[Myexperiment-discuss] Scientists use Social networking, but not PhD students

[Duncan Hull]

On Nov 5, 2009, at 12:08 PM, Paul Fisher wrote:

> Might be of interest to some people (even if slightly behind the  
> times).
>
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8342851.stm

Cameron strikes again!


See also
Next-gen PhDs fail to find Web 2.0's 'on-switch'

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=408942

It is counter-intuitive in the extreme, but young researchers are  
failing to make use of so-called "emergent technology", such as Web  
2.0 tools, to support their work. A three-year study by the British  
Library, Researchers of Tomorrow, is tracking the research behaviour  
of doctoral students born between 1982 and 1994 - dubbed "Generation  
Y". The results are being compared with a wider analysis of the  
behaviour of 6,500 doctoral students of all ages. Interim results,  
released to Times Higher Education, show that only a small proportion  
of those surveyed are using technology such as virtual-research  
environments, social bookmarking, data and text mining, wikis, blogs  
and RSS-feed alerts in their work. This contrasts with the fact that  
many respondents professed to finding technological tools valuable.

Associated website:
http://www.researchersoftomorrow.net/

Full report:
http://explorationforchange.net/attachments/054_Summary%20Report%20Final.pdf


--
Duncan Hull
The European Bioinformatics Institute
http://www.ebi.ac.uk/~duncanh