Introduction to the Survey Results

In addition to the technology questions we’ve been asking UVic Law students over the past nine years, we decided for the second year in a row to ask some extra questions about the mobile technology that students are arriving at Law School equipped with. This survey was completed by 139 incoming and transferring law students, which is a strong 90% plus response rate.

Executive Summary:

• 84% of incoming law students own “Smart Phones” that can browse the internet (up dramatically from 50% last year), with 42% of the total being iPhones, 13% Android and 27% Blackberry’s.
• 19% of students own tablet devices or ebook readers.
• 98% of students own laptops, and 16% own both a laptop and a desktop computer.
• 50% of student laptops are Mac’s, up from 44% last year.
• The average laptop price stayed basically the same as last year at $1,186, which is down from $1400 in 2007, and from $2,100 in 2004.
• The students’ average typing speed was was 60 wpm.
• 72% of all students bring their laptops to school almost every day.
• 55% of students use Gmail as their primary email account (up from 49% last year), 9% use UVic email and 22% Hotmail.
• 60% of students identified MS Word as their favorite tool for collaborative document editing (down from 67%).  30% favor Google Docs (up from 27%) and 2% OpenOffice.
• 58% of students report backing up their primary computer on a regular basis. 60% of those backing up do so to an external hard drive and 25% to a cloud storage solution.
• 97% of students use Facebook (up from 91%) and 92% (up from 80%) would like to see law school events and activities published on Facebook as well as through the online faculty calendar. 25% use Twitter, 21% use linked in, and 16% use Google+.

Smart Phone / Cell Phone Ownership

84% of students own “Smart Phones” or phones with built in web browsers that allow them to surf the internet on their cell phones.  That is up dramatically from 50% of smart phone owners last year.On the other end of the spectrum, 2% of students do not own a cell phone at all. This is significantly lower than the 11% of our sample of all law students who reported no cell phone in the spring of 2010. Just as laptop owner ship has been close to 100% since 2007, cell phone is now almost 100% as well.I suspect that over the next two or three years close to 100% of students will either own a smart phone, an iPod Touch, an iPad or Android tablet device.From the library’s perspective this is an important area to watch, as there are a number of interesting new technologies (like QR Codes) that could potentially enhance the library’s services that depend on library patrons having access to the internet on their cell phones along with a camera.

Tablet Device or Ebook Reader Ownership

For the first time we asked students about their tablet device and/or eBook reader ownership and found that most students do not have dedicated eBook readers. It will be interesting to see if a shift to digital reading of textbooks and other materials happens over time.  If text book makers lower the cost of digital books relative to paper books, we could see a rapid adoption of eBook readers.

Laptop Ownership

Laptop ownership has plateaued in the high ninty percent over the past five years (this year at 98%). Currently only three 1st year students arrived without a laptop this September. 50% of all incoming laptops are Mac’s (up from 39% last year), 1% are Linux, and the remaining 49% are running Windows (7% XP).The average price paid for student laptops has leveled out over the past two years at just under $1,200. In 2007 the average was $1400 and in 2004 $2,100. The increase in the number of higher priced Mac laptops is the probable cause of the leveling out of the purchase price of student laptops.Desktop computer ownership stands at 28%., down from last year.  All students have had access to high speed internet in their homes for two years now.

How often do students bring their laptops to school

One only has to look in Law Faculty class in session to realize that at least 72% of students bring their laptops to school almost every day.  Does this open up pedagogical opportunities, or is it just a thorn in the side of faculty members?Interestingly, 3% of laptop owners never bring their laptops to school with them. That combined with the 2% that do not own laptops, reinforces the need to maintain a certain number of public access computers and loaner laptops available in the building, especially for exam writing.

Typing Speed

Of the 73% of students who were able to tell us how many words per minute (wpm) they could type, the average was 60 wpm.

MP3 Player Ownership (besides smart phones)

95% of students own an MP3 Player or smart phone of some kind.  Of those students owning MP3 players, 96% own Apple products (up from 93% last year). For any instructors wishing to do podcasts of their lectures, there is no need to hold back any longer as the 5% of students with out PM3 players can review class lecture podcasts on their laptops.  Campus Systems is considering setting up a UVic iTunes site (like other universiteshave done) which would make distributing the mp3′s of class lectures very simple to do.

Primary Email Account

Currently only 9% of students use their UVic email account as their primary email account. The rest – 91% – forward their UVic email to a 3rd party email provider.  55% use Gmail as their primary account, and 21% use Hotmail, and 9% use their previous university’s email.

Favorite Collaborative Document Editing Software

Microsoft Word continues to be the most popular tool for collaborative document editing at 61% (down from 67% last year).  Interestingly, Google Docs is preferred by 30% of students (up from 27%).

So what did I recommend that she do to backup her new laptop?  Follow the 3-2-1 Backup rule:

• Always have 3 copies of all your files…
• Stored in at least 2 different formats…
• With 1 of those formats being “off site” from where the computer is located.

How can you easily follow the 3-2-1 backup rule?

1. Buy an external hard drive for your computer. In spite of what happened to the law student, having a backup on an external hard drive is a good thing to have.  It provides you with a second copy of your important files. An external hard drive will cost you some where between $80 and $160, and most come bundled with backup software.  Be sure to buy an external hard drive that is at least as large as the hard drive in your computer.
2. Subscribe to an online backup service like Mozy.com, Carbonite.com or Dropbox.com.  Using any one of these services in combination with the external hard drive will give you your third copy of your files, and that copy will be off site, safely away from any fire, flood or natural disaster.  These services are free for up to 2GB, and then cost between $5 and $10 per month for unlimited backups.  If my student friend had been using one of these services (even just the free 2GB service for her current paper), she would have been back up and running in just a couple of days.

Here are the slides from a recent presentation I gave to the Peninsula Friends on backing up home computers.

Being the father of five children under the age of 15 years old, and having 4 computers in our home along with a couple of iPod Touches, I’ve been experimenting with software & services over the past few years to try make my childrens’ experience on the internet as porn free as possible. After trying some commercial software for content filtering that ended up slowing down our 4 year old computer, and didn’t do anything to help on our iPod Touches, I have found something that works quite well on all the internet devices in our house (remember that no solution is 100% perfect not matter what the software vendor claims).  It not only works well, but once you set it up on your home router, you don’t need to install anything on the desktop computers or iPod Touches!

OpenDNS is the solution. OpenDNS allows you to filter web content and block adult websites on the internet by simply changing the DNS servers that your computers uses, or even better by change the DNS servers on your internet router. The service not only works well, but is free to use. After you’ve setup an account you can specify the kinds of web sites you want to block.  Types of sites you can filter range from, Pronography, to simply Tasteless site.  You have all the control that you could ask for.

If you want, you can also enable logging so that you can keep track of the websites computers in your house are visiting. This all happens transparently, without having to install any software on your computer. If you have an internet router, you can manually change the DNS servers that your router uses to the two OpenDNS servers, and all the comptuers in hour home will automatically be protected from the kinds of web sites you specify, log the sites they visit (you have to turn the logging on, it is off by default). If you want to change your DNS settings now just use the following:

• 208.67.222.222
• 208.67.220.220

You should also install the OpenDNS client on your computers, just in case the IP address on your router changes.  If your IP address changes (which happens from time to time), the OpenDNS client will let their servers know, so that your network will continue to filter content as you requested.  Here is download page for the Mac and Windows clients.

While this is a great technological solution, don’t forget that you should talk to your kids about their use of the internet, and what they should do if they accidentally get on a site that they aren’t comfortable viewing (i.e. tell mom or dad so that they can take care of it).  Like I said earlier, no solution is 100% effective, so chances are that they will occasionally see sites that aren’t appropriate.  Making sure that they know that it isn’t their fault and that you’ll help them is probably the best way to resolve the immediate problem, and open up a dialog between you and your child on their use of the internet.

To sum up: OpenDNS along with Online Backup Software are two services that every home should seriously consider using. OpenDNS is completely free, and Online Backup Software is free up to 2GB of data backed up, and about $5 per month for unlimited backups. Enjoy!

Drop Box synchronizes files between computers across the room or across the internet.  The service is free if you have 2GB of data or less.  For $10 a month you get 50GB of data storage.  I’ve used DropBox for several months now, and have to say that it works great.  It makes it much easier for me to quickly share documents between my Laptop (mac), my Work Computer (windows), and my Home Computer (mac).

Not only does it facilitate file sharing, but it also serves as an excellent backup system. While more expensive than Mozy’s $5 a month backup service, you do get a lot of extra functionality that Mozy does not give you.  DropBox works great on Mac, Windows and Linux computers, which means that it can be used on virtually any computer you own or can currently buy, including one of those cute little Net Books.

Another feature that some might find useful, is the ability to share sub folders with other people for collaboration purposes. As files are modified, previous version are kept so that if necessary you can revert back to a previous version of the document.  Files that are accidentally deleted can also be recovered, unless you manually purge deleted files.

I highly recommend DropBox for people who use multiple computers and need to share files between them.  Good luck!

So I started looking for the file. Sure enough, she had deleted it from the file server, so it didn’t go into her recycle bin. I tried doing a windows search (she’s running Vista Business Edition), and could only find a link to it in favorites, but not the file or a temporary file. Lastly I tried doing a Google Desktop search as we have it indexing her computer and her file share. It thought it found the file, but the link was dead (because the file had been deleted), but we could look at the full unformatted text of the file with the preview option. So we copied the text from the preview, and pasted it into a new Word document. I had one relieved customer. She had to reformat the document, but it saved her hours of work writing it from scratch.

So… Google Desktop is not only a great desktop search tool, but it can also help restore deleted files that have not yet been backed up!

As the systems administrator at the UVic Faculty of Law every semester I see one or two students who have lost everything… documents, pictures, music… Everything on their laptop computers. The look on their faces is unmistakable. They come to me looking for help. Unfortunately more often than not I have to deliver the news to them that they have lost all their data. Typically the the data is lost because of a hard drive failure (a recent Google report seems to indicate that newer high density hard drives are becoming less reliable not more reliable). Recovery is sometimes possible (just ask my good friend Mike Binstead), but it can often be quite expensive ($1,000 or more) if the problem is severe enough that a hard drive recovery company needs to be involved.

The most recent student who came in to my office with a troubled look on her face, just had her laptop stolen, and did not have any of her data backed up. She lost everything except for things she had e-mailed other people (she uses a webmail program, so her e-mail was not lost).

Last week I heard another sad story from publishing company that I’ve been working with. One of their branch offices had a fire which destroyed all six of their computers. The person in the office I’ve been working with most closely didn’t have any of her data backed up and lost everything. Two others in the office had backups, but stored them at the office, so their computers and their backups were both destroyed (just because you back things up doesn’t make your backup system full proof).

I know a number of data loss stories from Hurricane Katrina… I won’t tell them here, but I’m sure you can imagine what happened to many people and companies who were not backing up their data, and keeping some of the backups stored off site.

The biggest complaint I hear about backups is that people feel they are a pain to do. I agree! Most backup systems are a pain. If a backup system requires human intervention on a regular basis, it is probably not going to work well. Up until recently I backed up my home computer by burning the Data to DVDs. I have enough pictures and videos on our computer now that it took 3 DVDs to back everything up. It was a pain to do, and as a consequence, I ended up backing things up once every two or three months … not very impressive for a systems administrator.

At the Faculty of Law we backup everything on our servers nightly using a little piece of software on the servers that backs all the changed data to a central server on campus. The next day, a copy of the backed up data is shipped to a storage location on the other side of the country. I sleep better knowing that if the Law School Burns down, all our data is recoverable.

I recently started using a similar system for my laptop and home computer to backup all the data. It is Wonderful easy to use service, and for up to 2GB of data it is Free! The company is called Mozy Online Backup. If you have more than 2GB of data, you can pay $5 per month to store Unlimited Data. I am happily paying $5 per month for my unlimited account. Mozy works on both Windows (2000/XP/Vista) and Mac OSX (the Mac client is currently in beta testing, but I am happy with it’s performance on my laptop). Here are the features I love about the Mozy backup service:

1. It requires no intervention to backup. Just setup an account, install the software, select what you want to backup, and then just let it run!
2. It backs up your changed files every 3 hours, and keeps different versions of the same document for 30 days.
3. It stores your data off site at a different location, so in the case of a natural disaster or fire, your backup will be safe.
4. It is cost effective. Free for up to 2GB (which will work perfectly for UVic Law students) and $5 per month for unlimited backups.
5. The data is encrypted before it is sent to the server so that it is secure while it is being transfered over the internet, and while it is being stored on the Mozy server.
6. Mozy just signed up General Electric as a customer, to backup their systems world wide. A nice vote of confidence in Mozy.

I encourage everyone who does not have a good, reliable backup system in place to take a hard look at Mozy for your personal backup solution. I’ll be installing it on the two computers are my parents house the next time I visit.