Amherst College

Report Overview
Total Clips (5)
Staff (Schilling) (5)

Staff (Schilling) (5)
Apple on a slide? Not per this collegiate data 10/02/2008 CNET.com Text
Amherst's class of 2012: 99 percent are on Facebook 09/29/2008 Salon.com Text
Face to Facebook Learning 09/29/2008 Fast Company - Online Text
Amherst Administrator's 'IT Index' Highlights Trends in Student Technology Use 09/25/2008 Chronicle.com Text
IT Index 09/20/2008 Academic Commons Text


Apple on a slide? Not per this collegiate data
10/02/2008
CNET.com

Nick Carr points to university data that suggests good reasons to host e-mail, but the data from the IT department at Amherst College is much more telling about a clear and present danger to Microsoft's enterprise dominance: students prefer Apple, and particularly for an area of traditional weakness for Microsoft, mobile devices.

Even as analysts suggest that Apple is in for a slowdown, the company's progress with today's students and tomorrow's employees is outstanding, suggesting that now may be time to stick with Apple, not dump the crop:

* Students in the class of 2012 who registered computers, iPhones, game consoles, etc. on the campus network by the end of the day on August 24, the day they moved into their dorm rooms: 370 students registered 443 devices.
* Number of students in the class of 2012 who brought desktop computers to campus: 14.
* Number that brought iPhones/iPod Touches: 93.
* Likelihood that a student with an iPhone/iPod Touch is in the class of 2012: approximately 1 in 2.
* Total number of students on campus this year that have landline phone service: 5.
* Mac or PC? Of the four classes currently on campus, the classes of 2009 and 2010 are more likely to own Windows, while the classes of 2011 and 2012 are more likely to own Macs.

Granted, students are mobile by definition. They change their rooms, they attend different classes, and so on.

But so is today's enterprise, and Apple has a strong and growing share of the laptop market, which is where profits and opportunity abound.

I don't know about you, but most of my life is spent on my laptop, filling in the gaps on my iPhone (and previously BlackBerry). The only desktop I've considered in the past five years is one to place in my family room so that I can more easily monitor my children's use of the Web. In that case, I don't want mobility, but that's the exception to the rule.

And the mobility that I and a rising number of others are choosing? Apple. I wouldn't be banking on a long-term Apple slide right now.

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Amherst's class of 2012: 99 percent are on Facebook
09/29/2008
Salon.com

While I'm still trying to get settled in France, it has been a little hard to get Internet access, so on the occasions that I am able to sit down somewhere and surf the Web, sometimes it takes me a couple of days to sort through all my RSS feeds, and I apologize if some of my posts are just slightly behind the times. That said, Clive Thompson pointed out a recent study about the incoming class of 2012 at Amherst College and how the younger generations of my "digital native" peers are becoming more and more digitized. Mind you, this is a small, rich Massachusetts liberal arts college that has 438 new students this year out of a student body of 1,680-plus.

These statistics, while surely not universal across the U.S., definitely reflect the reality of the upper middle classes that have grown up with Internet access in the '90s and early '00s:

1. Percentage of first-year applicants who applied online in 2003: 33 percent.

2. Percentage of applicants who did last year: 89 percent.

3. Year that an incoming Amherst College class first created a Facebook group so that they could socialize and otherwise get to know each other prior to arriving on campus: 2006.

4. By the end of August 2008 the total number of members and posts at the Amherst College Class of 2012 Facebook group: 432 members and 3,225 posts.

In other words, only six members -- that's 1 percent -- of the incoming class aren't on Facebook. Astonishing.

I remember that when I left my undergraduate days (spring 2004) Facebook was just starting to hit college campuses around the country. I sort of blew it off at first, but joined within a couple of years. When Facebook first started at Harvard, it quickly spread to a few of the major colleges around the country, including my alma mater, UC-Berkeley -- and now in over four years it has gone global. Facebook has practically become a second language for college students. Ask any American college student what "friending" or "poking" or "leaving a message on someone's wall" means, and it's almost sure they'll be able tell you.

It's still not exactly clear to me what those of us who are out of college are supposed to do with Facebook. I mean, I'm on it, as are most of my friends, but I rarely spend any time looking at my page or other people's walls or whatever. Largely, I use it as a way to amplify my blog and this blog's reach. Yet, despite the fact that I don't care about it that much, I nonetheless know that it exists, and I can navigate that world with ease. My parents, much less my grandparents, largely do not.

6. Number of students in the class of 2012 who brought desktop computers to campus: 14.

This seems pretty obvious. With the presence of WiFi on just about every college campus (which was, again, just starting when I was in college), there's now essentially no point in having a desktop computer, except for maybe as a media server.

9. Total number of students on campus this year that have landline phone service: 5.

That's total number of students -- out of over 1,600 students -- who have a land line. Again, the oldest of these kids, remember, were born in 1986.

I have a land line at my house back in Oakland, Calif., but only because I need it to access DSL. (I don't have cable TV, much less a TV of any kind.) Otherwise, again, there would be no point. In a college dorm setting, there seems to be no point in having a land line, when most students have mobile phones and are online much of their time anyway.

And the most surprising statistic?

19. Percentage of email that arrives on campus that is spam: 94 percent.

I wonder how much of this spam gets through the university's filters, though.

What do you guys think of us young digital Turks?

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Face to Facebook Learning
09/29/2008
Fast Company - Online

I'm a voracious learner. In addition to reading magazines, books, blogs, tweets, and faces, I persistently look for patterns, connections, anomalies and what's new. I tolerated school only because it was where my friends were and because occasionally I could talk with adults who seemed to know a bit about topics that might someday matter.

The Internet's debut seemed better suited for my unmitigating curiosity. The sites I tunneled to represented people with knowledge and perspective I could learn from around the clock. My brainspan soared. Still, I knew there was more, locked inside people's heads, unfolding in the little moments between the times they took to post something profound.

Although my professional life often focuses on helping organizations understand learning across generations, my personal time is spent testing my theories in my own social environment, with my colleagues, with my family, and sometimes with those in line at the market or boarding a plane.

My real-world lab validates ample research people are learning from one another all the time. While we learn some details, theorems, and history from people who are school teachers, corporate trainers and college professors, more than 75% of what we learn comes from experiences outside of any formal education program and from people we know outside the walls of any class.

It was from this perspective I felt disoriented as a perspective client used Compete Inc.'s analysis of what people do on Facebook as proof (proof?) it's not a place where people learn. The manager was echoing nonsense I hear from educators and business people alike who argue social networking does not constitute learning and that a platform like Facebook is too immature to foster authentic education.

Is it even possible to look through a personal profile or status update and not at least learn something? Do people still believe only big heavy formal intentional topics count?

A highschool student sees what his friends did last weekend. A college student reads about and then signs on to a rebuilding trip in a hurricane-damaged city. A genNext employee discovers a conference where she can market the company. A boomer businessman finds a group of fellow entrepreneurial spirits. And a parent watches over her children without intruding into their lives. Each finds a place and a space on Facebook to learn.

Facebook provides a compelling outlet for people who enjoy learning, and it helps those seeking something else to accidentally and informally learn along the way.

As we build relationships with other people, we tap into their networks of knowledge and sense, creating learning webs, making our compound knowledge more valuable than compound interest.

If you're still of the mindset that social media doesn't foster deep or wide learning, consider Tom Kosnik, who teaches Global Entrepreneurial Marketing in the Stanford Technology Ventures Program and has given Facebook a pivotal place in his work on the Global Leaders, Entrepreneurs, and Altruists Network (GLEAN). Although the network was launched in 1993, not until Facebook was there infrastructure to help team members across the globe work together for the common good.

Facebook has enabled:

1. Large numbers of members to meet one another individually.

2. Rapid survey research among the extended network.

3. Recent graduates to connect with employers looking for talent.

4. Organizing live learning events around the world.

Another Stanford professor BJ Fogg, from the Persuasive Technology Lab, teaches a course called The Psychology of Facebook where Facebook provides an integral part of the coursework itself.

Still not concrete enough for you? Medical Central is Elsevier's community of medical students, researchers and professionals who come together on Facebook to share resources and exchange ideas. Posting videos of surgical procedures and blogs with breaking medical news, participants also learn together using more traditional medical textbooks and medical journals in modern ways.

Or how about the work of Hal Richman, who started the Convergence of Social and Business Networking group on Facebook to explore the learning he was seeing all around him. Early on he conducted a survey and 81% of group members said they like to merge their social and business worlds and 93% said they expected or aspired to meet people they will network and collaborate in the future. One qualitative response captured the essence of many others with, "It is important that business contacts get to see the real you. In that way you present a more rounded and credible personality who is more likely to engage others." Discussion topics were thoughtful and revealing, helping me as a group member to learn about how others were grappling with important emergent themes.

When Kimberly Samaha of the Bordeaux Energy Colloquium launched the Facebook group Sustainable Energy Futures to promote energy advances in developing nations, she hoped to gain the same sort of momentum as the Convergence group, and as a member of it too, she linked the two. Using some of the native capabilities of Facebook she introduced us to innovations in solar, biomass and hydro energy, not something many of the people in our group would or could have easily done on their own.

Young people are making these leaps, too.

A study of kids 9-17 by Grunwald Associates showed those using social network sites like Facebook are using social tools collaboratively, creatively, with specific project outcomes in mind, and they develop more complex and learning-related skills as their purposes change.

That probably plays well at Amherst College where only 1% of first-year students have landlines, and 99% have Facebook accounts.

I'm not advocating Facebook be used as a full-fledged classroom replacement system (yet) with all the bells, whistles, distractions, and seclusion those spaces afford. I'm also not so certain I've seen any one of those garner the, "getting to know one another first" authenticity that fosters face-to-face-quality trust that mitigates posturing. I'll likely update my stance as new Facebook applications fill gaps and make the software a functional formal learning platform.

The power of the social graph (your social network and more) is that we observe people in new contexts, we reconnect in a visceral way with old friends and we see the potential for mobilizing like-minds for learning, amusement and even social good.

It's time educators and business people embrace Facebook as part of a larger learning ecosystem supporting distributed learning, in real-time, for real-life, and rather than continue to talk about all that it's not, consider all the advantages looking us in the face today.

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Amherst Administrator's 'IT Index' Highlights Trends in Student Technology Use
09/25/2008
Chronicle.com

Sometimes you can identify trends in technology simply by looking around. And if it seems like every freshman on your campus owns a laptop and has a Facebook account, you might not be hallucinating--at least not at Amherst College, where 432 out of 438 freshmen had joined the Amherst College Class of 2012 Facebook group by the end of August.

That little fact is part of an IT Index, modeled after the Harpers Index and compiled by Peter Schilling, director of information technology at Amherst. Mr. Schilling hopes the index will help people understand that technology is in the midst of very radical change.

A number of Mr. Schillings 24 index items suggest the way college students use technology is changing rather quickly. For example, of those 438 freshmen, 93 have registered iPhones or iTouches to the campus network. And perhaps more revealing: About half of all iPhones and iTouches registered at Amherst are owned by freshmen.

Systems and technology that is essential to the incoming students and the class of 2012 wasnt even on the radar of our seniors, Mr. Schilling told The Chronicle.

Another fun fact? The number of students in the class of 2012 who brought desktop computers to campus: 14.

Mr. Schillings main objective in compiling the IT Index was simply to raise awareness of how technology is being used. The list could also, however, point to some ways in which these changes could become more integrated into campus life.

For instance, even though freshman orientation is typically the first way colleges officially welcome their new students together, these students have spent months interacting with each other online, Mr. Schilling says of the Amherst freshmen, whose Facebook group had more than 3,000 posts by the end of August.

In fact, Mr. Schilling says he checks the social-networking site on a regular basis. Students actually talk a lot about their needs there instead of actually coming to us, he says.

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IT Index
09/20/2008
Academic Commons

Amherst College, in western Massachusetts, enrolled 438 first year students this fall, for a total student population of 1680+. I gathered the following to tell the story of the changes occurring here and now in the life of the College.

1. Percentage of first-year applicants who applied online in 2003: 33%.
2. Percentage of applicants who did last year: 89%.
3. Year that an incoming Amherst College class first created a Facebook group so that they could socialize and otherwise get to know each other prior to arriving on campus: 2006.
4. By the end of August 2008 the total number of members and posts at the Amherst College Class of 2012 Facebook group: 432 members and 3,225 posts.
5. Students in the class of 2012 who registered computers, IPhones, game consoles, etc. on the campus network by the end of the day on August 24th, the day they moved into their dorm rooms: 370 students registered 443 devices.
6. Number of students in the class of 2012 who brought desktop computers to campus: 14.
7. Number that brought iPhones/iTouches: 93.
8. Likelihood that a student with an iPhone/iTouch is in the class of 2012: approximately 1 in 2.
9. Total number of students on campus this year that have landline phone service: 5.
10. Mac or PC? Of the four classes currently on campus the classes of 2009 and 2010 are more likely to own Windows, while the classes of 2011 and 2012 are more likely to own Macs.
11. Total bandwidth to and from the Internet available on campus in September 2000: 3 megabits per second.
12. Total bandwidth to and from the Internet available on campus today: 100 megabits per second for the Internet and 45 for Internet 2.
13. Ratio of network bandwidth available per Ethernet port today to that which will be available when the current campus network upgrade is complete: 1 to 100.
14. Percentage of College classrooms that have an LCD projector and a computer or laptop hookup: 85%.
15. For students adding/dropping courses this semester, the number of requests for access to the electronic resources associated with courses: 564.
16. The number of individual film titles in the College's digital video streaming collection: 1,260.
17. The number of times these films were watched last year: 20,662.
18. Average number of emails received per day: 180,000.
19. Percentage of email that arrives on campus that is spam: 94%.
20. Percentage of storage space taken up by email, a system designed to send brief text messages, that is actually taken up the files attached to the emails: 95%.
21. Ratio of the storage required for email and attachments for just the year 2007 to that of all of the preceding 5 years together: 1 to 1.
22. Increase in the total number of College-owned computers in use on campus from 2005 to 2008: 413 for a 2008 total of 1,308.
23. Total number of calls and emails to the IT Help Desk in 2007: 8,650.
24. Average time required to close a help-desk ticket: 39 minutes.
25. Based on the first 9 months of 2008, estimated percentage increase in help-desk tickets in 2008 over 2007: 11% (or 15.6 weeks of work for a staff member).
26. Candidates for administrative and staff job openings who applied through the College's web-based job applicant system in the first 10 months it was available: 4,037.
27. Job applicants interviewed for 12 openings in IT in the last year who learned about our positions through postings in regional, national, or professional, publications, websites, or lists: 1.
28. Estimated number of hours it would have taken to update the graphics, navigation, and organization of the 2005-2006 College web site (static HTML): 50,000.
29. Hours it took to roll out the new web site in August 2008 (database-driven): 3.5.
30. Total number of alumni who have logged in to the College web site: 7,354.

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