You may be interested in my report on Web2.0 take-up and usage which I submitted to JISC a few weeks ago. It’s analysis of some data that blogged back in March. I included the responses to the data in the report. It was all very ‘participatory’. The report can be downloaded from here: www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/digitalrepositories/spiresurvey.
The last couple of weeks have seen a significant increase in the outputs from the Isthmus project with work falling into the following broad categories:
Initial research
A mini-literature review was carried out and some research questions agreed which would serve as a backbone/reference point for developing the questionnaire.
Questionnaire
This is the first part of the student-centred research of the project, so a significant amount of work has been put into drafting and polishing the questionnaire to try to ensure that we get useful research data from it. This work has overlapped with the questionnaire design for the Thema project, so we have been able to consider, compare and contrast different approaches as part of the process. It also draws on the research carried out as part of the Spire project: Some real data on Web 2.0 use
Technological research
We have been looking at several different pieces of technology:
As part of the JISC funded ‘SPIRE’ project we ran a survey to try to discover which online services people were using and in what manner. We were interested to find out which services were popular and if they were being used for work, for study or socially / for fun. The SPIRE project was originally looking into the possibility of using peer-to-peer technologies in UK HE and FE for informal sharing but switched to a more Web 2.0 focus as it became clear that these types of services were already having an impact on the tertiary education sector. They also appear to be where most of the informal sharing and collaboration is currently taking place online.
The survey was advertised to the Department for Continuing Education’s online students and on the online courses marketing pages. We received circa 1400 responses which left us with a lot of data to analyse. I have processed this data in to a number of colorful charts which are in the PDF below.
I have already drawn a number of conclusions from these charts but have not included these thoughts in the PDF as I would be interested to know what others think the data might mean.
Results of the survey undertaken by the JISC funded SPIRE project (PDF)
For the full analysis of this data please download the final report here:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/digitalrepositories/spiresurvey.pdf