Internet and Email Use at Work - Study Findings

PEW Internet and American Life Project have a great paper out right now with some interesting stats on use of the internet and email and how it effects workers. It is from September 24, 2008 and the data seems to have been collected earlier in the year.

It caught my attention in relation to the Work Literacy Web 2.0 for Learning Professionals workshop/class/network (it's a bit of all of these). Someone was wondering if the tasks people are doing in relation to age have shifted over the last year or so. It seems that the older boomers maybe even seniors (in terms of generations) are more 2.0 savvy than ever. I'm not sure to be honest, but this report has some interesting information on how email (personal and work related) and the internet effect workers at home and in the "office". I know the eLearning Guild is also doing a free webinar today on their eLearning 2.0 360 findings as well and may address some of this - who is doing what and where idea.

Some of the PEW/Internet findings:

Working men and women are equally as likely to blog, but young adults far outpace older workers in their engagement with blogging. Employed internet users ages 18-29 are more than twice as likely to blog when compared with 30-49 year olds (20% vs. 9%). However, young adults are no more likely to report at-work tending to their blog; just 2% say they blog from work.

Blog reading is also most prevalent among younger generations of employed internet
users. One in three internet-using employees (33%) say they have read someone else’s blog or online journal, and 11% report at least some at-work reading. However, among young working adults, 46% are blog readers, compared with 33% of 30-49 year olds and 25% of employed internet users ages 50-64. At-work blog reading is equally prevalent among all of these groups.

Starting to be a Collector (comment from Work Literacy Ning)

Susan Neva commented today, after seeing a graph (What People are Doing) that I shared, that they would like to become more of a collector and wants to learn how to accomplish this task starting with RSS feeds.

I responded (and decided to share here) with a comment.

Week 4 of Work Literacy seems to be when we get into RSS feeds a bit more, but if you want a place to start try Google Reader. It's quite simple to use and navigate though and a great place to start collecting feeds. They don't have to be just on the topic you are interested in (ie: elearning) but can be space, news, cooking, it's endless. Word to the wise, don't collect too many or you end up not having time to read them all.

I'd start with Tony Karrer's blog, Brent Schlenker's, or mine. Tony and Brent have amazing content, but the reason I listed all three is they have great blog lists of others we follow and might be of interest to you. Tony suggested at one session to keep a feed for 30-60 days (I think) and then determine if you are getting much from the content. If it isn't of much interest to you after that, then clear it away. This way you don't end up with 1000+ rss posting a day.

Brent has just changed his reader to no feeds at all. If someone has a blog that he is following, he hopes they have now got Twitter Feeds coming from it as well and he relies on the blog headings that come through twitter. Not sure how this is working yet for him, but it's an interested way to keep up with all the info we share with one another. I use the Twitter Feeds myself through out the day to check those topics that pop up and are intriguing to me at the moment.