At the end of the BBSc303 tutorial on Tuesday I held a feedback session with the students present regarding Reasonate, their experiences with it and areas that could be addressed. This feedback session was prompted following the observation that the tagging functionality was not being utilised by students as much as hoped.
My opinion of this was that the current usage pattern suggested a scrap-booking mentality by most students and tagging (if it occurred) would probably follow once the bulk of the modelling work was completed and the emphasis shifted to explaining the overall process cohesively.
The students present provided the following feedback:
Tags are not being used because:
- There is tool little information to manage, it is “just the modelling process”.
- Uncertainty existed over who the target audience was for the tags (personal, team members or tutors/markers?)
- More comprehensive suggested tags would be useful to prompt the mind.
- Presently there is no distinction between personal tag groups and the tag group within the project. This made collaborating using tags difficult (i.e. simple to-do lists could not be created or checked off using tags).
- A question was raised asking why tags should be used when searching can be performed. What was not made apparent was the search engine index adds extra weight to tags hence the process of tagging improves search.
- Problem: cannot tag when creating a document only afterwards. This was a pain to do.
RSS was under utilised for a number of factors:
- Many groups worked side by side so the need for RSS was removed, looking over ones shoulder soon brought you up to date with project goings on.
- The Victoria University computer system did not retain bookmarked RSS feeds on logout. Consequently students who tried RSS with Sage (an extension for Firefox) soon gave up because continually adding their bookmarks was too much work for too little gain.
- Whilst approximately 80% of students where working from School others who were working at employers offices could not install third-party software (Firefox/Sage) hence they felt RSS was unavailable to them.
- NOTE: Since this lecture to assist the students links to online RSS readers have been posted on Reasonate. These online readers are not as user friendly or useful as their desktop equivalents but it is an option for those wishing to try the concept out.
Other issues:
Incorrect knowledge assumptions existed between the administrators and the students in a few areas:
- Many students did not understand the blogging toolset available
- The blogging tools available allowed for the creation of hyperlinks, image references and complex formatting (like tables and anchor tags). As students had no experience with web design they did not understand what these tools meant or how to use them. Consequently blog posts were not as rich contextually and in the content they contained.
- There was some confusion about the distinction between Reasonate and local/network drives. Some students did not understand how putting their work on Reasonate differed from placing it on a firewalled network drive.
Overall the feedback was useful and definitely highlighted a number of concept communication issues. The issues related to the use of tags was fairly similar to what I expected which was fairly reassuring on some level.