Conclusion

On the background of the huge similarity was observed between USA and Russian students in the usage of ICTs lies a significant difference in the way the use technologies in practice.

The results of our cross-cultural study do stand for the hypothesis that young people, and students in particular in respect to our research who use technologies in everyday life are similar in general. Students use the same type of ICT being in different countries in different parts of the Earth in Russia and in the US. Although our research as many others before proves that people all over the world email, Text, Skype and IM each other and illustrates the ubiquitous effect of modern technologies and new Media in general on global youth society our study stands for the idea that there are crucial cultural differences that can not be ignored.

Our research has focused on digital media used for education the research views the process of learning from a different perspective. It marks out seven style of studying with respect to the manner of media use. And even these styles are non universal for both Russian and American students although are very much alike.

Nowadays, our world is getting more and more global and it brings more and more progressive ideas, technologies, thoughts in every day people’s lives, but at the same time along with all these benefits it brings drawbacks: such as the unification of cultures that is a mighty weapon of mass destruction that has a possibility to demolish every possible even the subtlest difference.

In our future studies we hope to research the influence of social networking services on a student’s academic life further and find the proof or the disproof for the questionable hypotheses we have raised during our research work on this project.

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1 Acknowledgments

Colleagues: Irina Vorobyeva and Diana Trantina

Scientific advisors: Witte, James Professor/Dir, Center for Social Science Research, Sociology & Anthropology, GMU, Salm, Randall Student Researcher, Center for Social Science Research, GMU, Kosals, Leonid Tenured Professor/Deputy Dean for Research, Faculty of Sociology, HSE Russia

FIPSE grant money

2 A. Hattangdi, A. Ghosh. 2008. Enhancing the quality and accessibility of higher education through the use of Information and Communication. http://www.iitk.ac.in/infocell/announce/convention/papers/ (accessed December 1, 2011).

3 Ibid

4 Kirkup, Gill and Kirkwood, Adrian (2005). Information and communications technologies (ICT) in Higher Education teaching – a tale of gradualism rather than revolution. Learning, Media and Technology, 30(2), pp. 185–199. http://oro.open.ac.uk/6213/ (accessed December 1, 2011).

5 World Telecommunication/ICT Indicators Database. http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/index.html (accessed December 4, 2011).

6 Anon. 2010. «Text „health risk“ for teenagers». BBC, November 9,. Health. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-11720546.

7 Here we use the reverse encoding: the bigger the number the rarer students use ICTs for a particular purpose.