Editorial Columns

Technology and Today’s College Students

            There are 17 million students on college campuses across the United States, most of whom have grown up with an abundant and evolving array of information technology.

These are students who have never developed a roll of film. Cut and paste has never involved scissors. And for our traditional college-age students, the World Wide Web has been an online tool since they were born.

Last year, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary’s Word-of-the-Year was w00t, that’s w-zero-zero-t. It means “Yay!” and was first popularized by online gamers and hackers. Second runner-up for Word-of-the-Year was Facebook used as a verb, such as “I facebook my students.” 

I’m not saying we need to forget what our fourth grade English teachers told us about noun and verb usage and made-up words, but to stay in touch with today’s students, we need to adjust much of what we learned about communication.

Mark Zuckerberg, the 24-year old founder and CEO of Facebook said, “The other guys think the purpose of communication is to get information. We think the purpose of information is to foster communication.”

As trustees, college presidents, and administrators, we tend to fall into the category of “the other guys.” In an effort to bridge the communication gap, let me highlight a few of the emerging trends on college campuses.

·         Mobile Broadband: At last count there were 2.7 billion mobile phone users on the planet. More than 90 percent of college students have cell phones, a growing portion of them with Internet access. With the growth of mobile broadband, these portable, personal devices are quickly becoming the technology of choice for communicating, surfing the web, taking and sharing photos, and making videos.

·         Grassroots video: Internet users watch more than 11 billion videos each month, and three-quarters of U.S. Internet users streamed online video last year. The ease of capturing, editing and posting videos has caused a proliferation of new video sharing Web sites. Web-based delivery has been called “the currency of the modern media marketplace,” and students are at the forefront of embracing video for entertainment and education.

·         Social Networking:  While students still use email to communicate with folks like us, namely old people, they “talk” to their peers through social networking sites like twitter, pownce, badoo, bebo, tagged, MySpace, and Facebook, which is the 4^th most-trafficked website in the world. Eighty-three percent of students use Facebook, some reporting usage of up to four hours a day. In an effort to better connect with students, 34 percent of our faculty at Penn State now have Facebook accounts. 

·         Collaboration Webs: Collaborating with a colleague down the hall or across the ocean today is as easy as opening a web browser. A free service called “Skype” allows for live video chats. Affordable teleconferencing equipment and open programming interfaces, such as wikis, enable groups to collect information, edit documents and share resources. At Penn State, the number of unique wiki sites more than tripled in a matter of months.

While these trends offer untold promise for teaching, research and service, there are important issues that must be considered by an institution’s leadership. Take cost, for example. One significant byproduct of the new technology is the increased demand for broadband access. Just a few years ago, the move from a 28.8K modem to 56k made users ecstatic; these days, DSL and cable connections are up to 100 times faster than the old dial-up. The need for faster and better delivery of services is part of the reason universities spend $7 billion annually on information technology.

At the same time, the accessibility of large amounts of traffic poses a serious security risk. This is the No. 1 technical concern for higher education. Lost or stolen computers containing sensitive research and personal information can cost a university a small fortune in liability, credit damage and unintended consequences.  What’s more, the Government Accountability Office reported that viruses, spyware, data theft and other computer-related crimes cost the U.S. economy some $117 billion a year.

Ready or not, today’s students are forging ahead with new technologies. As trustees, presidents and administrators, our task is to decide how to harness the opportunity, provide for a secure IT environment, and cultivate a higher level of learning in the digital age.