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Hey Mark et al., The mock survey looks really good! I wonder if the question about the top 5 websites could be a long answer? So that there is visually more room for them to type in their answer? Perhaps we can write an intro to the survey about the ODBS; some of the questions at the beginning seem to assume that the participants already know what the ODBS is, and I think it may be safer to presume that they have never heard of it before. One more suggested question: Have they encountered similar initiatives before? If so, what was it? And also... basic demographic information (Name, contact, age range, etc.) |
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At this point I'm just trying to include all of the suggestions I've found in the forums. They're in no particular order. We'll sit down tomorrow and whittle the list down to a set of 3-4 questions. We really don't have the facility at this point for a proper survey. We hope to use this to intro the system and to drum up some interest in our focus groups. The name/contact/age info will naturally be included so we can contact interested parties. So far as the intro goes, maybe the Communications team could write something up? |
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Hi Mark! I presume the current questions are getting close to final, I have a question about the Admin survey. Questions 14: Which organization in your community would be best to house an ODBS? This questions follows one which asks whether people would prefer if they had it in house, or if they would prefer it to be mailed in. When I read it through, I can imagine some confusion on the user's part, seeing as they may or may not have enough info about the technical, human, and other resources that are required to maintain such a system. Perhaps we could ask what organizations may be interested in collaborating with the ODBS project to address related needs that they have? Just a thought! |
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We've pretty much settled on the content and general order of the questions. Ignore the wording and format of the questions for now. We`ll be working on that this week. Fiona`s going to be writing some ``painting-the-picture`` text to give people a better idea of what the whole project is about. Hopefully that will lay out all the important details prior to the question answering stage. |
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Thanks to you guys for hammering this out. I like the general content of the questions and the order is logical etc. I have a few comments about some of the questions. The question about how people fix the internet might be confusing for some people. I know in my own dealings with computers, I often use many different strategies for fixing the internet, depending on what is 'broken'. I also might not want to spend time typing what steps I take to fix stuff: check cables, run diagnostics or call my ex-boyfriend. Is the point of this question to assess the tech-savyness of users? Could it be phrased like "when you have problems using the internet, do you fix it yourself?" or "do you feel comfortable fixing computer/internet problems". I know you guys are going to change the wording this week, but I just had to add my two cents... For question 12, the one about books from the 1900's, perhaps we could add some examples or some titles that might help people picture the kind of stuff that is available. I also think we need to add the following question: If you were a kind of fruit, what kind would it be. You guys are all star fruits, I can tell! Hope that's helpful! |
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Yeah, I know that one's pretty vague. Celene and I weren't sure how to phrase it but wanted to keep it as a placeholder. If you can think of a better way please edit it and add some multiple choice options. Not sure how comfortable people from Wikwemikong are going to be about calling your ex-boyfriend for help though. You might want to leave that one out. :P If you can think of any examples of 1900's books I'll add them in. Star fruits! HA! |
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The Gutenburg website has several of Jack London's works, including Call of the Wild, Whitefang, and some more obscure stuff. I think The Hobbit, by J R Tolkien was also written around that time. Poems by William Blake and Collridge (I forget the spelling) are enjoyable even without an English degree. Blake also illustrated many of his works. Illustrated versions of Alice in Wonderland and Alice Beyond the Looking Glass would be fun. If you want something Gothic, Edgar Allen Poe wrote around the turn of the century. The Raven is the one everyone knows, but some of his other works are "dated" to say the least and could be offensive. |
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I've tinkered with that question a bit. I expected to see Project Gutenberg stocked with nothing but Charles Dickens but they have a pretty impressive catalogue. From 20th century stuff like Upton Sinclair all the way back to ancient Babylonian, Scandanavian and Celtic epics & sagas... Th file size is fairly small and easily downloadable using dial-up. |
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Hey Guys, The introductions look great and the survey is shaping up well. *Hopefully we'll be able to meet Adam and Nadia in the next day or two, get clearance from Brian and then get that survey out to Danica and Kitty by the end of the week? |
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In this case, we should have the project name change nailed beforehand so that we don't confuse ppl w/a survey that says ODBS and then send out pamphelets w/a POD logo. I'm not sure how to ask for everyone's input though b/c not everyone is reading the renaming thread in the Promo forum. Perhaps next class we can take 2 min to hold a vote. |
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I think it's a good survey overall. I just have a couple of suggestions. I was wondering if you could be more clear or detailed by what you mean by "fiction" and what you mean by "community organization"? I'm just thinking if I was a twelve year old kid filling this out, I wouldn't be sure as to what you were talking about. Also, what content they usually look at if they do go on the computer would also be good to know. |
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Thanks Jalal. We really want to put some kid-friendly questions in there or at least make it easy for kids to answer. You're right, most kids probably don't conceptualize "community organizations" but they would know if they go to the rec centre or not. Do you think making a list of options (band office, library, health centre...) would make it easier to answer? As for the "fiction" thing, we'll probably fix the whole list. Maybe we'll be able to break "fiction" down into a few categories. Or maybe we can just call it "liesure reading"? Margaret had also mentioned asking about which websites people frequent. We cut this one (sorry Marge!) when we were just doing a short questionairre. Now that we've bumped it up to a full size survey maybe we can squeeze this one back in. |
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We talked about this alternative before, Mark and Celene, about asking questions in the survey such as "do you have children" and "what kinds of books do they read, are interested in, or you read to them". I don't know how well getting a child to take a survey would go. As for fiction, that is tricky. I wouldn't call it leisure reading, because only librarians know that term. Even people who do lots of leisure reading don't call it that. Usually people who read a lot break it by topic, like biography, or history, or by genre, like murder mystery, fantasy, science fiction, and romance. These can be broken down further, like science fiction can be broken down into cyberpunk, steampunk, apocalyptic, epic space sci fi, or "soft" social sci fi vs. "hard" sci fi. Wikipedia is actually a very good resource if you want to learn about different genres, subgenres, and popular authors. The trick with defining what you mean by "what topics or genres do you read" is that you risk priming the respondants to answer in a certain way. Sometimes if I ask someone what they like to read and I give them examples of types of fiction that I read, that person says they don't read very much. When I ask them further questions, it often turns out that they like to read things like biographies, but because of the examples I gave them, they thought biographies did not count. PS. I recommend the Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov-its about a planet of librarians that take over the galaxy by hoarding all the information everyone else forgets ;) |
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Fiona you said it so well when describing how difficult it is to exhaust all the possibilities for genres. I have been reading over the questions on the two surveys, and I am curious whether we need to rephrase some questions that we know we'll never be able to provide all possible options for. Luckily, I don't think we'll run into this problem for all of our multiple answer questions. As for questions being easy to understand, I wonder how far we have to go with this. If we're creating a user survey that welcomes the possibility of children answering, there will have to be some reformatting of vocab. Have we definitely opted against a small kid's survey? Otherwise, would posing some questions to participants that routinely spend time with kids suffice? Anyways, looking forward to the meeting tomorrow... |
