Back on July 16, 2010 I posted a brief poll on IHEC Blog (view here) asking what is the top new media tool international educators use to keep up date on the field. After two weeks, seventy-eight votes were cast and I have posted the results below:
Twitter with 15 votes (19%)
RSS Reader with 14 votes (18%)
Facebook with 11 votes (14%)
Blogs with 7 votes (9%)
E-Newsletters with 7 votes (9%)
Listservs with 6 votes (8%)
NAFSA Forums with 5 votes (6%)
Google Alerts with 5 votes (6%)
LinkedIn with 4 votes (5%)
YouTube with 2 votes (3%)
MySpace with 1 vote (1%)
Google Buzz with 1 vote (1%)
Scientific are the findings? No, not really. Interesting are the findings? Yes, at least to me.
To be sure there are several limitations to my question. For instance, I did not include any of the social bookmarking tools such as digg, reddit, del.icio.us or StumbleUpon. Perhaps this was an oversight as I included the RSS reader as a tool in the poll.
I am not providing any analysis of the data here in this post as I’m saving that for a guest blog post in the future. I think the results are both interesting and informative and I will let you analyze and synthesize the data with the hope that you too might find the results to be informative.
I think I should conduct this poll again next year (with a few tweaks to the question and answers) to see what, if anything, has changed in the rapid changing new media technology arena.
Thanks for sharing David! The first 3 are spot on for me. I wonder how many in our field really use social bookmarking sites though… I’ve tried to share/collaborate without much luck, and they don’t always have relevant categories. I do like StumbleUpon, though more for personal than professional reasons.
Who voted Google Buzz and MySpace btw?