01.12.06
What do students know about Web 2.0?
I conducted a “beginning-of-semester” survey with my classes the other day. I teach two undergraduate courses that have mostly senior Computer Information Systems majors who are working on their BS in Business degrees. Assumably, by the time they are in their last semester, and being geek inclined, they might have heard of, or even used, some Web 2.0 technologies.
I also teach an MBA course that has mostly non-technical people in it (management, marketing, finance, accounting, etc.). You might expect these people not to know much about Web 2.0 technologies.
I gave them some technologies and asked them to rate their exposure on a 10 point scale, with 1 being “I have never heard of this,” to 10 being “I am an expert/professional in this technology.” A rating of 6 was “I frequently use this technology.” Anything below a 5 means that they might have an idea what it is, but have never personally used it.
The results for Web 1.0 technologies:
Web Pages (undergraduates 7.41, graduates 6.00)
Email (undergraduates 7.41, graduates 6.11)
Content Management Systems (undergraduates 2.28, graduates 1.87)
The results for Web 2.0 technologies:
RSS (undergraduates 2.56, graduates 1.57)
XML (undergraduates 4.22, graduates 2.00)
Podcasting (undergraduates 2.91, graduates 1.57)
Blogs (undergraduates 3.53, graduates 2.96)
I was surprised by how many of the undergraduates, ostensibly somewhat knowledgeable about things technical, had no idea was RSS or Podcasting is. A rating of 3 on the survey was described as “I know what it is, but I have never used it.” Actually, I think that their level of familiarity pretty much coincides with some other surveys I have seen recently with overall Internet users.
Since I am using all of the above in my courses this semester, I will post-test them at the end and see if they are a little more savvy after having used some of these things. More interestingly, I am going to ask them how they liked these technologies and what advantages/disadvantages they saw with them. Does their use allow us to address a greater variety of learning styles? Is self-organizing collaboration comfortable for them, or is it chaotic and frustrating? I’ll report back on this at the end of the semester. In the meantime, I’ll keep feeding anecdotal data to this blog as I see it.
