The LTD Project Blog

Following up one of Larry Ferlazzo’s top site recommendations, I tried out Fo.reca.st, and found it relatively easy to use to create a survey - once I’d discovered the functions hidden behind all the tabs, and tried out the various ways to format surveys. I’m not sure that the format names (for example, “plugged”) or the interplay between survey default and item specific display settings are easy to understand, particularly for English language learners and the not-so computer savvy (his criteria, 2008.08.22), but the illustrations and individual item previews may serve to bridge the gaps.

One problem I encountered while test driving a survey occurred when I missed the review button on a final item by a few millimeters, and wound up posting before answering all of the items in the survey. With no final warnings or confirmation routines that I recall, asking for example, “Are you sure you want to submit those responses?”, especially on surveys set for only one go per IP (and not requiring responses on first pass), the review button location, and possibility of submitting responses before really ready may be usability issues.

Nevertheless, ease of editing, formatting, and publishing virtually unlimited numbers of surveys, and items, as well as pre-formatted displays of results, is noteworthy. So are the possibilities of adding images, sound tracks, and video files for survey item stimuli, though at present they must be stored elsewhere. One recommendation I got was to store images in Flickr (personal correspondence, 2008.08.30). However, when you go to grab a URL at Flickr, the download page reminds you that Community Guidelines for uploaded images call for links back to the originals on the Flickr site, from their new locations. If there’s a trick for backlinking from images used at Fo.reca.st, I haven’t found it, or figured it out.

If you and learners with whom you work have ready access to public file storage, for A/V stimuli to add to your surveys, and you don’t need or want to manipulate resultant data yourselves, then Fo.reca.st seems to be a good way to go.

Thanks to prodding from Carla in comments on the previous post (EduBlogs Insights: More True than Ever), I’ve postponed lunch to “put something up here for an appetizer” (ltdproject, February 20th, 2008 at 11:50 am [JST]).

The mind-map represented in the image below is a visualization in progress to reflect upon tools and venues supporting a growing community of webloggers called WinK, an acronym for Weblogging in Kumamoto, the brain-child of two colleagues with whom I group blog privately in Vox.

The Pageflakes nodes (among RSS aggregators in the image, below), inaccurate and incomplete as they may be, represent recent developments inspired by impeccable models in the Blogging for Educators workshop (wiki & Pageflakes).

For the continuing inspiration that the TESOL Electronic Village Online workshop coordinators, facilitators, and other participants provide, I’d like to take this opportunity to offer my sincere thanks: Thank you all!

This mind-map (image only) captures many if not most of the major constituent elements of WinK at this point in time (between academic years 2007-08, and 2008-09). Please note that it is neither complete in details or interconnections, nor completely accurate in some of the details it represents.

(PB [aka ltdproject], description of WinK image posted on a Vox blog,

for discussion in the private WinK Core Group, 2008.02.20).

In The Technology of Reading and Writing…: Why RSS is crucial for a Blogging Classroom, Parry suggests need for a reliable means of facilitating peer-student readership, one that guides students beyond clicking and scanning of classmates’ blogs, beyond simply looking up and hitching up with one’s friends and favorites, and that propels them towards “reading the others’ work critically and providing constructive contributions” (Why it Matters for Student Writing, ¶ 3). If students receive RSS feeds providing headlines and synopses of posts from all peers’ blogs, Parry argues, students can scan every post and determine for themselves which they ought to read more closely.

In writing classes I’ve taught, I’ve observed how students at liberty to do so will gravitate to their friends and favorites, with whom they may even sit in class, and on whose blogs they may willingly sustain exchanges beyond one-off comments at assigned intervals. Although active feeds which conceal author’s names may encourage students to explore posts on blogs other than those of their best buddies, they will still need interest, motivation, and purpose to carry them beyond scanning attractive posts, commenting haphazardly, and then nipping back to links, feeds, and channels already familiar and favorable to them. I still wonder to what extent student peers can stimulate and satisfy each others’ intellectual curiosity through obligatory online interactions.

Parry suggests also that we use RSS feeds to channel comments as well as synopsize posts. Indeed we can, without so much difficulty that students cannot do so on their own blogs. For a relatively simple recipe for doing so on Blogger blogs, please see:

Recent Comment Feed on Your Blog
(pab’s potpourri, February 1, 2008).

On Wed., Jan. 16, 2007, I had a first go at running a Zoomerang survey, using the service package available for free. Although the survey was easy to build and implement, severe limitations of free services made extracting the results a major pain.

As a peer had warned me almost a year ago [add ref. about here], when I first explored the possibilities, Zoomerang allows for free neither data exports, a very enticing Pro functionality, nor access to survey data after 10 days. Pro functionality isn’t cheap: 350 USD/year or 99 USD/3 months for educational uses (Zoomerang Support, 2008.01.18).

Fortunately, I had planned a simple survey - only three items: two unique item selection type items, and one free response item. The simplicity of the survey made responses relatively easy to represent from temporarily available Zoomerang data collections.

Soon after I had closed the survey, Zoomerang made collective and individual responses available on a website. I quickly endeavored to record response data manually in a location where I could retrieve and use it, ten or more days on, on my computer.

The gut nuts of this review are:

• For survey development and implementation, Zoomerang is easy to use;
• For free service-based data extraction, Zoomerang is a pain in the a….

Smile-e (2007)
Originally uploaded by pabeaufait.

This post introduces a new logo for pab’s potpourri, smile-e (2007), created with Omni Graffle Pro.

The concept is actually about three years old, but has come a long way since 2004. It has survived two trans-oceanic relocations: one on paper, another on disk.

The yin-yang design represents blending of face-to-face and online communication. The smiley on top of the “e” indicates preference for face-to-face communication.

Smile-e (2004)
Originally uploaded by pabeaufait.

Whilst scouting neighboring tribes in the blogosphere, I found a blog among MaryH’s listings called Learning with Computers [LwC]: A community blog for the Learning with Computers Yahoo! Group.

What first caught my eye on that blog were a couple definitions posted there by one of MaryH’s blog mates, which distinguish two different purposes of blogs:

The Filter Style Blog vs The Journal Style Blog (July 28, 2006).

In retrospective, those definitions makes this blog sound like a combination of both styles, a combination which I hope the blog title “potpourri” accurately reflects.

Although the LwC blog apparently has gone into hybernation (since October 2006), a comment linked to the filter vs. journal definitions (above) points out a typical filter blog that is still up and running, namely: The Generator Blog

Looks like some of the generators filtering through there are worth checking out. Two more generators have shown up since I started this blog entry!

Here is a rough and ready tabulation of the professional development interests from 2006 LTD Project application forms:

(more…)