oops sorry - one session outstanding from me from the ELI conference - sorry it is out of sequence, I got a bit paranoid about battery life.
So the session - named above - was from U of Guelph in Ontario. This was a library and IT group who were looking at whether they should deliver more of their student support services through new and emerging technologies or techniques, rather than learning and teaching. Not a big deal just thought it was useful to set the context (and explain the title). They had done some research into their own students use of technology and expectations, and many of their findings seemed to contradict the stuff in the literature (although it aligned with conventional wisdom and the general sense we get from SHU).
Their slides are pretty comprehensive and share quite a lot of their results - so I'll let you take a look for yourselves (and I encourage you to do so, some of the results are surprising, some are not at all surprising) http://www.educause.edu/upload/presentations/ELI081/SESS37/ELI%20Presentation.pdf Hard to know what to add from my notes, but if you have any questions/comments, please post, I will try to expand on it.
Most I think are similar (or pose similar discussion points) to the kind of feedback we get at SHU. The only result they discussed which looked a bit "odd" was the library resources one. Even though they had made some effort to minimise the bias that might be in the responses if the students knew the survey came from the library by sending it from the office of the CIO, bottom line - it is still a survey from the university and this was the one question where I felt there might be some skew towards the answer you are supposed to give.
Overall the feedback was that all to familiar "message for the ages" - spend less time developing new things and more time improving things that are already offered by making them easier to use and supporting users to use them more efficiently/effectively.
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It's a pretty quick read, despite the 49 pages, in case anyone is worried (they are slide pages).
The point about improving existing tools and making them easier to use was also something that came out clearly in the Google Generation report. I think it is important to make something fit for purpose as well. Even if students were using games or environments like Second Life, it does not necessarily follow that academia should use them too.
You're right Brian. An interesting (but perhaps not surprising) thing that came out of their research was an awareness by students that the best resources to use were those offered by the library, but that they were also the hardest/most frustrating to use. Students were choosing to use inferior resources knowing that this wasn't the best for their learning and this was causing them anxiety. They didn't just want things "quick and easy" as people sometimes assume, but the barrier of "ease of use" was just set too high and seeking support was seen as weakness. Whilst they were talking specifically about library resources, I think the same message applies across the board.
A couple of points:
Firstly this survey has a high bias towards female students (70%), and will have strongly skewed the results - eg. in favour of instant messaging rather than games.
Secondly, there's a line about: 'Forcing students to use OSN’s for academic
purposes “not fun”'.
But what if HE provides similar functionality targeted at academic purposes? Not to duplicate what goes on in Facebook, but rather because (for example) the ability to organise adhoc groups and communicate within them could also be fantastically useful in learning contexts? Just because they don't want to do chemistry on FB doesn't mean that canny students wouldn't use something similar in a ringenced learning context. Oh hang on, they've got First Class for that, haven't they? Doesn't quite hit the spot, does it?
you're right about the gender bias, which was interesting because it was one of the areas they highlighted as being lacking from the literature. In fairness, they weren't exploring that, this was a service-oriented study, but they were clear they felt more research needed to be published on gender difference just not by them. (could we do it?) They did have a lot more data than they could cover in the session and I'm sure they mentioned having demographic breakdowns of all the different survey questions (as they showed with gaming). If you are interested in looking at it (say for IMing or whatever) I'd be happy to contact them and ask them to share.
The game stuff was doubly interesting to me because I went to this session straight after the intellagirl one, where she had talked about the growth of "girl gaming" and how virtual worlds are the convergence of the different gender gaming genre - but this didn't appear to be reflected in the student body data from this study (yet??).
I am with you completely on the OSN thing. As I recall the "not fun" comment came out of a focus group and I am sure that just because they don't want it in FB doesn't mean that there is no application for white box OSNs. I think (but I am interpreting here) that this comment arose when they were testing the well-worn assumption "to engage students we need to take the learning/our services to where they hang out online" ie FB or MyS (why?? why?? why??) rather than exploring OSN functionality in general.
I agree with the students and I agree with you, but the statement also highlighted for me what I don't like about focus groups - i bet once someone made the "not fun" comment that pretty much killed the conversation about OSNs.
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