Take 3 . . .

Okay . . . apparently this is not working for me this week.  This is the third time I am writing this “blog” regarding last week’s class activity.  In response to whether we should post our class activity to Laulima, Dr. Collins suggested I post some of the results on my blog.  So, I have been trying to do this now for the past hour.  I don’t know what I am not doing this week that I did last week, but it’s not working. So, I have decided to write my blog in Word and then post it to the site.  That way, if it fails to save for the third time, I don’t have to type all of this out . . . again.  I know, sorry for the frustration. This is probably going to be more condensed than my second attempt, which was more condensed than the first.  So, this may be a good thing for you. HyoIn and I asked people to list 10 vacation destinations.  What I found was that my participants were a little taken aback by the lack of directions given.  We are so used to specific instructions – list 10 places in America where people like to go on vacation; rank the 10 places in order of popularity; sort the 10 places into three groups:  places single people would most likely visit, places couples would most likely visit, places families would most likely visit – that we are not used to having free reign over an activity.  The easiest was for participants to list the places they wanted to go or enjoying going to and ranking them in that manner.  However, they sought more direction in the sorting – “What three groups?” or “How do you want me to group them?”  My response?  “Up to you.”  That would not have sat easy with me.  I like to know what is expected of me when I do things.  Although the groupings tended to vary quite a bit (as you can tell by the spreadsheet attached), the pilesort surprisingly grouped the 10 places into three distinct groups (plot is attached).  The non-US countries were on one end and the United States on the other.  The cities of contiguous states were towards the bottom and the “non-contiguous” states were towards the top.  Of course, they could have also been grouped as countries, states, and cities and that could have played a role in the creation of the distinct groups (more than one way of grouping the places into the same groups). What I was interested in was how the participants (or respondents) would be grouped.  I was expecting a distinction between HyoIn’s group and mine, but the plot was all over the place (attached).  My participants are one-six and HyoIn’s are seven-twelve (on the plot, one is under eight and four is under seven).  There didn’t seem to be any distinct groups.  The group appeared pretty random.  I guess that’s what you would want in a sampling (which I just realized now and didn’t notice in my first two attempts at this.  Maybe me writing this for a third time does have its benefits . . . ).  The data would be more convincing if the sampling is more random, I suppose. So, I guess if I was to use this to collect data, I would need more specific instructions to yield more distinct results and I would need to ensure the randomness of the participants included.  Maybe I don’t need more specific instructions . . . just a clearer topic . . . .  In my “productive classroom” trial, the responses were pretty similar, but then again, the group was not very random.  Something for me to think about . . . I hope this finally works!

Vacation compiled(1).xlsx
vacation pilesort.labels.BMP
vacation pilesort.respondents.BMP
 

I know what I did wrong in my first two attempts.  I didn't click on "Add to document".  Now I know!  I will erase the first two attempts.  =)