An interesting question. If we are truly in the 'collaboration age' and want to encourage students to use web based applications (keeps the teaching and support costs down, and if we can get them to do it on their own laptops, saves the need to provide these pesky computer labs ...) we need to know if they are actually using web 2.0 style applications.
As always it's difficult to know what students actually do but David White has conducted a
survey of student web 2.0 use at Oxford.
The key points seem to be:
- lot of use of online calendaring
- lot of use of IM (principally MSN Messenger)
- a bit of blogging
- not a lot of collaborative authoring
... which kind of means we may have missed the boat on providing our own calendaring services and providing our own jabber service may be met with a complete wave of apathy by the students.
Interesting questions not covered by the survey are
- How much use do students make of webmail and do they use their own mail in preference to uni provided mail
- Where do Google apps fit into the scheme of things.
As they used to say in examinations, discuss ...
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