Harvard prof Andrew McAfee has an interesting post analyzing a recent Gilbane Group poll of 1000 Facebook users of ages 18-34 on which collaboration tools they believe they’ll use on their jobs in two years.
Andrew writes: The largest difference, and a statistically significant one, is that the younger crowd has less faith that email will continue to dominate. As a group, the 18-24 year olds plan to make more use of text messaging (a channel technology) and social networking sites (primarily a platform technology, although Facebook does allow communication over private channels). Interestingly, they seem less enthusiastic about instant messaging than does the older set.
Given that we in higher-ed deal with those age groups as primary parts of our constituencies, and that these are the folks who are rapidly becoming our faculty and staff as well as students, we need to be thinking about what happens as these trends accelerate.
Technorati Tags: collaboration, social-software
Oren Sreebny 