In Search of Luddites

ONE WAY to tell if college students are Luddites is to determine whether they author their own personal music collection, like mine on an iPhone or Nokia E90. I have fewer than 50 students on my current enrollment rosters--a real shame and perhaps a call for analysis under the microscope of value for money. Five years ago, more than 85% of my college students were actively ripping, burning and sharing music. In October 2003, those students preferred to keep their music in MP3 formats, although the most experienced had a combination of MP3 and CD formats to ensure their collections play on the widest variety of machines. When it comes to stamping out Luddite behaviour, nothing works better than connections to personal music collections. So I'm asking my students about their music collections again this year, and showing their responses in the Friendfeed Communicators room.

Encouraging college students to dive into the flow of information by having them read a cross-sectin of blogs and microblogs has become more of a challenge than ever before because some people are using both channels are real-time communications channels. Some students don't feel comfortable just diving in and out. I show how you can let some of the content flow onto a mobile phone so you can follow some of the flow as it unfolds but a lot of my students don't have phones or phone plans that accommodate this kind of set-up. In practical terms, they probably need to carve out an hour a day to make things work. And then, they need to ensure they ruthlessly maintain a proper balance because blogging isn’t the primary centre focus of most productive activities.

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Previously on InsideView.ie -- "Multimedia Luddites" from 22 October 2003.

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