On September 15, I “attended” a webinar presented by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) which focused on the improving capacity to measure usage at the article level. The presenters contend that article-level usage information more accurately reflects scholarly impact than the current ‘gold-standard,’ citation-based measures.
Continue reading
NITLE Camp 2010 was 4 days of in-depth discussion and learning about assessment activities and the pedagogy and support of mobile devices. For me, it was a fantastic intro. to these topics and I have so much more to discuss than what you’ll see here (so find me and we can talk if you want to hear more!) but here are some highlights of what I learned:
1. Discuss assessment pilot projects (see https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AYZPHKugPdOiZGNzdDV0aDNfMjVnNnpma2ZmMg&hl=en )
2. Discuss annual planning calendar (see https://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2010/05/19/annual-planning-calendar/ )
3. Brainstorm ideas for how to orient new staff members to LIS (we’ll post the list of ideas to the blog after the meeting)
Clearly both surveys and focus groups are important tools for gathering information about a particular population. Usually surveys are used first, to a get general sense of the population. Surveys are then followed by focus groups that get more in depth information.
However a case can be made for reversing this order and starting with focus groups first, followed by surveys (see: “Use of Focus Groups in Survey Item Development“, The Qualitative Report, Nassar and Borders, March, 2002). Focus groups can often help to define survey questions or inform how questions are phrased. This can be particularly important for technology surveys, helping to couch questions in terms that those surveyed can understand.
The Curricular Technology team did a lot of brainstorming over the summer. This seems like a good time to step back and compare what we have done to what our priorities are:
We have a lot of projects started whose focus is to find one or more replacements for Segue including a CT feature matrix, a CT needs “knowledge grid” (i.e. what do we know and not know about technologies that faculty and students need), course site platform survey questions.
What’s that latest on surveys at Middlebury? I know we have been having some problems with KeySurvey, and that Ian set up a testing instance of Lime Survey. Would be great if someone could find this out and report back to the group.
As well, is it worthwhile to consider WordPress plugins for surveys. In particular, the PollDaddy plugin looks interesting. I suspect we’ll want to be cautious about these sort of plugins especially given the problems we’ve had with cForms as an obstacle to updating WordPress