Classroom Blogging - The Year in Stats

As the end of the school year approaches, I had the kids in my class collect the stats from their weblogs. I asked them to simply give me the number of posts they had written, and the number of comments they had received. This is that raw data letting you see the number of posts and comments made by each student:

Sorting this data gives us this:

 

Graphing this sorted data gives us this:

I've just finished reading Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody. In this book about the effects of social networks on culture and society, one thing he talks about is how this type of graph can be found almost everywhere social media is involved. He says that looking at the stats for facebook friends, blog subscriptions, wikipedia edits etc. a graph like this almost always emerges. A tall head with few people doing by far most of the edits, postings, etc. followed by a stretched out long tail, popularized by Wired editor Chris Anderson's book of the same name.

What is the story of this data?

1.) A total of 993 blog posts have been written. This gives a median of 39.5 posts / student and a mean of 45. This has taken place over approximately 180 school days. This turns into approximately 5.5 posts / school day. (I am using school days instead of total days as this year, I found the grand majority of the blogging done by my class was done during school days.)

2.) A total of 1266 comments have been left on my classroom blogs. This is a median of 46.5 comments on each blog and a mean of 57.5. Dividing these comments into 180 school days means that an average of 7 comments / day are left on our classroom blogs.

3.) The student who wrote the largest number of blog posts (146) wrote twice as many as the other nearest person (76).

4.) Writing a large number of posts does not necessarily mean you will get a large number of comments. While the person who wrote the most posts also received the largest number of comments (113). the person who received the second highest number of comments (110) only wrote 50 total posts.

This is just the barest bit of information. As I've written about before, if we had a few more tools at our disposal, we could know so much more about our kids' online habits.

Things I'd be interested in knowing about my kids online:

1.) What percentage of blog posts were written after we received our ten eee pcs? It seemed like a lot of writing happened after this time. Is there a correlation between ease of access to the network and writing?

2.) I don't know how many total comments each of my students left. We recorded this data on a Google spreadsheet for the month of the student comment challenge and the numbers ranged from a low of three to a high of twenty - four. Next year I am planning on having students record their comments throughout the entire year.

3.) These stats don't tell me anything about their traffic online. I only know things anecdotally and by examining the history files of my computers about where my students spend their time online. I would be very interested in a traffic visualization tool that would allow me to track where my students go online, and how much time they spend at different places.

So much more to learn.

Comments

[Dennis Richards]

Great post, Clarence. One question I have: Is their a correlation between attainment of 21st Century Literacies and your data? In other words: Do students who evidence attainment of 21 Century Literacies blog and comment more, and students who blog and comment less do not evidence attainment of 21st Century Literacies. I suspect that if the potential of tapping the richness of collective intelligence to help us invent a more creative, collaborative, contributory future is dependent on students developing 21st Century Literacies, then I'd conclude that understanding and monitoring student attainment of these literacies is something we have to research.

Adopted by the NCTE Executive Committee
February 15, 2008

Literacy has always been a collection of cultural and communicative practices shared among members of particular groups. As society and technology change, so does literacy. Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies, many literacies. These literacies—from reading online newspapers to participating in virtual classrooms—are multiple, dynamic, and malleable. As in the past, they are inextricably linked with particular histories, life possibilities and social trajectories of individuals and groups. Twenty-first century readers and writers need to

1. Develop proficiency with the tools of technology
2. Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally
3. Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes
4. Manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information
5. Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts
6. Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments

Or iste NETS

“What students should know and be able to do to learn effectively and live productively in an increasingly digital world …”

1. Creativity and Innovation
2. Communication and Collaboration
3. Research and Information Fluency
4. Critical Thinking, Problem-Solving & Decision-Making
5. Digital Citizenship
6. Technology Operations and Concepts

Or Will Richardson's

The new world of learning is requires us to teach students to be independent learners, ones that are not dependent on teachers but are:

* Self-directing--we now have the ability to create our own, personal curriculum around the ideas or topics that we are most passionate about. We no longer require curriculum to be delivered to us. We need to help our students find their passions and pursue them in the context of online networks in ethical, effective, organized and safe ways. And finding a balance between the online and offline life is also a "literacy" in this age. There are so many ways to communicate these days (blogs, wikis, IM, text, etc.) that it's easy to get overwhelmed.
* Self-selecting--in this world, learning spaces are created, not provided. And teachers are not assigned, they are selected. The creation and nurturing of these highly collaborative spaces and communities is a new "literacy" that we need to help our students develop. How do we find the best teachers? How do we connect to them? How to we build communities with others that are supportive and effective?
* Self-editing--whereas most of us were educated in a world where the materials we worked with had been edited by someone else along the way, in today's world, less and less of what we read is now "edited" in the traditional sense. So, reading and writing is no longer enough; we need to develop people who are effective editors of information as well.
* Self-organizing--the Dewey Decimal system doesn't serve the online world well, so we have to organize our own stuff. To do that, we use tags and social bookmarking systems, building folksonomies where we organize the Web together.
* Self-reflecting--as we become more and more in charge of our own learning, we need to develop the ability to reflect upon and assess our own work. This "metacognitive" work can involve a number of different genres and tools.
* Self-publishing--our students will need to be literate at sharing out the work they produce because that increases the connections and conversations that can lead to further learning. Blogs, wikis, podcasts and video are among the publishing skills they will need to have.

[Mike]

In your "free time," it might be interesting to look at the content of those posts and comments, i.e. coding each according to length, quality, purpose, etc. and breaking it down that way. For example, for each post decide if it was a question, a reaction to another student's blog, an unsolicited insight, etc. Or maybe look at how frequency of posting correlates with other indicators of student performance. Just a few thoughts...

[Tracy Rosen]

Interesting data. You give me an idea for next year - a math lesson about tracking and graphing data...hot.
tracy