Blog Survey … Some Early Insight
Posted by Cole Camplese in Current Projects, Teaching, ThoughtsMar 1st, 2005 | 5 responsesI had posted quite a while back that Bart and I had conducted a small study at the end of last semester related to the use of the class blog in my IST 110 course. We’re getting our results together and I wanted to share a few things with you about it. The slide images are a little small, but you should be able to see what is going on. If you want more information, feel free to contact me directly, or leave comments. I’m not going to comment on these yet … I think they speak for temselves.
We received 37 total responses for this out of a class of 42. One thing to note was that I posted a considerable amount of content on the class blog (several posts per week) and students were only asked to respond to a single, graded Discussion Activity every week. They decided if they wanted to comment on my general posts.
The first image shows students’ reactions to blogs vs. message boards as educational tools. The second image shows students’ reactions to the fact that comments are fully visible without a need to navigate a message board hierarchy to read other posts and if that helps them organize their thoughts prior to posting. The final image shows their reaction to the motivational impact of seeing other posts had on them.
Seems like an interesting start to this … lots more stuff to plow through, but it is coming together nicely. I will continue to post updates.
5 Responses to “Blog Survey … Some Early Insight”
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Cole, great slides! I’ll be borrowing slide 1 when I’m asked how weblogs differ from discussion boards
Cool … I will be releasing a few of these each day the next several days as we get through the data. Some interesting things going on here. We even asked some questions related to audio blogging/podcasting … those results will surprise a lot of people. These are being done in keynote 2 … as they are being wrapped up, I can send you them for use. Talk to you later–>
Excellent work Cole, that first slide is worth it’s pixels in gold! If you overlay curves over the results looks like a bell curve for both with blogs shifting to the left. Very insightful. I wonder if, in time, WIKI’s wouldn’t show a curve to the right. Hmmm…. I’d like to use the data in our research session at MOJO. Guess I can read the data of the chart. Would that be acceptable? Real Cheers!
[...] So I have been spending almost all of my time over at my other blogs — mostly at the blogs@pgsit. Now that the Governor’s School has ended, it is time to get back to this site. I have to admit I was getting set to post this over at my Learning & Innovation site, but my hosting company’s servers are down (yet again) … tangent here, but I was just getting ready to set my wife up with an account there for her new WordPress blog … she is on blogger.com at the moment, but has just recently been invited to join a larger blog network and is ready for the features something like WP can offer. Sorry about those details. On to my thoughts …I am starting to notice some nice traction in the use of blogs and podcasting in education. I have written before what I think about the use of blogs as communication and community tools (I’ll give you a hint … I like them), so I will just point you to those comments. In today’s New York Times, there is a piece in the Technology section titled, New Tools: Blogs, Podcasts and Virtual Classrooms. The piece, written by Ethan Todras-Whitehill, talks about the growth of podcasting and blogging in the classroom. It is amazing to see the pictures of the kids producing the Room 208 podcast. It really shows you how powerful all this stuff is. I saw something the other day from some website about how tired they were hearing about podcasting … this isn’t a direct quote, but it was something like, “podcasting is stupid because it is just a fancy name for audio on the web.” Even if I do share a little bit of the same issue about the whole “audio on the web” thing, I feel as though the podcasting revolution has allowed teachers to get really creative with what they ask of their students. Even though blogs have been around far longer than podcasts, the whole podcasting thing has really highlighted the importance of having a publishing system that can carry your voice (literally and figuratively) out on the RSS feed. If you can’t figure it out, that is what is so amazing about this stuff — its reach. [...]
[...] and evaluation related to the students’ overall satisfaction and as I’ve posted here before, they were mostly happy with how it it worked as a course communication environment. Then today, [...]