The Missing EDU App — ISN’T Missing !

The Missing Edu App | Inside Higher Ed »  posted by Joshua Kim Inside Higher Ed, May 2012  ….. The missing App – AIN’T missing!  Please see The HigherEdCloud and Beagle Research Group – Thought Leader Interviews for more

The Next Ten Years

Reblogged from Beagle Research Group, LLC:

A door closed this quarter and another opened.  We’re now oriented on a new computing paradigm that will serve us for the rest of the decade.  There is now broad agreement on the big IT issues of our time and they can be summarized in the Four Big Buzzwords mobile, social, big data (and analytics) and real time.

We’ve been bantering these words around individually and in groups but in Q2 2012 most vendors came to a tacit agreement that these would be the issues around which marketing campaigns would orbit for the intermediate future. 

Read more… 1,112 more words

Tools will be important but platform will be key.

Constant Connectivity in Life Means More Connectivity in the Classroom

Reblogged from edtechdigest.com:

GUEST COLUMN | By Andy Lausch

College students have high expectations for technology, digital content, and connectivity inside the classroom – not surprising given their access to technology outside of the classroom. It’s this environment that is driving institutions to consider virtual learning and how to make it an essential component of the educational experience.

Virtual learning, which enables instruction to be delivered to students who are not physically in the same location as the professor and/or other students, is both efficient and cost-effective – two important factors at a time when higher education budgets and students’ personal finances are tight.

Read more… 497 more words

Beagle Research Group Thought Leader Interview – studentforce

Recently Denis Pombriant (@denispombriant) honored me by asking to interview me about the trials and tribulations that have become studentforce.  A few years ago I realized that students were the most adept at using the cloud/Internet and were the first to BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) to campus; yet, to this day are probably the most disenfranchised users on any campus …. a NATURAL Social Enterprise.  So, with the benefit of [I believe] the best platform to build solutions that change the way we work, the way we learn, the way we educate (FORCE.COM) I asked eight STUDENTS to walk me through what their day was like.  Lay out the processes they went through to study, find a job, collaborate, socialize, handle finances.  Tell me about the systems they liked using, had to use, wanted to use as it related to their education.

A few months later STUDENTFORCE was hatched.  It ain’t 100% ready for market …. its really close; however, studentforce (concept and solution) has garnered lots of interest from people who make a difference in this market …. especially STUDENTS.

By the way I say I was honored to be asked for an interview from Denis because he is – and he hangs with the very few analysts, authors, industry visionaries whose thoughts, writings and opinions are respected and followed closely by vendors, consultants and others who make up the Enterprise Software market.

So below are my answers to Denis’ questions.  The original post can be found by clicking here alongside others in the industry whose recognition and respect I can only hope to attain.   And, go visit Denis at Beagle Research Group where daily he adds value to our lives by practicing his craft with dignity and a lot of hard work.

Thanks Denis !!
____________________________________________________________________________________

by Denis Pombriant

Entrepreneur Ed Schlesinger has been building a Force.com application for students in higher education called Studentforce. Ed’s bullish on the higher ed market and he’s locked and loaded to roll out Studentforce.

This market resembles human resources in some respects. In each case, the business processes are much more like the front office processes mediated by CRM than they are like back office processes that they are often lumped together with. Perhaps this explanation accounts for the relatively low penetration of automation into these spaces so far. ERP style applications are bulky and expensive and higher-ed and human resources have needed to wait for the front office to catch up. It appears the wait is over in both arenas as this interview shows the big opportunity in education.

Denis Pombriant: Ed, you’ve been pursuing the idea of an online application that college students can use to help manage their day-to-day college experience. What got you started in this?

Ed Schlesinger: I’ve been a salesforce.com user for about 10 years (CRM) and recognized its power as a platform early on. Ironically, when I started using salesforce.com I had been selling ERP implementations, specifically PeopleSoft student information systems to universities. That was the late ’90s, early 2001. At about this time my children began looking closely at colleges and started working with admissions applications. And being that I was aware of the lack of, what’s the word, organization of updatedness, a bad word, but just how confusing it was to do business with the university from the students’ perspective. I realized that the student was expecting a better experience and I started working with Salesforce.com evening August 2005; before the app exchange to put together Studentforce. This was before you could change tab names, create objects and before workflow had been deployed

DP: What drew you to the Salesforce platform? It sounds like it was in a primitive state at the time.

ES: Primitive to what it is right now, but way advanced to what was out there. Again, I was doing sales, and sales is a process, filling in an application for a college is a process. Going through university is a process for the student as well as the administration and the faculty (Higher Ed calls it the student life cycle). And there’s value I believe in tracking, creating a profile of the work you’ve done and attaching documents. And, again, there was a bit of intuition with the consumerization of IT that the market was going to catch up to the users, users being the students.

DP: Okay. In other words, what does Studentforce then provide to student on today’s campuses that they can’t live without once they have tried it? People have been going to college for a long time and they haven’t had a Studentforce.

ES: A single interface, customizable to the university where the student can, from any device, wherever they are, as long as they can get to a browser or a mobile device access and track their assignments, their classes, their digital content, share, collaborate of note-taking and task management. Again, only one place, simple, easy, a few clicks or a few — what do we call what we do on iPads and touch devices — a few touches and swipes.

DP: Okay. So this is something that enables the students to interact with each other, interact with administration, interact with professors?

ES: Correct. And also on the other side, since the platform for the university is such that once the students have access to Studentforce, (the point solution), the university administrators and faculty can take advantage of the platform for recruiting and admissions such as is done with products like Enrollment RX. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that?

DP: No.

ES: They (EnrollmentRx) is built on the Force.com.com platform. So they had the beginning of the student life cycle from the administrator and the faculty side, and then the end of the student life cycle are alumni relations, fundraising development which is covered very, very nicely by another [force.com].com product called Afiniquest. Again, those tools are for the faculty and the administrators. The other side of it though is the students, and that’s what Studentforce product is. And it comes from the belief that students, much like customers in general, are beginning to own the conversation with the institution or the company. Therefore, the technology will be driven from the consumer IT market space.

DP: So would you say that Studentforce is by default a quasi-social kind of application?

ES: Absolutely. Especially with Chatter.

DP: Do you take advantage of Chatter?

ES: Oh, without a doubt. Chatter is used in a way with joint projects in class and joint assignments can be completed using Chatter instead of email, which we all know students don’t like using.

DP: That’s true.

ES: Documents can be transferred that way, too. Once the platform integrates with the new acquisitions that Salesforce has done vis-à-vis Do.com for task management and Rypple, which I think is going to be called Successforce for student reviews and peer reviews, I believe it will round out the application; it’s definitely social.

DP: So it almost sounds like you’re sort of turbo charging the study group, which is something that’s actually, well at least in my experience, more of a graduate school thing than an undergrad thing.

ES: And what I’m finding is that it’s more of an undergrad thing from experiences that my children have had. And it’s also I think subject specific. So political science and economics might have more study groups than perhaps a hardcore science and math.

DP: Yeah, but a lot of it is sort of one of those archetypal things that use study groups and so do MBA programs to study cases.

ES: Absolutely and opens up another conversation, by the way, to how do students interact in study groups? You throw an Apple T.V. or a Google T.V. onto an assignment as a related list, throw in a link to the related faculty record and/or post that link under the curriculum record, and now you’ve got 30 students sitting in their dorm looking at one screen rather than in groups imagining or, “Oh, did the professor say that? Did he say this?” Right now many of the schools are having their professors tape their lectures. As a matter of fact, SYR, I believe, started sending their business school professors to for coaching in order to produce more professional lecture capture videos .

DP: I would imagine that this kind of approach also plays very well for distance learning, especially as I think about for-profit universities like Phoenix and the like.

ES: Absolutely, however, what I found is that it would be cost prohibitive because of current salesforce.com pricing for vis-à-vis non-profits and universities and for-profit universities, but absolutely yes. There’s also a university out there that is a free university. I forgot the name of it. I can get it to you. It’s definitely non-profit. University of the People is what it’s called. It’s based in Texas and in Israel. And they were kicking the tires a little bit.

DP: Okay. What’s your relationship right now with Salesforce?

ES: The relationship has been very, very good. Over the years I’ve received encouragement from senior executives to continue pressing the studentforce concept. It seems like second-level, third-level executives all “get it.” I had a conversation a couple weeks ago with the new VP of the AppExchange. The concept I presented was a higher-Ed App Exchange where students, faculty and administrators could take advantage of existing AppExchange apps and students can also take advantage of financial services so financial aid can be done through the platform, their relationships with a bank, Quicken, Mint. There’s a new product coming out called Simple, which is simple banking that does a wonderful, wonderful job of managing finances and is targeted to students, loyalty programs.

And where I believe this can generate revenue for the university is with e-textbook sellers.

DP: How so?

ES: Currently, if I’m a student who purchases an eTextbook for my iPad or Tablet first I have to choose the eTextbook seller/platform (iBooks, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kno, Inkling, etc.) to purchase the eTextbook. And, when it comes to accessing that eTextbook when its needed I would have to open the platform, search for the book and independent of anything else …. Annotate, highlight and take notes.

By using the platform (studentforce) a student with access to broadband can be sitting under a tree and have the ability to retrieve the class record, scroll down to an eTextbook link and open the eTextbook regardless of the platform or library its being stored. They can then annotate, take notes and highlight while studying and through the force.com API post those notes to various related records for future reference.

Since the university is – in effect – providing the eTextbook sellers the student consumers they can benefit by already established partner programs offered by the sellers. Revenue generated from just this one segment can offset costs to deploy multi tenant (real cloud) features on campus.

DP: So tell me, where are you in the rollout of Studentforce, and what’s market penetration and uptake like?

ES: Well right now, folks at Salesforce.com are very aware. I’ve got very, very good buzz at Salesforce thanks to social networks and new ways of getting the word out, Studentforce is a catchy and powerful name, and I’m getting lots of inquiries. I have yet to go to market; however, there are multiple partnership and business development opportunities that I’m entertaining.

DP: So does that include investigating venture capital?

ES: Absolutely. I mean, more startup funding. I need to make some minor changes to the app itself to get the UI more student friendly, but nothing more than four to six weeks’ worth of development, and that’s an ongoing process with any force.com product.

DP: It sounds like you’re locked and loaded and hitting the market right now. Is that about where you’re at?

ES: Yes I am. The market is finally beginning to respond because of the imperatives in the market, [doing] more with less. (see President Obama’s SOTU speech about universities and costs)

DP: So tell me, don’t you also have a relationship going with Dell?

ES: Yes I do as a matter of fact. One of the issues early on that I identified with Studentforce is that students are not going to input their class information. They’re not going to update certain information. They’re so used to having it fed to them that that data needs to come from somewhere else. So I’ve struck a very tight relationship with Dell Boomi, which would provide the integration for the front end (Studentforce) to the back end (university current student information systems, ERP and Learning Management Systems – as an example) And that’s a benefit to the students and the institution and their higher IT on multiple levels.

DP: Such as?

ES: Some of the challenges that they have right now are getting into the cloud. They can’t just turn on cloud applications and turn off legacy systems. They need to evolve into the cloud. So they have many redundant data silos in higher-ed IT, hard-coded integrations that are very, very costly. They require a great deal of maintenance. Again, they’re dependent on these academic and administrative systems, whether it be Sungard, PeopleSoft/Oracle right now. And they just can’t turn those off and move into the cloud. What Studentforce can provide to them with the integration is a way to take that data front-ended with Studentforce as they are migrating from their client server systems into cloud systems.

DP: We’re just about out of time. I wanted to just ask you if you had any high-level, wrap-up points to make about Studentforce, cloud, higher education, things like that.

ES: Absolutely. I think the market is ready. There was a strategic decision I made at the beginning of all of this to sell to the enterprise and not directly to students.

DP: Why is that?

ES: That’s because of an experience I saw with Google when they put up their Google apps for higher-ed. They first went to the students and said, “Here’s an email address and knock yourselves out.” The CIOs at organizations said, “Whoa, wait a minute. That’s opening up a gaping security hole for us. You need to talk to us.” And they ratcheted it back, and they came out a new way by distributing through the CIOs. And Facebook started off in colleges. There’s a little bit of a dilemma there.

I venture to say, I haven’t done the study, but if you put 10 students out there and ask if they want their academic and their career information out on Facebook, you’re going to get seven that will say no while the other three might say yes. Facebook is still a privacy issue.

DP: Yeah.

ES: That’s why Chatter, which is secure, trusted and within the organization might work well there. And also we’re starting to see the real social enterprise. And I know that’s a buzz word right now, but more appropriately, the Internet of things. And one of the companies that have been very interested in Studentforce is [Enterasys], which believe it or not offers routers and modems and connection and wireless equipment. But what they’re doing is very groundbreaking. They’re putting together an Internet of things that real and true — what I believe is the natural social enterprise, the college campus together.

And I believe that students who are very familiar with buying tools from a technical market like the App Store will take very nicely to the benefits of a higher Ed app exchange.

DP: That’s great. It sounds like there’s a lot to keep an eye on here with Studentforce, and I tend to keep doing that. And I appreciate you taking the time to speak with us today.

ES: Thank you very much.

Cloud Technology Can Lift the Fog Over Higher Education

This post was originally published by The Chronicle of Higher Education and written by Gordon Freedman.  It appears here with the author’s permission. Gordon is president of the nonprofit National Laboratory for Education Transformation. Mr. Freedman previously served as vice president for global education strategy at Blackboard.

By Gordon Freedman

We are now more than a decade into the 21st century. Much has changed in terms of how we use online and mobile technology to interact with one another, learn about world events, look up facts, or share who we are with everyone else online. However, for all the innovations that new technologies have brought to consumer affairs, business, entertainment, and government, one sector of society—education—remains stubbornly planted in the 20th century.

Our colleges and schools continue to operate in a highly rigid world driven by a precise sense of time, a concrete place, a fixed set of roles, a deliberate set of content, a single diploma, and a strict hierarchy in which students are inferior to instructors.

---

BROWSE THE FULL ISSUE: News and Commentary
BUY A COPY: Digital and Print Editions at the Chronicle Store

---

Contemporary society, meanwhile, is becoming increasingly open: Institutional and political boundaries are being erased, and people of all ages are participating in their respective social spheres in myriad ways. It is as if a new ocean has been discovered on which all members of society (at least in theory) can set sail. Yet many of our younger students are required to live double lives—one in which they can creatively manage their information and social identities, and another where they must conform to an old-fashioned, one-size-fits-all culture.

I call this collision of worlds the Cloud versus the Fog. I believe that the future of higher education lies in the cloud. Colleges that can leverage three key cloud-based technologies—identity management, dynamic social networks, and real-time data mining—will be more innovative and productive, educate more effectively, and develop students with a far greater stake in their own education. This is not an argument for anarchy or completely open education. Rather, it is an argument for bringing young people who practically live inside the cloud, and those who work within it, into discussions about how to lift the fog so that we can more clearly see the palette of learning options.

The term cloud describes the virtual, server-based world that is controlled by the Web or by mobile networks. Because cloud technology is driven by common data standards, cloud-based systems learn about their users very quickly. Such systems can mine data about users because each log-in and keystroke is analyzed in order to synthesize that data, feed it back, and share it with researchers and other users and systems.

In contrast, the fog that has settled over higher education represents historical inertia, a bureaucratic loss of imagination, and policy traffic jams, layered over a world of bricks and mortar, rules and regulations. The fog does not adapt to a more open and transparent world. Example: Cloud technology could systematize transfer and articulation issues for students and institutions, especially in community colleges, while the fog’s array of physical practices make them more confusing and costly.

While I am not condoning unchecked data mining, I understand that big data, real-time analytics, and digital identities are here to stay. If my son, a college freshman, logs on to Facebook or Twitter, plays a game on Zynga.com, buys something from Amazon, downloads a song from iTunes, posts a blog, or communicates with a friend through the campus Gmail system, a rich assortment of data about him is immediately seized by multiple algorithms owned by many different firms that now have a sense of who he is, what he likes, who he knows, and what he does.

Although some colleges have started using analytics to track students’ progress, many remain driven by “dumb” technologies that know very little about their users. My son’s college data is not retained, reorganized, safeguarded, or fed back to him—whether to make him a better student or to improve his college experience. By comparison, the “smart” information systems prevalent on Amazon, Google, and Facebook know their users very well—maybe too well. The right information systems in higher education would be able to parallel smart and secure systems found elsewhere.

During the past decade it was widely assumed that a variety of new information technologies would clear the fog. But they have not. In fact, in some ways they have added to it by introducing another layer, depriving students of the chance to design and participate in their own learning experiences.

Simply extending the existing campus with online courses, digital content, and largely unproven apps misses the point entirely, because these technologies do not fully follow the data-rich nature of the cloud. There can be no transformation of education if data flows only in one direction.

How can we pierce the fog? Colleges must embrace the principles of the cloud as part of a strategic redesign rather than as an add-on. And they must adopt the three key principles that separate the cloud from the fog:

Identity formation and management. Because the cloud requires and supports identities for its users, individuals have a stake in maintaining their own identities. That can inspire pride of ownership, along with the ability to carve out a personal niche or become a member of a social network. Cloud-based systems are conscious of an individual’s transactions and communications, which further reinforce a sense of membership and community. A student wondering whether he or she spent money effectively could find out with a single click. Similarly, a student might wonder, Am I on track? Where have I veered off, and what will help me get back on course? For a student with a cloud-based learning identity, another click could help provide the answer.

Social networks and learning communities. Students should have their own secure learning accounts, similar to Web-based social identities, where they can manage their own learning in one place, receive feedback from other students or mentors, and view their transcripts. Under such an interconnected system, no student would have to be to be held back by demographic circumstances or be lost in a maze of buildings, regulations, and inattention.

Data mining and assessment. Colleges can use data to help students and faculty members monitor learning and teaching, and take adaptive actions in nearly real time. With adequate safeguards in place, similar to those that protect online trading and banking, new health-record systems, and security transactions, these tools can be extended to campus settings.

The problem with many academic systems is that they are “dumb” to who their users are, what they are doing, and what other systems they are using. This is largely because colleges have different buyers for different functions—learning management, student-information systems, digital-content management, campus analytics, and e-mail systems.

While there are single sign-on systems to get to all of these systems with one log-on, that does not make them “smart.” A smart system integrates all of these functions to do two things: serve the end user (students, faculty, administrators) and interpret the data to improve performance.

At the moment there is no clear path to smart systems in higher education. The big data and identity engines of Silicon Valley are not idling, however. They are starting to accelerate, with the higher-education market squarely in their sights. While private equity is rearranging many of the traditional education-technology and content players, mostly on the East Coast, a new breed of venture-backed education start-ups are taking what their founders learned at Google, Facebook, Zynga, and Twitter and focusing on education.

As the head of a new nonprofit group devoted to academic transformation (and based in Northern California), I can see this happening. It is the talk of the Valley. As huge initial public offerings make millionaires out of many relatively young technologists, a good number of them are looking at higher education with interest. They had the benefit of good educations recently, see what technology can do, and want to “do good.” But they don’t yet know much about piercing fog.

Higher-education leaders, unlike the cloud-based companies of Silicon Valley, do not easily comprehend the social and commercial transformation gripping the world today. Indeed, there was a certain amount of gloating that the centuries-old higher-education sector survived the dot-com era. After all, textbooks are still in place, as are brick and mortar campuses.

The simple fact is that life is becoming more horizontal, while colleges remain hierarchical. We can expect the big shifts in higher education—where the smart use of digitization leads to degrees—to come from other countries.

And that’s sad, because the United States makes most of the new technologies that other parts of the world are more cleverly adapting, especially in education.

For once, putting our heads in the cloud might be a good thing.

Government Cloud Raises Questions

Reblogged from Beagle Research Group, LLC:

I was surprised by the Salesforce.com announcement coming out of the company’s road show, Cloudforce Washington this week.  In the nation’s capital the company announced Government Cloud, which is just what you’d think it is if you’d been following Salesforce at all.

Beginning this summer, the company plans to deploy a secure and separate infrastructure to support cloud based applications for state and federal governments. 

Read more… 447 more words

Written by Denis Pombraint of Beagle Research this development might be a watershed moment for public cloud and salesforce.

Making the Cloud Conventional

By Denis Pombriant
CRM Buyer  (Part of the ECT News Network)
02/15/12 5:00 AM PT

Perhaps Oracle’s Taleo acquisition says a lot about a conventional software company trying to make the cloud     conventional. But at this point the cloud is conventional, it’s just not conventional in that way. So a paradigm has been shifted. However, with each vendor articulating a cloud strategy, we’re seeing mostly closed strategies.

Last week Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) bought the HR SaaS company Taleo for US$1.9 billion, which to me means it’s time to do you-know-what to the fire and call in the dogs. This hunt is officially over and out.

The hunt in question is for legitimacy and primacy of the SaaS and cloud computing model. Many people would argue that legitimacy happened when Salesforce had its first billion-dollar year — heck, its first $100 million would do just as well. But primacy has always been a wee bit dodgy.

There’s been a see-saw battle between the on-premise and cloud communities for many years, which culminated with all the major software companies finally adopting and promoting some version of their own cloud computing architecture in the last two years.Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) famously thinks the Web needs an operating system; Oracle announced its cloud, driven by its ultra-husky next-generation servers last fall at OpenWorld; and SAP (NYSE: SAP) has been trying its hand at multiple iterations of cloud computing.

More importantly, a raft of small entrepreneurial companies are offering hosting facilities much like when this business got started with ASPs, or application service providers. It’s tough to make a living selling commodity infrastructure, but the advances made by companies like Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) — such as the application in a browser rather than client-server — make selling infrastructure possible.

‘We’ve Seen This Before’

The Taleo announcement was so important that I had people emailing me to offer their thoughts. For instance, Tien Tzuo, one of the early employees at Salesforce and now the CEO of Zuora, a billing and payments solution provider for subscription businesses, had this to say:

“This is the tipping point for the cloud. RightNow [bought by Oracle], SuccessFactors [bought by SAP] and now Taleo. The big old-school enterprise players have just validated the cloud as the future and signaled the end of their reign.”

I agree, and it is reminiscent of Clay Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma, but Tzuo takes this theme even further.

“We’ve seen this before,” he says. “Siebel acquired Upshot trying to look more SaaS-like and apparently to box Salesforce.com into a corner. Instead it backfired. That one deal validated the SaaS model to CRM buyers. And almost overnight Salesforce went from up-and-comer to leader.”

Yup, I was there too. But I think what’s happening now is the incumbents are accelerating their efforts to catch up. With each vendor articulating a cloud strategy, we’re seeing mostly closed strategies, which means things might not change very much for their customers. Some vendors are trying to have it both ways, clouds plus customer lock-in.

Closed strategies limit choices and options, and at least in some situations we’ll continue to see higher than necessary costs for things like management and development or maintenance. What many of the clouds offer is a trimming of the cost of infrastructure, period. I think that’s what Marc Benioff means when he says, “Beware of the false cloud.”

Paradigm Shift

To put a final point on it, Tzuo says, “All these cloud acquisitions won’t help ERP one bit. Acquiring cloud companies doesn’t make you a cloud company. … It’s an attempt to distract customers and hope they will forget about the boat anchor they’re stuck with.”

Tzuo is not the only skeptic. Echoing Tzuo, Ted Elliott, CEO at Jobscience, an HR solutions company based on the Force.com platform (and so a Taleo competitor), said, “This really represents a capitulation by Oracle regarding the cloud. Unfortunately this would have been great in 2004, but in 2012 we are transforming towards social; a server company that builds databases is transaction-oriented and social is about relationships — people, not numbers”

Elliott’s got a point, and so does Tzuo, and perhaps the Taleo acquisition says a lot about a conventional software company trying to make the cloud conventional. But at this point the cloud is conventional, it’s just not conventional in that way. So a paradigm has been shifted.

“While Oracle and SAP are desperately trying to catch up to the cloud, the game has already changed to social,” said John Wookey, executive vice president of advanced applications at Salesforce.com. “We are focusing on moving the industry forward with the social enterprise applications and platform that companies are demanding.”

Perhaps most importantly, all this hoopla about clouds and rather conventional application areas means that many big vendors are not giving the attention they ought to be giving (in my opinion) to social media companies. They are proving to be a generation behind. Well beyond darlings like Facebook and Twitter, there are fascinating companies like Get Satisfaction, Studentforce and Crowd Factory – just to pick a few of names out of a hat — that are rocking their worlds and causing the next disruptions.

That’s where Salesforce has focused its energies. They still talk a lot about the cloud and its centrality, but they’re also onto a new vision — the social enterprise. The cloud is increasingly about plumbing; the social enterprise is about putting the plumbing to work. 

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Denis Pombriant is the managing principal of the Beagle Research Group, a CRM market research firm and consultancy. Pombriant’s research concentrates on evolving product ideas and emerging companies in the sales, marketing and call center disciplines. His research is freely distributed through a blog and website. He is the author of Hello, Ladies! Dispatches from the Social CRM Frontier and can be reached at denis.pombriant@beagleresearch.com.

Smartphone use and EFFECTIVE study habits …. findings are counterintuitive

The conventional wisdom is that smartphones and other devices are distractions for students. Just shows that the Mobile Generation is NOT conventional.  Yup! Students use of Smart Phones increases EFFECTIVE studying; where/when students use their smartphone …..

1. Just before going to sleep while in bed
2. While commuting
3. During exercise
4. Immediately after waking up; and
5. Almost 20% use their smartphone when ‘nature calls’

Via: STUDYBLUE.com

Technology Use on American College Campuses – December 2011

Some surprising findings from this survey:

1. iPad is not (yet) the favorite tablet on campus
2. Only 8% of students say they can’t live without Blackboard
3. A little over 50% don’t mind using facebook to discuss academic topics; however,
4. Almost NONE believe faculty and students should communicate via the fb platform
5. By far (81%) a Laptop is the most important device a student must have

Via: Online Colleges Guide

Generation Mobile – Student use of Mobile Devices

Created by: HackCollege