Digital Students

This site provides news and information to college students who use digital tools for school, work, and play.  Most of the content will be written by students, for students, over the course of the Fall 2010 semester.  Check back later to read find helpful articles and tips!

The Fail Blog site has some great examples of what can go wrong when you try to communicate without thinking carefully about your audience or purpose.

(Thanks to Shawn for posting the link!)

A recent episode of NPR’s “Fresh Air” radio program discusses research into how technology impacts our brains. Follow this link to read the story or to download the podcast.

This famous video by a cultural anthropologist shows the disconnect between traditional methods of teaching in higher education and today’s social media savvy students.

From the Onion News Network:

In The Know: Are Tests Biased Against Students Who Don’t Give A Shit?

This short presentation helps you see why digital literacy is an important skill for your personal and professional life.

This July 2006 article on the Science Daily web site reports the results of a study done by psychologists at UCLA.

As the article notes, the researchers don’t say that multitasking is never a good idea, but they do emphasize that you shouldn’t multitask “while you are trying to learn something new that you hope to remember.”

The following web sites feature lists of digital tools college students might find useful for school, work or play:

21 Productivity Tools Every College Student Must Use

Top 10 Digital Tools for College Students

Top Web Tools for College Students

10 Great Web Tools for College Students

21 Online Student Tools to Help Students with Research, Communication, and Organization

Web Sites for Students: Online Learning Tools

Top 100 Productivity and Lifehack Blogs for Students

Feel free to suggest additional tools in a comment on this post!

According to this MSNBC article, a study conducted by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania found that students care more about protecting their privacy online than many had previously believed.

This video provides a brief overview of how communication is changing in the 21st century:

This press release describes the results of a new student from the International Center for Media & the Public Agenda (ICMPA) at the University of Maryland, which “concludes that most college students are not just unwilling, but functionally unable to be without their media links to the world.”

Sometimes it’s helpful to open links in a new tab or window in your web browser, so that you don’t lose track of the original page.  For example, you might do a Google search in your web browser.  Then you might go through the search results and open links that look relevant in new tabs.  You can view the pages by clicking on the different tabs along the top of the web browser window.  And you can easily return to the Google search results page by clicking on the first tab.

To open a link in a new tab or window, hold down the command-key (Mac) or control-key (Windows) when you click on the link.  You can also right-click for these options.

The Digital Student site is hosted by the Guardian, a British newspaper, but it has a lot of information that would be useful to students in the US as well.

This March 2006 article from Time magazine explores how multitasking has become a defining characteristic of young people today.

This article from the Chronicle of Higher Education discusses recent research into how well we learn while multitasking. If you have the Diigo toolbar installed and active in your web browser, you’ll see my highlighting as well as class discussions of the article.