Business week have published some statistics on the age profile of users of social networking software (which we are planning to use in next year’s incarnation of the massage therapy programme.) Thanks Leigh for the heads-up.
Looking at these stats it appears that if we were based in the states, roughly 40% of our students would have at least some familiarity with these types of software. I expect that the real number in New Zealand is probably somewhat less due to the ridiculously out-of-date nature (and snail-like speed) of our internet infrastructure , but would expect that it would not be too much lower (perhaps 30%). This is actually quite a bit higher than I thought it might be, which is encouraging.
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September 3, 2007 at 4:32 am
Yvonne
Hi David
The figures are interesting and higher than I would have expected.
What’s really promising is that quite a hefty percentage of people are reading blogs, podcasts etc. even though they are not ‘creating’ or ‘authoring’. As potential learners moving onto ‘using’ them, learning could be much easier as a result of initial exploration of the software. Starting from the position of ‘what’s a blog/wiki/tweet?’ can lead to a steep learning curve – although I think this is likely to be an ongoing query from many students for a while yet.
Cheers
Yvonne