Now that I've collected all the data I can before I begin putting together my presentation and writing my paper, I've had several off the record chats with colleagues who are interested in my t.i.p. I've found these lunch time discussions really helpful because as I'm explaining what I did and what I was hoping or expecting to find, I start thinking about all the things that I could have done different or will do differently for the presentations.
For example, so far it looks like wikis aren't a great motivator since over 57% don't want to use wikis in the future.
I'm also trying to figure out the best way to share some of my data. My qualitative questions offered a range of possible answers for each question from "strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree." I'm not sure what I was hoping to learn from this range of possible answers but when displayed in a graph, it becomes a confusing mess of pre and post "agreeable-type" answers. So instead, in my infinite wisdom, I've decided to condense my data into pre and post "agree" - full stop. Since I'm working in percents it seems to me this is the easiest way for the audience to make sense of my data and for the life of me, I can't think of any drawbacks. If you can think of any, I'm all ears. I've already typed it all up into excel from survey monkey so if there is a valid argument for presenting it all, it's no skin off my nose.
I also should have done more research into motivation before planning and implementing my project. Thankfully, after reading several articles and research from the last 30 years, it seems I was on the right track (according to the research) but I don't think my data supports this theory.
Something, somewhere went terribly wrong.
Anyway, live and learn. I don't think I learned a lot about how to best use wikis in a classroom, if at all but I have learned some of what works and what does not when doing research. I suppose that's the point. I hope.
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