survey

College Students Use, Love, Are Aware Of The Limitations Of Wikipedia

How Today’s College Students Use Wikipedia For Course-Related Research: Overall, college students use Wikipedia. But, they do so knowing its limitation. They use Wikipedia just as most of us do — because it is a quick way to get started and it has some, but not deep, credibility. 52% of respondents use Wikipedia frequently or […] » about 200 words

Social Media Usage Stats

Retrevo claims to help electronics shoppers decide what to buy, when to buy, and where to buy it,” so their recent survey on social media addition is probably more significant as link bait than as serious research. Despite my concerns about confirmation bias, I’m as amused as anybody by the numbers. 8% of adult respondents say […] » about 200 words

Things Learned From The Durex Sexual Wellbeing Survey

Yes, they did a survey, and the results show the French have plenty of sex, but are among the least satisfied for all that activity. Russians (80%), Brazilians (82%), and Greeks (86%) appear to be the most likely to get it at least once a week, while in Japan it appears both infrequent and unsatisfying. New Zealand distinguished itself for being the only country where women averaged more partners than men.

The U.S. stats were middling at best, though 37% of Americans reported their “sex lives have been negatively impacted by daily stress.”

Even if you don’t like the results, you do have to respect the company for doing the research. Or, you could just laugh at their ads.

WordPress Survey Tools

Lorelle and Samir both point to a number of plugins to do surveys within WordPress, but neither of them say any of them are that good. And Samir is pretty disapointed: “at the end of it all, I never did find my ideal online survey tool.”

Survey Fly is the best recommendation from both of Lorelle and Samir, but it isn’t WP2.5 compatible and was las updated in summer 2006. It’s also limited to tracking only one survey at a time. Ugh.

Our Connected Students

Just when you thought I was done talking about how the internet really does touch everything, Lichen posts some details from the most recent University of New Hampshire Res Life student survey and it gets me going again. In order, the top three activities are:

  • socializing (15.8 hours/week)
     
  • studying, excluding in-class time (12.5 hours/week)
     
  • instant messaging, (9.3 hours/week)

Lichen also points out that IM activity was reported separately from “personal internet use,” which got an additional 8.4 hours/week.

The survey doesn’t appear to be online, so I can’t tell how many other computer-related activities are reported or how activities like “studying” may (or may not) also include computer use.

Is Blogging Career Suicide?

Ken (I wish he had a blog to link to) pointed out Bloggers Need Not Apply in the Chronicle Of Higher Ed over the weekend. The story is to some a highly cautionary tale: A candidate’s blog is more accessible to the search committee than most forms of scholarly output. It can be hard to […] » about 500 words

Napster’s Hard Road

Napster — the legal, reincarnated music download site — essentially invented the concept of incumbent campus download services. They loudly touted deals with schools “anxious” to stop the p2p music sharing problem. Trouble is, according to this story at The Reg, it’s not working well. A survey at one client university paints a sad picture: […] » about 200 words