Building "Something"

Seeing as I had no desire to go anywhere near second life again, I created a survey about religious tattoos on the clark survey forum which benefitted this classes, as well as my social research processes class. The survey questions had already been developed, but I discussed it with my group and we decided to post in online, and then make a facebook event telling people how to take the survey, in the hopes that we would receive more response than we would if we handed it out. All three of us invited all of our facebook friends and asked the people we invited to do the same, though most of them did not. Of the thousand our so people invited to the event, 107 responded that they were "attending" (which actually didnt really mean anything), and 172 people decided to take the survey, which only applied to people between the ages of 17 and 23 with tattoos anyway. I quickly learned that the clark survey website was not very user friendly, especially for people like me who need step-by-step instructions. The website also made it so that you could post instructions, and I could not figure out how to make a free response sections for certain questions without making the free response a separate question. In order to fix this, I posted the instructions on the facebook event page, but I had to get rid of the free response sections of certain questions that we meant for expansion on some of the multiple choice questions.

It ended up taking about an hour, but probably would have taken much less time for someone who had a better idea about what they were doing. I'm also not sure that I would say that I like what I've made, I do not dislike it, but it is kind of the bare minimum because the website is not very complex.

Here is the survey: http://surveys.clarku.edu/Survey.aspx?s=4bf72b0e5a934066a45d2499c016c36e

Playing Well with Others

1. How many of your comments turned out to be the only comments attached to a particular post?

Only one of my posts was the first, everything else was commenting after other people. However, I only responded to the other comment on the first blog, and the rest were just responding to the post.

2. How many different blogs did you comment only? (Remember: 3 is a minimum number, you are not limited to only three people)

I commented on four blogs, it was interesting to see what people decided to post on their blogs other than our assignments.

3. Did you tend to respond to people you already from outside the class?

No, at first I was just looking for people with blogspot addresses because I thought they would be the easiest to comment on since I have a blogspot blog. However, I ended up commenting on a wordpress blog basically by accident because I didn’t realize that the blog I was looking at was on wordpress, but then I found something that I wanted to comment on and decided it couldn’t be that hard. I found it a lot easier to think of things to say about posts that were about things other than class assignments, so that also narrowed down the blogs that I considered commenting on. However, I also commented on someone’s post about second life, because they seemed to have the same problem that I did when I created my avatar, which was that the original outfit kept showing up every time my avatar turns around.

4. Do you think this is a useful way to communicate in a class setting?

I guess it is useful, but I do not know if it is really necessary. It does force people who do not normally participate in class to voice their opinions about the different assignments though, so that I probably a good thing.

5. What are the advantages/disadvantages of this method of communication?

Advantages are that when someone sees something outside of class that has to do with our class work, we can post about it right away without having to try to remember it for the next class time. I am not sure if there are really any disadvantages, I think it is a good way to communicate. That being said, I am pretty sure I wont continue posting on my blog after the class ends, at the very least because it appears no one is actually reading it.