Digital Natives, Browsers, and New Content Models

Welcome to this morning’s Daily Research Update. Today’s themes are digital natives, browsers, and new content models. If you want more context for this research, take a look at our Education and Technology Trends for 2010. You may also be interested in our Weekly Research Index, or you can follow our live, daily research on our Current News page.

(Click here to see a simple listing of today’s suggested reading)

The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project has released their latest report on text messaging among American teens and it tells us that more than 50% of teens are now texting daily. “And it’s not just frequency – teens are sending enormous quantities of text messages a day. Half of teens send 50 or more text messages a day, or 1,500 texts a month and one in three send more than 100 texts a day, or more than 3,000 texts a month. Older teen girls ages 14-17 lead the charge on text messaging, averaging 100 messages a day for the entire cohort. The youngest teen boys are the most resistant to texting – averaging 20 messages per day.”

Such behavior has led many to refer to this generation as “digital natives,” a title Anne Collier writes may do a disservice to our kids. In fact, she identifies three specific “media” monsters related to children and parenting: 1) ‘Digital natives’ as alien life forms; 2) The paralyzing remove-all-risk monster; 3) The extremely busy adult-blinding monster. Regarding ‘digital natives’ she argues:

By viewing kids as alien life forms called “digital natives,” we send the message that children don’t need tech-, media-, and social-literacy training to navigate the ocean of information at their fingertips 24/7 and the tricky sometimes harsh waters of digital-media-informed adolescent social development. And by focusing on technology instead of children, we create daunting, new-sounding things to fear like “cyberbullying,” directing attention away from the good work already being done against bullying as well as cyberbullying by changing school cultures and teaching and modeling empathy, ethics, and citizenship (at school and online).

But let’s be honest. To many adults, a younger persona’s ability to manage the evolution of technology does seem a bit, well, alien! They seem to adapt so much more easily to evolving technologies. Heck, they probably like the fact that browsers are changing. Speaking of which, Opera’s Charlie McCathieNevile weighs in of what browsers might look like in five years. Asked about changes we may see, he says:

There are many I could name, from the huge increase in Javascript speed (and capabilities) in all browsers, to the development of native video, or the increased interoperability of XHTML, CSS and SVG. But the most significant in the long term just might be WAI-ARIA — a technology that makes it easier to make rich applications accessible to anyone, effectively by tagging code to say what it is meant to do. Because an important aspect of the web is its universality. The ability to build innovative new things has always been around, and it is part of what engineers do by nature. But the ability to make sure everyone can use and benefit from them is the prerequisite for a societal shift. If you like, it isn’t the “bleeding edge” that is most significant (although it is generally the most interesting and captures the most mind-share), but it’s how the “trailing edge” shifts. That what changes everyone’s life.

One thing’s for sure. Many of the interface and workflow changes we’ll see will be prompted my mobile devices. On that note, we have these leaked screens of the new BlackBerry OS 6.0. “As you can see from the screenshots, the new browser is vastly improved not only in performance, but also in overall look and feel. The new browser will also feature tab switching and support for multi-touch.” Of course, when we talk about mobile interfaces the standard is definitely the iPhone. And that’s not likely to change any time soon if recent sales are any indication.

Apple announced its second quarter earnings results today and, once again, the company outperformed market expectations with its best non-holiday quarter ever. The company posted $13.50 billion in revenue and a net quarterly profit of $3.33 per diluted share. This obliterates Wall Street estimates of $2.45 a share. It was also a big quarter for Mac and iPhone sales. The company sold 2.94 million Macintosh computers — that’s a 33% increase year-over-year. It also sold 8.75 million iPhones in the quarter for 131% growth year-over-year. Furthermore, the company sold 10.89 million iPods, which is a 1% decrease year-over-year.

Elsewhere in mobile news, Google says we can look for Chrome OS netbooks for under $400 once they appear on the market later this year. “Google introduced Chrome OS two months ago as a lightweight, browser-based operating system that would boot up in seven seconds or less. Google hasn’t revealed who will be manufacturing the Chrome OS netbooks, but already Acer has said it expects to offer about a million of these devices this year.”

In other technology news worth noting, how can you not be impressed by the size and success of Skype. Check out these statistics.

Skype added 39 million registered users in the fourth quarter to end the year with a total of 560 million.
The number of Skype-to-Skype call minutes totaled 36.1 billion in the final three months of 2009.
Skype users made more the 250 billion minutes worth of Skype-to-Skype calls from the time the service was launched through the end of 2009.
Skype in 2009 accounted for 12 percent of the world’s international calling minutes, a 50 percent increase over 2008 when it accounted for 8 percent of international calling, according to TeleGeography Research.
36 percent of Skype-to-Skype calls as of the end of the fourth quarter included video — in other words, Skype is going to figure prominently in the video conferencing business, challenging more established players with its no-cost solution. Skype CEO Josh Silverman in a guest post for GigaOM explained why he views video as the future of Skype.

On a similar note — big, that is — some believe that Demand Media will be the first $1 billion tech IPO since Google. “Demand has driven this remarkable growth by taking the traditional media concept of “make it and they will come” and turning it on its head, leveraging search data from the likes of Google and YouTube to understand and then ‘produce content people demand’. Understanding what people want is one third of the value equation. The second part is producing it at a low cost.”

In reality, there are a number of future publishing success principles to be learned from Demand Media. Foremost among these is how to leverage the content needs and usage trends of our customers. Demand Media’s approach makes sense for those who are content to be dependent on Google for serving up their content. Oxford University Press is actually taking a different approach with its Oxford Bigliographies Online (OBO).

The OBO tool is essentially a straightforward, hyperlinked collection of professionally-produced, peer-reviewed bibliographies in different subject areas—sort of a giant, interactive syllabus put together by OUP and teams of scholars in different disciplines. Users can drill down to a specific bibliographic entry, which contains some descriptive text and a list of references that link to either Google Books or to a subscribing library’s own catalog entries, by either browsing or searching. Each entry is written by a scholar working in the relevant field and vetted by a peer review process. The idea is to alleviate the twin problems of Google-induced data overload, on the one hand, and Wikipedia-driven GIGO (garbage in, garbage out), on the other.

Finally, Graham Attwell responds to concerns of educators around the transition of Ning from a free to premium service. His post is on alternatives to freemium sites like Ning.

We have all become used to using free social software services. But, at the end of the day we live in a capitalist society. Yes, the software industry is evolving new business models. But are they in the long term sustainable. Ning, like many other services such as PBwiki, has based its economic model on providing a free ‘basic’ service and an enhanced premium service. Providing free services for education could be seen as having two benefits. the first is in publicising and popularising a particular service in the hope it will then attract sufficient premium business customers to justify the cost of the free service. The second is to hope that sufficient education customers will see the benefit of upgrading to the free service. I suspect there are three problems with this.

Suggested Reading

Teens and Mobile Phones | Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project

The new media monsters we’ve created for our kids

What will the browser look like in five years? | O’Reilly Radar

Apple Sells 8.75 Million iPhones in Q2

BlackBerry OS 6.0 Screenshots Leaked [PICS]

Chrome OS Netbooks For Under $400, Says Google | Gadget Lab | Wired.com

Skype By the Numbers: It’s Really Big

Ford’s Sync Brings the App Revolution to Your Wheels, With Voice Control | Fast Company

Demand Media Will Be The First $1 Billion Tech IPO Since Google — Here’s Why

Oxford University Press launches the Anti-Google

Pontydysgu | Bridge to Learning | Educational Research