facebook for data collection

Back after a long gap with a post prompted by a conversation with Daughter Number 2, who said that a friend of hers had recently set up a facebook event that wasn't an event...

The idea was that, instead of describing an event, her friend asked a question. Then, people could respond to the question by selecting one of the three attendance options available in facebook events. For example, you could make a statement, such as "School Computing helps prepare pupils for real world computing uses.", and map the responses as follows:

Attending --> Agree
Maybe --> Not sure
No --> Disagree

Obviously, you can substitute any question/statement you like and define whatever mapping for the answers suits your purpose. As long as you are content with only three responses, this looks like a quick and dirty way to collect data. Here's one I made earlier:

I thought this was interesting. It uses a technology with which students are already familiar (arguably "addicted to" in the case of my daughters) and so requires no special logins or hurdles to jump through for the participants. Also, it is easy to use existing friends and contact groups to restrict who can see and respond to your question. Finally, because you have to choose a date for the event, you automatically have a deadline by which the responses have to be made.

It is not entirely satisfactory, however, because you cannot change the response buttons, so you have to explain the mapping to potential respondents and there is no way to export the responses for further analysis. Therefore, I had a quick look to see how else it could be done and found that there is a facebook poll app that allows you to create your own response options. It draws a decent graph and can export the results to Excel. Also, if you are willing to pay, you can get other useful features.

Clearly, neither solution is as flexible as dedicated poll/questionnaire tools such as SurveyMonkey and Poll Everywhere but I think that doing everything in facebook is an interesting approach. I especially like the way you can take something created for one purpose (event management) and subvert it for an alternative use (data collection).

Have a go at my event poll and my facebook poll and then let me know what you think. Would you use either method, or is it just a daft idea?

BEd, Handheld Learning and Frozen Laptops

Today I intended to talk to the BEd 4 group about handheld learning. I was talking mostly about mobile phones but touched on Nintendo DS, iPhones and a few other bits and pieces as well. Unfortunately, the session started badly and went downhill from there! The ultimate fail happened when my laptop froze completely because the hard disc was full.

I said I'd try to note down a few of the things I talked about (or meant to talk about) and pass them on.

For information about Nintendo DS and handheld gaming, I of course referred them to Derek Robertson, the Consolarium as well as his Brain Training research and Nintendogs activities. I also talked about a couple of mobile phone based games that I like: Myst and Guitar Hero. For more information on Myst in education, have a look at the stuff Tim Rylands did and for the Guitar Hero, see the Guitar Hero @ MSG page.

I also talked about mobile blogging - or moblogging. I referred to some commercial tools but tried to emphasise how much could be done free (or next to no cost) with a moblog - see for example the PGDE(P) moblog as well as do it yourself solutions with Twitter and TwitPic.

I also spent a bit of time talking about how mobiles could be used as Interactive Voting Systems and demonstrated Poll Everywhere (with the students voting via Twitter) but should also have mentioned SMSPoll, Powerpoint Twitter Tools and TwEVS.

I also did a quick demonstration of QR Codes and described how you could use a QR Code generator to make codes for classroom posters, homework sheets and letters to parents. With the right software on your phone (I use i-nigma) you can use its camera to take a picture of the code to connect to an associated website. For example, the above code will take you to my Delicious page.

Towards the end of the session, I sent the students out on a "field trip". They were to find a janitor and send his or her name back by texting a message to Twitter from their mobile phones. I didn't spend long enough explaining the exercise so it didn't quite go to plan but we got a few messages before the end of the class.

Finally, some reading. For more details on mobile gaming, see TeachMeet08@SLF: Mobile Games and for advice on how to build a good personal learning network on Twitter, see Nine great reasons why teachers should use Twitter and Seven Ways to Find Teachers on Twitter.

So have I missed anything? What do you think the key aspects of handheld learning are?

Vote with Twitter

This is a follow up to my What do you think? post. I had loads of good suggestions from people, with many pointing out that Poll Everywhere can accepts votes sent via Twitter.

polling station
Originally uploaded by secretlondon123

I really like Poll Everywhere and have used it with small sections. The free account for 30 responses is perfect for an average class size. However, I am not sure I'll be able to get funding to use it in lectures with hundreds of students... which is a pity. I was pleased to note though that someone from Poll Everywhere noticed my Tweets and encouraged me to get back to them to talk about costs.

In the meantime, I thought that using unique hashtag on Twitter and counting responses would be a quick and dirty solution that might be good enough for on the fly straw polls. A couple of people suggested possible lines to pursue that didn't involve a full blown programming project involving Twitter's API, so I had a go... with minimal success.

First off the blocks was Stuart Meldrum who suggested pulling the RSS feed from a Twitter Search into a Google Docs spreadsheet. I got so far but couldn't work out how to pull in all the search results. I've published a copy, called Public TwitGraph, which hopefully you can look at. If anyone can tell me what's going wrong, I'd be very grateful.

Next suggestion I tried to follow was from Martin Hawksey who suggested using Yahoo Pipes. Again, I had a go and got as far as adapting someone else's pipe to produce a list of numbers that I thought I might be able to pull into Google Docs to add them up and draw a graph. However, I couldn't get the RSS feed from the Pipe into Google's spreadsheet. Curses! Thankfully, Martin is more skilled with Pipes and has managed to use a hashtag to draw a graph. Brilliant! Stunningly brilliant even!

I can't quite see how he's done it, and I'll need to play with it for a while to see if it scales up, but it looks very promising.

What I really like about all these solutions (or in my case, not quite working solutions) is that they are based on stuff that other people created... stuff that they willingly shared with the Internet community. Yet more proof, if proof is needed, of the value of personal learning networks, Web 2.0 technology, blogs and (last but by no means least) Twitter.

I'm off now to tile a bathroom... but tomorrow, I'll be playing with Pipes. :-)

What do you think?

Personal Response Systems are used in schools and universities to collect opinions, and answers from students. They work like the ask the audience system on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? I must admit that I wasn't sure they would be much use until I tried them in a lecture. The response from the students was so positive that I was convinced after one use. However, there are problems. Handing out and collecting the handsets, setting up the software and receivers etc. is all a bit of a pain.

put your hand up if you are having a good time
Originally uploaded by micn2sugars

It occurred to me that since I already have a Twitter backchannel going in many of my presentations, it might be possible to use Twitter to collect student votes.

What's the big idea?
It seemed such an obvious idea that I was sure someone must have already done it... So I spent most of yesterday evening failing to find what I was looking for. I thought you could ask a question and give a unique hashtag for each possible answer. For example, you could ask:

Do you think voting with Twitter is a good idea?
1) To vote Yes, Tweet: @ddm090820 #ddm001
2) To vote No, Tweet: @ddm090820 #ddm002

Something would look for the unique hashtags, count them and then display the votes cast. Simples! Except, I can't find anything that does it. I asked for suggestions from Twitter but nobody could come up with exactly what I wanted. Essentially, I want a free version of Poll Everywhere!

I got quite excited when I found TweetVolume. It seemed to do what was required... until I realised it used Google to search Twitter - not much use if you want real time reporting of the results. If only they had used Twitter Search instead of Google.

My next idea, suggested by Barbara007 on Twitter (in response to my pleas for suggestions), was to search for the tags myself and just count the results. I investigated this too but while Twitter Search tells you how long it took to come up with its results, it doesn't tell you how many hits it finds. I want to use this with groups of over 100 students, so scroll and count is not going to work!

Conclusion
It seems to me I have four options:

1. Talk the TweetVolume people into using Twitter Search instead of Google.
2. Get someone who knows about programming and APIs to write an app for me.
3. Find a live Twitter search tool that tells you how many hits it finds.
4. Give up!

...Unless you know differently. Any suggestions?

So what do you think?

I have been meaning to redesign the blog for well over a year now but I worried that I might break something. However, I finally decided just to go for it! I hope you agree that the blog now has a cleaner, less cluttered look. This my be a daft question (along the lines of, "Put your hand up if you can't hear me.") but have I broken anything? Specifically, is the subscription in your feed reader still working? (See, told you it was a daft question. If the feed is broken, how did you get here to read this?)

Original EdCompBlog

One effect of the change is that it makes it easier for me to add gadgets and widgets in the sidebar. I have taken advantage of this new found power to show some of my Flickr photostream and a snapshot of the music I've been listening to but the ability to add polls is potentially more educationally valuable. My first poll asks an not entirely unpredictable question - what you think of the new design so far? :-)

So what do you think?