What Sort of Web Animal are You?

Some of you may have seen The Virtual Revolution, a series recently broadcast on BBC2 to mark 20 years of the Web. The final episode focused on asking whether the Web is having an impact on relationships between people and even the way that we think. While it's probably too early to give a definitive answer to these questions, recent research into the browsing habits of children and students suggests that there may be a generational gap in the way that people use the internet to find information.

To investigate this further, the BBC has teamed up with University College London (UCL); the result is The Web Behaviour Test, an interactive exercise which takes 20-30 minutes to complete, and is made up of different types of questions and games. You need to register with the site before you begin, but this is free and only takes a minute. At the end of the test you'll be classed as a type of Web Animal depending on your responses - click here to read about the different types of animal, or here to learn more about the test.

I'm hoping to get together a group of students to take the test and chat about their responses, with a view to presenting a paper about web behaviour at the annual College Conference in the summer. If you'd be interested in getting involved with this then you can email me at D.Renfree@ucb.ac.uk for further details. Or if you'd just like to take the test for yourself, I'd be really grateful if you could contact me to say which type of animal you were classified as at the end of the exercise. In the interests of full disclosure, I'm apparently a leopard... :-)