How do Midwestern High School students use the Internet?
As part of the sessions I’ve been running with local high school students I’ve been asking them to take an anonymous survey to tell me a little about how they use the internet. I’ll use the result to tweak my goals for the project. However, as I look over the results I’m finding lots of interesting trends. Most of which I hadn’t expected to see.
It should be noted that this is largly a farming community where cable internet isn’t available and the local public library only has a handful of public computers.
- 73 responses
- 34 male 37 female
- 77% freshmen (14-15 years old)
- 83% have internet access at home
How many hours per week do you spend online?
- None 7.04%
- 1-3 hours (an hour a few days a week) 23.94%
- 4-10 hours (an hour or two a day) 42.25%
- 11-24 hours (more than two hours a day) 15.49%
- 24+ (when am I not online?!) 11.27%
- 80% claim to use Instant Messaging software nearly every day. Most preferred MSN with AIM and Yahoo tied for second place.
- 75% use My Space every day and yet 63% said they either didn’t blog or don’t know what a blog is. I can only conclude that either they don’t recognize their MySpace pages as blogs or that they only use their accounts for social networking.
- None of the students had heard of Flickr and only a handful (less than 20%) used Facebook.
- 82% use email everyday but none of them use gmail.
- Though 73% listen to MP3s, only 25% of them use ITunes to do it.
- 58% had never heard of Wikipedia
- Only 20% had every played an MMORPG and only 5% play one on a daily basis.
- None of them had heard of Habbo , There, or Second Life.
December 13th, 2006 at 3:17 pm
[…] Sarah Robbins has been asking students at her local high school about how the students use technology. It’d be really interesting to see similar data from wider samples and other demographics along similar lines - I don’t know if any exists. They do match reasonably my experience with university students about a year or so ago, however. Data for different nationalities would certainly be interesting - lots of the students at the university where I used to work were from the Middle East and Asia - China especially. […]
May 6th, 2007 at 5:51 pm
[…] Given that high school and college students use their computers mostly for downloading music, watching videos on sites like YouTube, playing video games, blogging, and visiting social sites like MySpace and Facebook, it may be awhile before Perelman’s utopian vision is realized. […]
May 7th, 2007 at 11:23 am
[…] Given that high school and college students use their computers mostly for downloading music, watching videos on sites like YouTube, playing video games, blogging, and visiting social sites like MySpace and Facebook, it may be a while before Perelman’s utopian vision is realized. […]
January 4th, 2008 at 10:55 am
[…] Given that high school and college students use their computers mostly for downloading music, watching videos on sites like YouTube, playing video games, blogging, and visiting social sites like MySpace and Facebook, it may be a while before Perelman’s utopian vision is realized. […]