What Technologies Do Today's Law Students Use?

Rich McClue, a a systems administrator at the University of Victoria (Canada) has posted to his blog (here) the results of UVic's most recent Law Student Technology Survey.  Here are some of the findings that caught my eye:

• 84% of students have internet-capable "smart" phones.  The preponderance (42%) of those are iPhones.
• 19% of students have e-readers or tablets.
• 50% of students use Mac laptops.
• 77% of students use either Gmail or Hotmail for their primary email account.  Only 9% use the school email as their primary account.
• 97% of students use Facebook and 92% want to get notices of law school events and activities on Facebook.
• 16% of students use Google+.
• 25% of students use Twitter.

Read the full post here.

I was surprised at the usage rates for Google+ (higher than I expected) and Twitter (lower than I expected; I tried live tweeting in one of my classes last year -- it did not catch on). 

The level of Mac ownership is similar to what I estimate at my own institution, and makes me think that administrators need to rethink  institutional IT polices against Mac support, given our students' technology choices. 

I would be curious to drill deeper into students' email delivery choices.   Of those using Gmail or Hotmail, I suspect that many forward their school email to those accounts.   My anecdotal impression is that there is a tenacious minority who don't forward their mail, though, and rarely check their school email accounts.  A few years ago, we had enough students not checking their school email (and not forwarding the email to their commercial accounts) that we had to revise our academic rules to impose an affirmative duty on students to check their school email.  There are still a few students every year who claim to be "surprised" that they missed important messages delivered to their school accounts.

Comments

[Rich McCue]

At our 1L orientation we recommend that all students who do not want to check their university provided email account on a regular basis, forward it to their personal email account... we then show them how to do it while they are sitting in front of a lab computer. I suspect that many of the students simply forward their email during orientation session, although I don't have an easy way to verify that.

[Frantz Pierre]

We ask our students not to forward to a third party e-mail provider. During orientation our College informs them they will be held accountable for every message sent to their university e-mail account. If or when an e-mail bounces we place a copy of the message in their mailbox or locker along with a memo to contact our IT Office so we can support any e-mail issues. Thank you Rich McClue for this enlightening data.