Mobile Youth Survey

Summary of my Understanding Mobile Youth Workshop @ The Prepaid Mobile Summit IIR 22-25 September 2008 in Prague.

Note contains video not available on Powerpoint. MobileYouthNet to view on the street videos in full.

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'High School Musical 3' on MySpace (since most of the viewers are over 14, right?)

- Club Penguin's newspaper (doing better than its real world counterparts - kinda funny) (Wired)

- Smart girls rock! (new Vanilla Star Jeans ad featuring Olympic gold medal gymnast Nastia Liukin) (Media Post, reg. required)

- Teens wary of mobile ads (limited by price and chatty as ever. Lots of mobile research from ComScore) (Media Post, reg. required)

- Energy drinks (making teens sick.) (L.A. Times, reg. required)

- Teens react to Palin pregnancy (once again teen pregnancy dominates the headlines....thanks Andrea! Also, for all you educators reading -- the story about the Wikipedia edits made to Palin's entry is a great teachable moment)

- McCainSpace (John McCain relaunches his social media effort)

- Battlefront (new effort from Bebo and Channel 4 aimed at inspiring teenagers to use the web "as a canvas for social change." Check it out here)

- Fly Virgin 'Entourage' (Virgin names a plane after the popular HBO series. Plus USA Today examines young men's changing perceptions of masculinity) (Variety)

- Open source textbooks (industry vets making textbooks free online) (Wired)

What it does

If you’re like most people out there, by the time you end updating all your social networking accounts, half your day is gone. If you’re trying to avoid this, then you should try out Ping.fm. This service (that just launched into public beta), will allow you to take care of updating all your social profiles in one go. Just update your status through one of the many ways the site lets you, and they’ll make sure all your accounts are updated. This makes a task that could have taken you up to an hour be done in as quickly as a couple of minutes. The number of applications and sites that they cover is truly amazing. If you don’t find the social networks you are using on this site, then you’re using some obscure site on the net that no one knows about. I’m finding it hard to put into words how useful this service is. There is no reason why anyone shouldn’t be using this as the only way to update their status.

In their own words

“Use AIM, GTalk, iGoogle, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, WAP, iPhone/iPod Touch, SMS or E-mail and let Ping.fm relay your message to a multitude of social networking sites.”

Why it might be a killer

This makes perfect sense. It turns the hectic task of updating into a simple thing you can do through our phone.

Some questions

Why didn’t they think of this earlier? Will they support more networks in the future?

Link: http://ping.fm
Our Review: http://www.killerstartups.com/Web-App-Tools/ping-fm-update-multiple-statuses

 

Recent research from WOMMA Member GFK Custom Research North America paints a very telling picture of what Americans are doing on their mobile devices: playing a lot of games. In fact, according to GFK/NOP research, 70 million US mobile customers are playing games on their phones, a number which includes both downloaded games and preloaded games. Additional research by the dotMobi consortium and AKQA delved into the mobile internet habits of Americans and Britons alike, and found that of the 1,65

How many mobile owners use them to game?

This is the first article in a series based on our new technology in education research we conducted in August 2008. The complete study isn’t posted yet, but if you are interested in a briefing, please let us know.

For most kids, it’s back to school time with the youngest of our Lab Members heading off to middle school or junior high and our older kids attending university – some for their last year! Regardless of age, there are a few things they agree on when it comes to technology and education.

- 100% of our Lab Members want schools to allow them to use technology to help them learn.
- 79% consider computers and internet access to be vital.
- 47% specifically want their schools to use the web to make learning easier.

As usual, all their ideas were encouraging and inspiring but today I will focus on that last bullet: how the kids said using the web can make learning easier.

School 2.0: social networking for education

A number of our Lab Members wonder why schools aren’t using the same tools they are using for social networking: think Web 2.0. They see the web as an unlimited opportunity to help them learn and deepen their educational experience through a school-sponsored site that is feature rich. Here are a few feature examples they cited:

Live chat: would allow for post class discussion of key topics with help from professors or teaching assistants if the content was difficult or complex.

Online collaboration: lets student find and meet other students with similar interests to foster study (and offline) relationships.

Resource sharing: like the note cards of older days we’d pass to one another with good citations; using a website, students could post and point to content that supports their area of study; allowing them to identify more content, promote critical thinking and produce better research.

Video playback: of lectures, special presentations and more. Many of the kids talked about the challenge of taking notes that grab all the important elements the first time. With video, they say, they could go back and review the content one more time especially if the subject is complex.

No School 2.0? Then at least an Education Portal!

If a school isn’t ready for School 2.0, the Lab Members ask schools to at least have what I am calling an “Education Portal” that supports their need to get the information they require to be successful.

The portal, they say, would have key dates, assignments, and a way to post homework and grades – along with daily reminders and other vital information. But most importantly, there would be a “school standard” to ensure all teaching staff use the site in the same way so the tool would be used consistently and comparably.

Listen to what Luke, age 19 from the United States, has to say about the system at his university:

“There is no standard for how much a teacher puts on there or not, some teachers use it, some don't, and some use it inconsistently. If the school would make some practical rules about [its] use I think it would help every student and keep them informed and on top of their homework and classes.”

It’s really important to note that the Lab Members didn’t talk about these tools as a way to “slack” or be lazy, but rather as a way to improve their ability to get access to more information by helping them focus their attention on the right things. My sense is – at least as far as our panel goes – these are bright kids who are excited about learning but there is a lot of “noise” out there and anything we can do to help them tune in to the right things, will only make them better students.

This is just a portion of our new research; I will have more from this study in the next few blogs when the Alcatel-Lucent Worldwide Lab Members will talk about the role of education and the internet, how mobile phones might help if their next teacher might be a robot!

Everyone knows what a jeans ad should look like, it really hasn't changed much since Levi's and that dude in the launderette. The new Wrangler campaign 'We Are Animals' is different and it's dif