2010 Seventh International Conference on Information Technology
Internet Usage Pattern by Female Students (A Case Study) Rozita Jamili Oskouei
B. D. Chaudhary
Computer Science & Engineering Department Motilal Nehru National Institute Of Technology Allahabad, India
[email protected],
[email protected]
Abstract Female students are in minority in most of technical institutions in India and many infrastructural facilities and services are not targeted to them. Even though internet facilitates removal of geographical, social and cultural barriers, it does not seem to have any significant impact on academic pursuit of female students. Not many serious investigations have been conducted to study the usage pattern of internet by female students and its impact on their academic and social activities. This paper presents results of a study conducted at Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology Allahabad regarding usage pattern of internet facilities by female students .This study has been done by mining the log files of proxy server for three months. This period included two test and one semester examination weeks. Results of mining are summarized below: •
Approximately 3000 websites were visited and majority of them were non-academic websites. A classification schema for those websites is proposed.
•
Only 13% of internet users are female students and out of which only 11% use internet.
•
Dominant use (63%) of the internet is for NonAcademic purposes. This is true for students with excellent academic performance(CPI).
Key Words: log files mining, web site classification, behavior mining, and social network
1. Introduction
World Wide Web is a huge repository of knowledge which can be accessed through internet. These technologies have significantly influenced daily activities and quality of life of individuals and organizations including academic institutions. Academic institutions have made significant investment in computing and internet infrastructure with a hope that this investment would result in extensive utilization of knowledge resources on web leading to significant increase in productivity of students and teachers and to enhancement of their learning experiences. However, there is a growing concern in industries and academia that these investments have not resulted in desired goal of 978-0-7695-3984-3/10 $26.00 © 2010 IEEE DOI 10.1109/ITNG.2010.76
Computer Science & Engineering Department Motilal Nehru National Institute Of Technology Allahabad, India
[email protected]
increased productivity and quality. There may be several reasons for this situation including curriculum structure, instructional and evaluation methodology or social and cultural conditions. Female students are in minority in most of technical institutions in India and many infrastructural facilities and services are not targeted to them. For example, library, computer center and some of laboratories are open till 12 midnight but female students are unable to use them because their hostel rules expect them to be back in their rooms before eight o/clock Pm.Such rules are in existence in many institutions due to security concerns for female students .To minimize difficulty arising out of such situations, institution provide some computing and internet facilities in the female hostels. Generally these facilities are limited. Even though internet facilitates removal of geographical, social and cultural barriers, it does not seem to have any significant impact on academic pursuit of female students. Not many serious investigations have been conducted to study the usage pattern of internet by female students and its impact on their academic and social activities. This paper presents results of a study conducted at Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology Allahabad regarding usage pattern of internet facilities by female students .This study has been done by mining the log files of proxy server for three months. This period included two test and one semester examination weeks. This paper is organized on seven sections. The second section presents computing and internet infrastructure, degree programs offered and female student’s enrollment and also describes important attributes which have been filtered from the log of proxy server. Section 3 describes our proposal to classify websites visited by students in general and Female students in particular. Section 4 summarizes the results of mining of the internet usage pattern by female students. Section 5 explores to discover relationship between internet uses and academic performance of female students. Section 6 Discuses related work. Section 7 summarizes our conclusion.
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2. Data Source Environment
fosters new social relationships based on commonality of interest and locations.
Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology Allahabad has a decentralized computing environment. Each academic and administrative department/section has their own computing facilities in addition to a computer center, which is a central facility. The institute has approximately 1000 computing nodes distributed all over campus and connected through optical fiber backbone including hostels and residential areas. The computer center houses approximately 300 nodes and operates from 07.00 Am to 11.00 Pm for 365 days. Computing nodes in the hostels are of students and are not included in the above count. Internet connectivity is provided through 42Mbps leased lines. The Computer Center runs “Squid/3.0 Stables” proxy server which provides number of different logs which can be used for debugging, user and site profiling, and for measurement of utilization. For our research, we used Access Log which records 15 fields for each access. We have filtered the following fields from the log for our analysis: (IP Address, Web Site URL, Date & Time, User ID ) The institute offers nine B.Tech. , Eighteen M.Tech. , MBA, MCA, M.Sc. and Ph.D. degree programs. Total annual intake is approximately 1100. Annual intake of female students across all programs is approximately 180. Current population of female students is approximately 520 in total student population of 3500, which is approximately 15%. All enrolled students are provided user ID for internet and E- mail access.
Similarly, there is category “pornography” in ODP and also in [4] which we have changed to “Undesirable” even though this term sounds subjective. This undesirable category contains pornography, drugs, and other addiction related web sites. And these sites are undesirable from student’s welfare considerations.
3. Web site Classification A preliminary analysis of log files for three months indicated that there are approximately 3000 websites visited by the female students. Since our objective of analysis was to identify usage patterns of these websites in the context of academic activities, we had to classify them. Several proposals [1, 2, 3, 4] have been made to classify websites. Most of them are based on the contents of the pages of the websites and their structural features. These classifications do not take in to account the context in which classifications are to be useful. Accordingly, we proposed our own classification of websites which is shown in Figure 1. Our classification scheme integrates classification schemes of ODP [3], and those proposed in [1, 2] with new categories which are relevant in the context of new usage pattern. Some of the new categories introduced in the classification includes: General and Professional in Academic category, Social Networking, Community, Entertainment, in the Nonacademic category. We included Social Networking as an important category as it has evolved in recent years and include web sites which enable a community of users to collaboratively generate contents and share them. It
Figure 1 also shows the web site usage by the female students in percentage. For example, 63% of hits were to Non-Academic web sites.
4. Results In this section we summarize results of our analyzing of the log files: • Only 13 % of total internet users are female students . • Female students belonging to B.Tech degree program are dominant users of internet where as students belonging to MBA use internet least. • Most of the female internet users belong to 4th semester B.Tech degree program. There does not seem to be any logical explanation for this. • Dominant use (63%) of the internet is for NonAcademic purposes as compare to academic. • Most frequently visited websites under category Non-academic/Social network /Advanced and under category academic /professional/non-commercial/ Open Source and free coding, . During examination usage of Non-Academic/Social net/Blog too much increasing. • Maximum usage of internet by female students were during mid-semester tests. It is interesting to note that websites visited are from NonAcademic/entertainment/Undesirable/Adult and entertainment/Online Game category and not from academic category. It is very tempting to hypothesize those students visiting Entertainment sites to cope up with stress due to mid- Semester tests. Among the social networking web sites, orkut is most frequently visited. From academic websites, most frequently visited web sites are Open Source and Programming websites. • Female students also visit web sites containing Drug and adult contents.
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5. Relationship between Internet Usage and Academic Performance
usage. Figure 2, given below, shows the relationship between academic performance and internet usage. Horizontal axis represents categories of websites visited and the vertical axis represents academic performance.
We also analyzed the academic performance of female students to understand its relationship with internet 1249
The academic performance is described in terms of cumulative Performa index (CPI) on the scale of 1 to 10. It is evident from this curve that those female students whose academic performance is excellent (8
