because on the map you can literally see everybody that has made a status update and what Google is calling a buzz, similar to like Twitter or a Facebook status update. And not only does it give you the information on what the user said, it gives the username and also the location on the map, sometimes down to the street level. So there are some privacy concerns with that and Google has made several adjustments, but users are still getting accustomed to what it is and if it’s going to be useful as a tool.
If you’re receiving this in your feed today and if you happen to be attending the East Central Technology Conference tomorrow, I will be there. I will be presenting on podcasting some professional development opportunities there. So if you happen to attend tomorrow, make sure you stop by and give a shout out and say hello. My technology pick of the week this week, is a service called Prezi. I have several friends in my Twitter network that have been using Prezi and what it is, is a visual representation and it’s kind of like a PowerPoint that you can zoom in and zoom out of objects. It’s really kind of hard to describe. The best way is to experience it. So what I’ve done is I’ve attempted my first Prezi and it contains some of the research that I reported on earlier. So, if you’re interested, I’ll provide a link in the show notes as well as a link to the general Prezi.com website. Several presenters are using this now. It provides a lot of motion and it really can keep the audience attention, if it’s not overdone.
That wraps it up for episode 105 of Tech Talk 4 Teachers. Show notes for this episode and archived episodes are available on the web at the EIU Instructional Technology Center website at www.eiu.edu/itc. To leave a comment or suggestion, please send an email to techtalk@eiu.edu or leave a comment on the Tech Talk 4 Teacher’s blog. Until next time, this is Tom Grissom. Keep on learning!