The Office of Instructional and Research Technology at Rutgers wanted to get a sense of what technologies the students at Rutgers are using. We knew we were missing items so we polled a number of students in the Information Technology and Informatics major to fill in the blank areas.
This was the message I sent out to our group after they got back to me...
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I polled my students - it was eye opening. Here is my attempt to divide the technologies and manner of usage into some meaningful categories.
Broad category division is Life style and enabling technologies. Lifestyle is broadly broken down in to Communication, Media creation, Entertainment/Media consumption, and Life.
I think it would be great to collect this data. Is it too much? Is this the right survey to have all of these questions on?
Life Style:
Communication
- Still have a traditional land line phone?
- Talking on cell phone
- IM on computer
- IM on cell phone
- Web on Cell phone
- Cell phone photo sharing
- Cell phone video messaging
- WebCam/Video phone (person to person)
- Multiuser text chat conferences
- Multiuser audio conferences
- Multiuser video conferences
- Participate in Forums/Newgroups (not class related)
Media Creation
- Blog
- Podcast
- Streaming Audio
- Video podcast
- Streaming Video
- Wiki participant (not class related)
- Social Bookmarking (deli.cio.us, digg.com, etc.)
- Web site design
- Flash animations
- Photosharing (ofoto, Flickr,etc.)
- iTunes playlists
- Music remixes
- Web Mashups (using portal APIs)
Entertainment/Media Consumption
- Blogs
- RSS/News reader
- Podcast
- Streaming Audio
- Video podcast
- Streaming Video
- Wiki
- Cell phone Video (vCast)
- Cell phone as MP3 player
**Gaming
- on cell phone
- on handheld system(GameBoy, GBA, Nintendo DS, PSP, etc.)
- casual games/web games (MSN Sone, shockwave.com, yahoo games, etc.)
- console games (Playstation, PS2, N64, GameCube, XBox, XBox360)
- Computer games (PC/Mac)
- Online multiplayer (CounterStrike, Halo, Starcraft, etc.)
- MMORPG (Everquest, Lineage, DAoC, World of Warcraft)
- installed custom interface
- uses external support tools (DKP, item database, etc.)
Life
- online banking/financial management
- manage student loans
- manage social life (facebook, mySpace, etc.)
- Real time apps like "Where's my Bus?"
- RateMyProfessor
- MonsterTrak/Career management
- online persistant storage
- shop online
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Enabling technologies
- Cell phone
with PDA
with Camera
with VideoCamera
with Web capabilities - PDA (Palm, iPaq, etc.)
- iPod/MP3 player
for music
as extra portable storage - flash drives
<=256 MB
> 256 MB
- Wireless networking
- Bluetooth enabled devices
computer peripherals
cell phone headsets - Digital camera
- Digital camcorder
- flatbed scanner
- Wacom tablet
- Photo Printer
- Computer microphone
- Webcamera
- Satellite Radio
- Global Positioning System (GPS)
- CD Burners
automatic
ability to choose different encoders - DVD Burners
automatic
ability to choose different encoders - Car computers (no, really!)
Comments (2)
Dec 07, 2005
Todd Richmond says:
I think a big issues is one of determing level of sophistication and/or engageme...I think a big issues is one of determing level of sophistication and/or engagement. Tricky to come up with a good metric for that. Maybe you'd have to set it up with questions like:
I take photos with my cellphone (y/n)
I send photos to my friends from my cellphone (y/n)
I blog from my cellphone (y/n)
I take digital photos (y/n)
I edit them on my computer (y/n)
I do something other than resize photos (y/n)
I make web pages with my photos (y/n)
I upload my photos to flickr (y/n)
I worry about using 1-5 scales or whatnot as each person has a different calibration. Plus y/n questions are "digital native"
Dec 08, 2005
Michelle Bejian Lotia says:
Yes, it's difficult to come up with metrics for users to rate their own competen...Yes, it's difficult to come up with metrics for users to rate their own competence using different tools. What I've found helpful is to ask them about their confidence using X tool. So you'd ask:
How confident are you with the following?
Taking photos with my cellphone
1 (Not Confident)
2 (Neutral)
3 (Confident)
_ Don't do it
_ Don't know what this means
I've found it really interesting to add a "Don't know what this means" option - then you find out if a user is making a choice not to do something they know about, or if this is an unfamiliar technology. The first time I used this option on a survey about 3 years ago I found a suprising number of my faculty respondents didn't know what I meant by "threaded discussion". Yet we had always assumed as a design group that that was a concept all of our CMS users already understood!