GOOD NEWS FOR DATA PORTABILITY

Hopefully it won't be long before we don't have to create new accounts at the drop of a hat.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/29/your-gmail-account-is-now-an-openid/

PROPOSITION 8

A really good take on Proposition 8 in California from a friend of mine who recently moved there and shares my faith:

http://brammerbunch.blogspot.com/2008/10/war-of-ring-in-defense-of-proposition-8.html

ANALYSIS OF DISTANCE ED COURSE WITH WEB ANALYTICS

One of the things I found most difficult in analyzing raw web statistics with this course (and it seems that I would find this frustrating with any similar project) was that I felt like I was doing some guesswork without having spoken to the client.

There are no goals set (perhaps that's part of the end assignment), and there is really no way for me personally to know what the client would like to see happening. Do they want more course evaluations? Would they like to know how many people finished the course? Do they care that people don't spend much time on any given page? These are all questions that could easily be answered and filtered through a couple of sit-downs.

My assumptions, along with the data I looked at, led me to these observations and recommendations:

• Of a total of about 4,300 page views of the first page of the first lesson (I have no access to actual enrollment data), only 15 or 16 visits were made to the course evaluation page. Again, not knowing how many actual course evaluations were submitted, this would reflect at most 15 or 16 course evaluations, or an evaluation rate of 0.37%. I don't know what Independent Study's intentions are for course evaluation, but this seems to be to be a very, very low number. My recommendation would be to integrate the course evaluation better into the course. It could be placed more strategically, perhaps, to give more attention or incentive to the student to complete the evaluation.
• Looking only at the past month, even the few evaluations that were visited (not necessarily completed) have quite a bit of variance. One student spent almost four minutes on the evaluation page, while two others spent 26 and 42 seconds--hardly enough time to fill out an honest or thought-out evaluation. It might be interesting to see if there was more than one evaluation submitted, and to be able to tie that evaluation to the time spent. My guess would be that if a student completed the evaluation in around 30 seconds, it's probably safe to throw that evaluation out. A recommendation could be to modify or take a new approach to the course evaluation so as to be both more effective and more inviting to complete. Maybe you could even scatter evaluation questions throughout the course?
  
• As an overall recommendation, the analytics for Math 110 needs filters and especially limited access. I can access any page on the course, which doesn't seem like it would help accuracy in determining which pageviews are from students/nonstudents. And any visits from students (such as those from our class) would cloud the undermine the integrity of the data.
  

Overall, I think I have more questions than I have recommendations or answers. I imagine we'll revisit this course.

Learning in Dense, Distributed Social Networks

I just finished reading my new Web 2.0 Bible: Here Comes Everyone.

I don't want this to be too much of book review, but you can probably already tell that I give a lot of heed to Clay's analysis of the changing social landscape in large part because of the invention and proliferation of the internet. We're just starting to see the real societal evolution-type tools seeping through the floorboards of previous failures. We're starting to realize that it's not just geeks and recluses that are using social networking tools like Facebook.

An aside: sometimes, when we gather in groups to discuss the phenomena of social networks, too often the questions start to tune like this "Well, I used [tool X] for minutes/hours/days, and [such-and-such] really bothered me. Is [tool X] really viable/valuable?" Almost always, this is the wrong question. Debating about whether or not Facebook is a viable tool is like standing on the side of the highway discussing if roads are really worth it--while hundreds of cars pass. Millions of people have already answered this question:Yes! If people are spending their time there, then we, as educators/business people/evangelists must not decide if, but how to use these tools.

One of the most interesting things I've learned about social networks such as Facebook is the complexity and geometry of the connections. Borrowing from the diagram below and Clay's observations, social networks have a much more decentralized look than a distributed or centralized network.Also, the connections, by and large, are for more denser among the clusters of connections than with the nodes that tie the distributed collections together. In other words, most people in social networks are closely tied to a group of people, with only one or two of those ties being to people who are tied to many, many people.

This structure seems to make sense. In fact, I would say that it's generally a good representation of the kind of social networks that exist in non-internet realms. Think of yourself and your group of friends, you're probably likely to see a similarity in structure.

Could educational social networks be described in a similar fashion? Take me for example. I am connected to multiple "educational" networks (they probably wouldn't describe themselves thus) that are extremely dense both as to the contributors as well as the content. One subject, one programming language, one API. However, some of those people in that network are also connected to multiple other content area networks. There isn't much transparency as to the benefits of multiple connections of educational networks: it's not like on Facebook where we can browse through each other's educational "friends." At least not yet.

Now back to the how for education. For Facebook, if we take into account the fact that the maintainers of this tool are ever increasingly seeking to be a platform for social interactions, then the possibilities of social objects are really endless. Not only that, but since the cost of producing quality, meaningful, and useful Facebook social objects (much due to the lowered cost of failing poor applications), Facebook has become, in a sense, a sandbox of social tool engineering. Without a doubt, we'll start to see more (and better) applications that enhance areas like education. There are already lists. Further, since education is in many aspects a social endeavor (and since it's where a great number of people are spending their time anyway), it seems hard to argue that social tools can't enhance, or at the very least, change the educational experience. With text messaging almost out of control amongst high schoolers and educators in a frenzy, we may already be seeing some change, for the better or worse. If social changes are occuring (they are), then social activities such as learning are bound to see changes as well.