Survey Monkey Limitations

I can't believe it's been so long since my last entry in this blog.  In the interim I've been extremely busy.  I've done lots more reading, and I designed an online survey for students using Survey Monkey.

My pilot survey had 58 responses, and that led me to a bit of tweaking of the survey design.  It's now been rolled out ot the entire student population of 12,000+ students.  After the first day I have 474 responses.  It's quite exciting and I'm a bit nervous about the whole thing.  I had to get approval from the University ethics committee and the Student Experience Group.  If I screw this up I can't just do it all over again.


I've been turning my attention to getting results out of Survey Monkey and into SPSS.  Not easy by any means!  There  is no native export, so I'll have to import the data into Excel to clean and code it before it can be opened by SPSS.  Lots of work and little time!

The other things are that I've had a research grant approved.  OK it's only for £300 towards conference expenses, but it's my first.  I'm intending to present a paper at ECGBL Athens next October.  There only remains the small problem of writing the paper first!

Epiphany??

I had something of a breakthrough last night in relation to my thinking about my research.  I've been in a total logjam for about 3 weeks - feeling as though I was making zero progress and even that I couldn'y get a proper handle on my research project.  I had reached the point where I was seriously starting to doubt my ability to see this project through to completion.

Thank god I now *seem* to have clarified my thinking, and I'm busily mind mapping my project.  Fingers crossed...

Early Research/Pre-research

What about a survey asking students about their experience of online communities of practice in playing games or, more unlikely, OSS development?

So what was the problem, again?

Things went so much better today.  I've finished the lit. review, and I'm reasonably pleased with the result.  I've emailed the draft form to mark for comments.


Also, I found my wallet when I really thoughtI had lost it - pretty good day all round.

Project Plan OK, Literture Review not so much

Mark has approved (well, mostly written) my phd project plan, which extends out to 2016.

The paperwork also requires a brief lit review, which I'm kind of struggling with.

Brian has agreed to (try) giving me a tiemtable with 3 days teaching, 2 days non-teaching per week to give me some space for my phd work.

Some thoughts

Epistemologists from John Dewey to Paulo Freire to Seymour Papert agree that you learn through doing. This suggests that if you want more learning, you want more doing. Thus OLPC puts an emphasis on software tools for exploring and expressing, rather than instruction. Love is a better master than duty.