iSean

i am surprised to learn that my comments on the insiderhighered website received so much attention. i found the site quite by accident. i had no clue that the site was getting such traffic when i started my little debate. well, come to find out, many more people than i expected found my discussion with James Farmer. i even had a librarian here at GVSU comment on my comments just the other day. i guess i need to be more careful about what i say when i think i am somewhere obscure. and, i didn’t say anything bad; i just wasn’t writing with a known audience in mind. as large as the internet is, the little niches can bring together many of the same faces.

anyway, i wanted to post some raw data from last semester. as i’ve mentioned before, i survey my students every week. on the last survey last semester, i asked about Blackboard and blogs and even the phpBB forums that I use. I posted the screenshot images at Flickr, but here’s the gist of the question that got right at the heart of my previous discussion:

i need to add a footnote — i put much more effort into the discussion forum and i wasn’t sure how to best use blogs . . . but, it’s nice to see my students appreciating the phpBB forums. The literature is not clear on best practices with regard to blogs and many professionals who write about blogs have varied ideas on how implementation should occur. That leaves folks like me guessing really.

here’s another question that compares the website I create (using html and CSS, etc.) versus Blackboard:

by and large, my students prefer to use learning tools outside of Blackboard. along these lines, my students overwhelmingly preferred my discussion forums much more than Blackboard.

i will have more entertainment with data in the future, but this was some of the stuff that struck out to me earlier today when i was looking through the data for the first time.

Tags: Blackboard, phpBB, interactive learning, online learning