EDUCATING ANALYSTS

After an exhaustive 1/2 hour search (hey, everything happens at greater speeds nowadays, right?) for the uses of web analytics in education, I came across a gem of a starting point. The title: Using Log File Analysis to Evaluate Instructional Design — A PowerPoint presentation used in Ken Fanser and Rod Riegle's presentation at the 2003 Sloan-C International Conference on Online Learning.


This resource hits a lot of really great ideas about using Web Analytics as a valuable tool for evaluation. It's dated but at the same time still very applicable. Some points I found interesting to consider after reviewing this presentation:

• One of the biggest barriers to entry for someone wanting to use a "log file" to evaluate their online instruction was getting the data in a readable format. No more. Tools like Google Analytics completely eliminate a lot of these painful and complicated steps of getting set up to see who's looking at your content.
  
  
• Some of the proposed limits to web analytics for use in education are still valid, while others I don't believe to be such a problem. Por exemplo, it still can be easy to misinterpret results from analytics tools, most of which are geared towards business goals rather than educational goals. Yet, the amount of data you can get from one user is not quite as limited as the presentation suggests, as well as some of the issues raised with rich media (Flash) aren't quite as valid. There are plenty of ways to work around/with rich media to cater to your analytics.
  
  
• The presentation raises some very important questions as to the effectiveness of analytics in online education.
  
  
• A fundamental question, quite possibly one of the only questions that needs to be asked in evaluation, is "Did learning occur?" How can that be determined from page views? Maybe with deeper analysis, we can approach a way to guess. Yet, isn't that a struggle of any educational medium, to assert whether or not learning did, in fact, occur?
  
  
• Another question that may be difficult to answer with web analytics: Was the content engaging?
  
  
• A more elementary question: How do I link student X to user X? Is it possible to evaluate effectiveness of instruction with web analytics at the single user level?

All in all, a great find for the subject. I wish I could get access to the recorded presentation.

WIKIPEDIA AND ELEPHANTS

In doing some research and digging around in Wikipedia (did I really need to link that?), I started thinking [again] about the power of tools like Wikipedia and what they represent in the age of New Media.

Please, please, if you are at all interested in topics like New Media, "phenomena" like Wikipedia, or are wondering what in the crap everyone is talking about when they say things like "Web 2.0," go and get Clay Shirky's book: Here Comes Everybody. Seriously, do it now. I'd lend it to you, but I have this horrible habit of starting books with a voracious appetite only to find something else to do or read when I'm about halfway through. That, and I really don't want to lose track of this book.

So anyway, reading some interesting articles on Wikipedia led me to the desire to actually write something. I read through some pages that I was pretty sure wouldn't exist, such as the entry for Elko, Nevada (my home town), and decided I'd write one for myself. Cahlan Sharp. A Wikipedia entry on myself, what could be more self glorifying?

Problem is, I wasn't the first one with that idea. No, there isn't an article on me yet. I got as far as checking the Wikipedia guide to first-time articles and realized that I was in the wrong.

Commandment six: thou shalt not write articles about thyself or thy friends (paraphrased, of course).

Makes sense though, right? Not that I couldn't have tried to do it anyway, but the point is that my intentions were all wrong. What if every user or peruser of Wikipedia decided to make an article about himself/herself?

What's that? Oh, right. It's called MySpace; it's called Facebook. I got caught up in the excitement of sharing coupled with a selfish desire to think I was important enough to warrant the general populace's attention. What a jerk!

I also remembered reading an article a long time ago about how Stephen Colbert decided to take a jab at Wikipedia by inspiring his users to edit the Elephant article to read that the population had doubled in the last six years. What a fun discussion that spawned.

Straight from Shirky's book, in chapter 5 entitled "Personal Motivation Meets Collaborative Production" (the entire chapter is about Wikipedia):

Skepticism about Wikipedia's basic viability made some sense back in 2001; there was no way to predict, even with the first rush of articles, that the rate of creation and the average quality would both remain high, but today those objections have taken on the flavor of the apocryphal farmer beholding his first giraffe and exclaiming, "Ain't no such animal!" Wikipedia's utility for millions of users has been settled; the interesting questions are elsewhere.

I'd love to write that entire chapter in here.

I wonder if the Great Wikipedia Debate hasn't progressed a little from the "Ain't no such animal" exclamation to a phase of teenage boys first discovering they can make prank phone calls (Colbert).

Now I think we'll start to see and recognize even more usefulness come from tools like Wikipedia.

METRICS FOR ANALYTICS

Some quick thoughts on useful things to measure for web analytics:

• Number of unique visitors: I know most analytics programs or server-side analytics engines can track this, but one of the most important lessons I've learned in analytics is that hits != visitors! With education, just as important.
  
  
• Time spent on a page. Difficult to measure (how to determine whether someone is reading or taking a break), but very useful. A lot of time spent on a page can be a very good thing.
  
  
• Conversion/goal tracking. Google analytics has a slick way of dealing with this. Basically, you want your users/learners to follow some sort of prescribed path--this can be tracked. If a student went from point A to point E, then back to B, and never ended up on the critical F, then something ain't right.

Also, some wish list items:

• More data per page. Imagine analytic technology that showed data as to what areas of the page were most focused on, not necessarily clicked on. In usability testing, this happens with a camera mounted on the user's computer that tracks eye movements. Not feasible from a broad analytical perspective, but I suspect it may not be as impossible as it sounds.
  
  
• More visualization. I'd love to see more dynamic, engaging, and at the same time useful visualizations of things like traffic demographics mashed with other tracked areas.
  

BLOGS = DONUTS?

Sorry, I wanted a tantalizing post title to get your attention. I have a theory that everyone, including you, has a specific donut that resonates with your DNA. It will call to you like a siren. You can't resist it--there's no use even trying. It might even change from month to month.

Now, how many calories is it going to take you to find it?

This post is really about the educational uses of blogs. Hopefully this doesn't come across as the laziest fulfillment of an assignment ever attempted by mankind. The assignment was to find a specific "article" about the educational uses of blogs and to discuss its (the article's) interest to me as well as expansions or improvements on it.

Honestly, one of the best resources I found was Kimberly McCollum's blog post spawned from the same assignment. Let's be honest, she did her homework.

Really though, I found the article (post) great for two reasons:

1. It's concise. It doesn't make my eyes tired thinking about how much I'm going to have to skim (notice I didn't say "read") to get information
   
   
2. It's a starting point. The post gives an overview of what I'd want to know about the educational uses of blogs by giving an overview and pointing me in possible directions.
   

Heck, if Kimberly's post were hosted on Blogger, it may have even climbed to the top of Google's search for the keywords "educational uses of blogs." Maybe my linking to her post will be the catalyst that propels her to the top and results in litters of comments to such a number that she won't be able to respond and continue her normal life.

Back to the assignment--my only expansion on this topic is due to the tendency I have to use loose definitions. First, if we're talking about education, I like to include self learning. I'm a huge fan of self learning, not only because it's how I've built my trade but also it's so reflective of the kind of person I am. Self learning, combined with a loose definition of "blogs," is the essence of how I educate myself in my work. I independently and randomly search others' work, learn from it, internalize it, sometimes expand on it, and apply it. My self learning is almost completely dependent on using blogs as starting points.

So when we talk about the "educational" uses of blogs, it might be useful to expand the definition of "educational" beyond a classroom or teacher-centered setting. I really liked the part in Kimberly's article that talked about the benefits of "reflective practice."

I feel like I might be thinking in circles, too. The assignment to search out an article (isn't that really a blog, although sometimes more static?) about educational uses of blogs followed by blogging about that article seems a little like asking someone to use a word processor to type a report about a document that explores the benefits of word processing.

Maybe I should stop writing posts after 10:00.

HELLO, MY NAME IS _______

I've been planning on getting this blog up and going for some time, but two of my classes in my graduate program this semester provided me some extra incentive to finally get it together.

One of the assignments mirrored in both classes is to introduce myself and explain some of my reasons for taking my two classes: "New Media, Social Media, & Learning," and "Web Analytics."

Me in a nutshell: I'm from a small town in northern Nevada called Elko. I've been living in Utah for the past six years or so, and after spending two years in Brazil on an LDS mission, studied Portuguese and graduated with a degree of the same name from Brigham Young University in Provo. I got a job just before I was married in 2004 editing online high school indepenedent study courses. I got so interested in web technology, specifically rich web media, I began teaching myself web programming languages. This continued until I obtained my first full time job as a multimedia developer for the LDS Church (headquartered in Salt Lake City).

After two years at the Church, I left with a friend of mine to pursue ventures with some outside clients that had grown to a considerable size. We quickly grew to a company of four employees, and currently have five employees in our small internet publishing and multimedia firm called Sharp Media Interactive Development.

I am married to the most beautiful girl in the world, Kim. We have two children: Emmy (2) and Cohen (3 months). We currently live in Pleasant Grove.

As for the classes, I quite literally almost didn't take any classes this semester. With work being as busy as it is, I took the summer off and almost did the same in the Fall. The titles of both of these classes were too good to pass up. With Web Analytics, I heard a lecture from my professor, Clint Rogers, last year about the class topic and was really excited about it. Analytics are not a huge part of what we do, but I love the applications and implications of it and I'm ready to learn more.

As for New Media, I am really exicted about learning and sharing about the technology that is my work and my passion (if you can't already tell).

Here's to a fruitful semester (that doesn't kill me).

SPORE AND SCIENCE

Released yesterday was Spore, the latest and greatest in what has been some of the most influential, creative--and yes--educational games made.

Will Wright, the mastermind behind all of the Sim games (SimCity, The Sims, etc.), has gone above and beyond the traditional "Sim" games with the release of Spore.

Spore is an ultimate creative tool. It allows the learner/gamer to design an almost infinite variety of organisms using the game's very dynamic tools. This organism, and the gamer, evolve through the game's five stages: cellular, creature, tribe, civilization, and space. As if exploring creation and interaction wasn't enough with any one of these stages, we get to experience all five of them! I just bought my copy today, and am anxious to get playing with it.

Games like Spore rejuvinate the idea that video games can indeed be used, and be used very effectively, for learning.

I ran across an article today in Wired by Clive Thompson that takes a look at how video games, especially complex systems in games, inspire scientific method techniques in gamers who explore and often seek to exploit these systems. From the article:

More than half the gamers [in Lineage, a role-playing game] used "systems-based reasoning" -- analyzing the game as a complex, dynamic system. And one-tenth actually constructed specific models to explain the behavior of a monster or situation; they would often use their model to generate predictions. Meanwhile, one-quarter of the commentors would build on someone else's previous argument, and another quarter would issue rebuttals of previous arguments and models.

These are all hallmarks of scientific thought.

One of the most interesting points of the article is that the gamers most often didn't even understand how scientific their reasoning and procedures were.

Games like Spore (when used in moderation, just like everything else) will healthily continue to inspire creativity and unlock potential for young minds, or maybe even the slightly older minds :)

SMALL WORLD

Ever heard the term "Six degrees of separation?" The phrase refers to the seemingly bizarre idea that each person on the earth can be connected through a maximum of six separate connections.

This article talks a little about why the number is no longer six, and what that change is due to.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/03/six-degrees-of-separation-is-now-three/

CONFESSIONS OF A TIRED PROGRAMMER

I've been wanting to start this blog for a while—sort of make a central place where I can blog about something more than just programming or my work. Since I have two classes this semester that both have as their first assignment the creation of a blog, it was a good time to act.

I love programming. Wait, maybe I said that wrong. You're probably thinking after reading that statement that I've attended multiple Stark Trek conferences or something. No, that's not it. I love programming as a tool of creation. I love that I can use a logical set of rules to create something. One of the driving forces that has kept me learning more programming languages and staying as close as I can to the cutting edge of web technology is because I see really cool things out there and my instinct is to learn "how in the heck did they do that?"

I'm also tired. Maybe it's because I've been programming too long, I don't know. I want to further exercise different muscles. I want more opportunities to think outside the programming box. I want to solve problems that can't be easily solved with a good programming model. Actually, maybe I don't want to solve problems right away. Maybe it's even that I want to experience more of coming up with problems rather than immediately typing out, line upon line in a Courier-derived font, the logical solution to that problem.

Maybe I just need to go to bed.

NACHO

One of my favorite movies of at least the last few years has be "Nacho Libre." Jack Black should have won an Oscar for the dozens of hilarious facial expressions he did in this movie.

One of my favorites is the wide-eyed look he gives in this conversation with Encarnacion when he says "To tell you the truth . . . he was a luchador."

I couldn't find a screen capture of that look, but this is a good one too.