Surveymonkey's technology enhanced support

We have been using Zoho Creator and Surveymonkey to collect data for formative assessment and other uses. This morning I wanted to know whether we could share the responsibility for creating assessments and surveys with other users. This is an important feature because we can build on one another's work and improve our efficiency of our efforts to improve learning and assessment. So I posed this question to the support contact form at Surveymonkey:

Export surveys to use in another account?

Question

2/15/2008 10:55:59 AM

Your site explains clearly how to export data from surveys. It also explains how to use one survey to create a copy of it that can subsequently modified. It also explains how to use system-wide templates to start and then modify.

Is is possible to export a survey and then import into a second account? Can professional accounts mimic characteristics of your template functions so that surveys can be developed for similar user communities? For example, if our school district develops a survey that helps us improve instruction, can we share it with other districts who may want to build on our work? I. e. you have an open data capacity, do you also have an open content capacity?

Thanks for your assistance.

Immediately after submitting the form containing my request, the site responded with the following page:

One more step! You are not quite finished.

Based on your initial question, please review the following topics we have found for you. One may provide an immediate answer to your question.

Tutorials

Survey Design - Print Your Survey

Email Survey - Collector 201 - Create an Email Invitation

Answers

What happens to my surveys and data when I cancel my account?

What features are included in a Professional subscription?

Do you have an example survey?

Can I print survey results or open ended comments?

Can I create surveys from a selection of survey templates?

What is a custom report? Can I customize the data in the Analyze section?

If this does not fully answer your question: [Submit]

Apparently, the support system "scanned" my query and compared it with its database of questions they have already answered and published on their support site. They wanted to make sure that I had found an answer to my question if one already existed. I had already used their search function to look for "export" but all I could find were references to exporting data rather than the surveys themselves. So, I submitted the form and returned to working on related projects while the humans took over trying to interpret my request. Mychal, a support provider, responded several minutes later:

Mychal Hoffman (Support)

2/15/2008 11:02:19 AM

Hello,
You can transfer surveys designs to another account.
Here is how:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/HelpCenter/Answer.aspx?HelpID=11&q=transfer

You will want to select Copy (not Move to do this). If you copy the survey into another account, this will not copy the data or responses. ...

His response continues with more details on characteristics of the copying process. So, it turns out that they had answered my question already. But, they use the term "Transfer" to refer to reusing surveys and reserve the term "Export" for references to data. That distinction eluded the help systems' inference engine. I anticipate that the next generation will get it right.

School data tutorials

The CASTLE project at Iowa State* promotes the development of data analysis skills in every school building.

Although not every educator needs to have the skills addressed by these tutorials, every school organization needs to have a critical mass of personnel who can work with raw data and provide assistance and/or data analyses to other staff. If educators are to truly realize the power of data-driven decision-making, these "data managers" should be in every school building, not just the district central office. This is true even in school districts that already have a comprehensive data management and analysis (i.e., data warehouse) or instructional management and assessment system, since educators in those districts often find that they still have a need to work with raw data outside of those software systems.

They provide School Data Tutorials, a series of tutorials in using intermediate to advanced spreadsheet analysis in the context of school issues. Anyone who has the combination of classroom experience and these analytical skills should have an edge. Developments in new technologies may change the way we collect and manage data but the need for analysis will grow.

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*Formerly at Minnesota during the development of the data tools?

Collaboration and databases for learning

Doug Lynch, Chair of our department, sent the following email message to me recently calling my attention to an article that he found:

Steve: I found this article that may be of interest as we craft grant plans...but has implications for your mission as well.
http://0-proquest.umi.com.lilac.une.edu:80/pqdweb?did=1017922091&
sid=5&Fmt=4&clientId=8421&RQT=309&VName=PQD
Douglas J. Lynch, Ph. D.

The citation for the article he recommended is:

Sara Dexter, Aaron H Doering, Eric S Riedel. (2006). Content Area Specific Technology Integration: A Model For Educating Teachers. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 14(2), 325-345. Retrieved December 19, 2007, from Education Module database. (Document ID: 1017922091 [link requires UNE Network access]).

The article describes an ambitious college-wide strategy for dual integration:

This dual integration (technology integrated in the content area methods course, and the content area integrated into the technology course) is the essence of the model of teacher technology preparation we present here. The fellows were essential as they were the bridge between these two domains of knowledge as well as between the instructors of the technology and methods courses. All participants' willingness to learn and to organize their efforts around the teaching and learning of that content area was also essential.

This supports the initiatives that Heather and (and Dan to a smaller degree) have started for integrating across Social Studies Methods and Technology for Teaching and Learning.

I followed another lead in the paper from a section where the authors described their process of establishing the ways of working together

The technology course instructor, and usually the project director, met with the methods course instructors in each content area to learn about the standards, important ideas and processes in that content area, and the learning outcomes for the methods courses. During these meetings we introduced the concept of mindtools (Jonassen, 1996) and started to identify, which technologies might be best for their students to learn. The mindtools concept, and later the notion of using technology to add value to instruction and assessment (i.e., technology making possible something otherwise impossible to do or difficult to achieve) proved to be generative concepts for the faculty members' learning. These ideas helped the faculty members focus on topics in their content area where technology could really help teaching and learning. That we argued from the outset that technology wasn't a panacea, but rather a tool with capabilities that could be very helpful in carefully selected instances, also lent credibility to the project staff and technology course instructor's efforts.

Doug had marked the Jonassen citation (1996) with the comment "get." The citation refers to the book Computers in the classroom: Mindtools for critical thinking. While we wait to get the book, I searched for related work from Jonassen. He surprised me with the best justification I have found so far for my claim that databases are valuable resources for teaching and learning. For several weeks, I have been trying to help Doug understand why I think that Zoho Creator is such an important development.

Databases may also be used as tools for interpreting, analyzing, and organizing subject content by learners. Student-constructed databases using a Concept Development Strategy and an Interpretation of Data Strategy requires learners to select information to collect and to organize it into meaningful categories (Rooze, 1988-89). Student-constructed databases have been used to support history instruction (Knight & Timmons, 1986) and lessons on seashells (Goldberg, 1992), and as an inquiry tool to aid higher-level thinking in a fourth-grade American Indian studies course (Pon, 1984). Constructing database queries is a form of hypothesis testing (Katzeff, 1987). The database shown in Fig. 1 was developed by learners studying cells and their functions in a biology course. Although the intellectual benefits of building knowledge databases is obvious, more formal research on the efficacy of these activities is needed.

Designing a database requires the learner to identify a content domain, sense an information need, and develop a data structure for accommodating the information to be included. Building databases involves analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating information (Watson & Strudler, 1988-89). Database construction is an analytic process which engages important critical thinking skills such as evaluating, organizing, and connecting information; a few creative skills such as analogical reasoning and planning; and several complex thinking skills such designing a product, problem solving and decision making (Jonassen, 1996).
http://www.ed.psu.edu/insys/400/ssdb.htm

Let's get designing and building!

Organization for workshop classes

In her book, In the Middle, Nancie Atwell relates a story about Donald Graves visiting her classroom and identifying the basis of her success: organization. " 'Look,' he explained seriously. 'You can't teach writing this way if you're not organized. ... You two always ran a tight ship and you still do, but it's a different kind of ship.' "

When I first read this story, I worried because I don't think of organization as being one of my primary strengths. But as I read further, I started to take heart. Several of the tools that Atwell recommends for organizing workshop classes are paper-based forms. She writes at length about the evolution of her system. Finally she asks "again and again, as a teacher, what do I really need to know?" (p. 106)

For Technology in the classroom, we can ask "what do we really need to know, and how much of that can we capture in distributed data acquisition tools?"

Zoho Creator goes mobile

Zoho recently announced that they now provide access to Creator via cell phone browsers.

We are glad to announce the availability of Zoho Creator Mobile version. You can access it @ http://creator.zoho.com/mobile or http://creator.zoho.com/m from your mobile. In fact, if you visit http://creator.zoho.com from your mobile phone, you’ll be directed to this page.

This opens a whole new world of possibilities for both collecting and sharing data in a variety of contexts. It may be the opportunity that breaks through my resistance to adding another phone to our account.

Working in Public: Linking Knowledge to Action

In discussions about using Ning.com networking tools for school district business, Kate Greeley and I discussed several advantages and challenges. In looking for a reference link for a paper I am drafting, I discovered another advantage.

Bob Sutton and Jeffry Pfeffer identified a widespread problem in institutions and businesses that they called The Knowing-Doing Gap: managers know what needs to be done but very frequently do not implement the practices. Recently, Sutton reflected on an innovation described by Diego Rodriguez at Metacool To Do Lists: A Way to Link Knowledge to Action:

"Diego at Metacool has an instructive and inspiring new post. He has a picture and a great discussion of a 'To Do' list that was publicly displayed by the staff at the Denver Art Museum, which showed the things that they still needed to get done on a new addition. I love this because it not only advertises to donors what things they need money for, it also creates public pressure on the staff to get things done. As research on commitment shows, public proclamations are far harder to reverse than those that are made in private."

Sutton got one part of the innovation but Rodriguez took it another and more powerful step:

Even better would be to open up that to-do list to anyone. So when I find the typos on the FAA website, rather than writing a snarky post on my blog, I help 'em out by entering an item on their to-do list wiki. Now I'm part of the solution, and probably part of the brand. It's about leveraging the power of the many to create the best pile of real evidence possible about what works and what doesn't. At some point along the line this starts to feel a lot like open source. Might Mozilla really be one be one big public to-do list in disguise?

Back to the Denver Museum of Art. I wish they had a publicly addressable to-do list. I would add an entry right now. Something like "fix those crazy interior angled walls that everyone kept tripping over."

Hmmmm. Shall I add testing this idea to my public to-do-list?

Access to Zoho Scripts?

What will Blogger do with my Zoho Creator Scripts?

Unlike other blog engines, Blogger does not strip out the javascripts, it leaves them intact in the code. I even see in the status line that the brower has sent a request for data to Zoho Creator. But I don't see the results of requests to render the data into a table. That means that Blogger parses the javascript, but selects what it will render. If it were working, you would see a table of values in the open space below. I need to check out Google Pages because they serve Tiddlywiki pages which contain scripts. What are the differences?

Learning to use JSON at Zoho Creator

This page documents my efforts to learn how to tap into the Zoho Creator Database that I can create with little programming experience. The potential users include anyone who wants to take advantage of the power of distributed data entry and use. Exhibit, a part of the Simile Project at MIT, allows one to mashup data sources for interesting renderings of data. They have demonstrated use of a Google Spreadsheet as a data source but require that it have all kinds of special treatment. I wanted to learn whether Zoho Creator would offer a better interaction. The data in the table below are a subset drawn from one of my public Creator databases. It demonstrates that I can access and use JSON data from Zoho.

Update:

Mon. 10:00AM 11-Mar. 2007: By looking at tutorials at w3schools.com, I found the javascript I needed to run through the list of records: For...In Statement. I copied the code and inserted it into my page, made sure that it worked there and then started to modify it to see whether I could make it work in my case. Still need to use the full names that come from Creator to access the values but it works. Able with a little trial and error to add the table formatting to the output to get the results in a standard form.

Sun. 8:30PM 10-Mar. 2007: GOT IT! This javascript page requests the data from the JSON output at zohoCreator and pulls back the selected values. Confirmed that it was working by going to the Creator page and modifying the entries there and making sure that they are reflected in the output here. Noted that Zoho Creator is relatively slow in providing the output. This page takes only 8 ms to load but Zoho took 28 seconds to give back the answers. Will have to inquire about their response times. After editing again, I tested again and found that Creator responded in less than 18 seconds (to return 252 b). And on the third try, it returned the data in 2.99s.