Activity 2 – Post-Ghostery Site Visits
Now that I’ve sobered up a bit from the e-creeping data snatching revealed to me by Ghostery, I am ready to look at some other sites / applications.
First of all, I found the sites somewhat Big Brother-ish… this watching of live, raw, unsorted data… it almost felt like I shouldn’t be watching the information that was unfolding for me. Watching the information on the screen was a bit like having my finger on the pulse of what was going on without being able to feel anything. I also thought, “Cool… but what could a teacher like me do with it?”
ManyEyes
When trying to manipulate the data, I noticed the way some of the data was/wasn’t formatted would not allow it to be used in many of the available ways. For “working” data sets, you could easily use / visualize data, though… it would be good for visual learners – not so much for hands-on / auditory / kinesthetic ones. It is fairly usable, though – I could see me using it for student votes or the visualization of class data / progress / surveys. With my current homeroom class of nine, though, I can’t see me making too much use of it.
Springer Realtime
This falls under the novel category, but I can’t see much use for it – for me, at least. The keyword tag cloud that refreshes every ten seconds doesn’t seem to carry over any words from one refresh to another… there’s no real connections to be made in the times I checked it in the last couple of days. The Icons section doesn’t group icons, so it’s too hard to scan them and see many trends before it changes.
The Darwin program looks more useful / usable, but I did not delve into it deeply.
Posted in: Week 12: Social Analytics
Allie 3:55 pm on November 24, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Something your post really made me think about is that not all data is equal – there is good and reliable data, and poor data. It’s interesting that what we sometimes find in social analytics is lots of emphasis on the analysis of data – and not so much on the *collection.* I’m reminded of my scientist partner who worries much more about the reliability of the data being collected than on the analysis (as analyses can be done and re-done). And so, I find the visualizations in Many Eyes to be quite compelling, but I don’t find the viewing of the sets so compelling.
hall 1:26 am on November 25, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Hi mcquaid ,
You have concisely evaluated each site you had visited. It certainly can give a reader a synopsis of each site without visiting them. Your account on how you would use Manyeye in class is quite good I did not think of it that way. But after I read your post and revisited the Manyeye site I realized that it can certainly be used to carry out students votes which could useful in Statistics class on data collection and representations.