DIMINISHED THOUGHT

I've been transcribing interviews from Beijing for my masters thesis dealing with cell phone usage among young, urban Chinese. One interview I just finished has a girl telling me about how important it is for university students to own a mobile phone in order to participate in university social life. She told me that parent's often purchased mobile phones for their children when they were accepted to university as a reward, even if it was difficult for the parents to afford it. She related it to the one child policy in China, implying that parent's restricted to one child would go the extra mile to make them happy.

Anyway I'll have to see if that finding is replicated in some of the other interviews but I thought it was very interesting.

Labels: cellphone, China, Purdue

Done with the semester. Check out our proposal for an online learning community that serves Purdue University. Hopefully this is something that will be followed next semester. In my opinion, the most innovative feature, the online citation database/generator (for lack of a better term), hasn't been described in adequate detail. Check out the section on article citations in this previous post for more information.

Labels: Community, learning, projects, Purdue