Get Your Head in the Clouds

EDUCAUSE, a nonprofit association dedicated to advancing higher education by promoting the efficient and effective use of information technology, recently released the annual ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology (Smith and Caruso 2010). The purpose of this annual study is to illuminate the roles technology plays in the college experience. During the spring 2010 survey, quantitative and qualitative data were recorded from nearly 40,000 freshmen and seniors at 100 four-year institutions and students from 27 two-year institutions. Participants were asked to report on different aspects of their technology skills and the perceived affects of technology on their learning experience. The ECAR study provides valuable information for anyone connected to an institution of higher education, especially for academic librarians who understand the value of insight into how their patrons are using information technology (IT). For this edition of the Electronic Roundup, I examine some of the key findings from the ECAR study, and what these findings mean to the academic library. One of the most important findings from the study is the student adoption rate of cloud computing. Cloud computing has lived up to its name in being a “cloudy” concept to describe over the past two or three years. However, if you are an active user of online services such as Facebook, Flickr, Google Docs, YouTube, and Picasa, then you are already a cloud-savvy consumer. Put simply, cloud computing involves using Internet programs and services as spaces to store and share data. These data can be in the form of videos, pictures, documents, audio files, or anything else that can be digitized. Another way to understand cloud computing is to think of it as using different parts of the Internet as storage devices that can be accessed from any Internet-enabled computing device. I want to emphasize “computing device” to avoid limiting cloud access to a computer. Students