Blog Audit
— Because Charts Make Life Better —
I began this assignment by rereading my posts, and pretty quickly in, I noticed a periodicity in the effort put into each post. That got me thinking — what outside effects could have caused such regular fluctuations in the amount of time and care put into the assignments?
I started taking notes:
- What was the subject?
- Did I sound emotional in the writing?
- How long were the posts?
- How connected to the chapter was the material?
Then I started making a chart.
I rated my posts on effort, enjoyment, connectivity to the chapter material, and on the time commitment involved.
Out of curiosity, I also added the number of major assignments due in other classes for each time frame.
This spreadsheet is shown in the (tiny) chart below.
The first unsurprising aspect I noticed was the relationship between the effort rate and the number of major assignments due that week. From the image below, there’s a general trend expressing lowered effort when more assignments are due.
This makes sense. I often finished the week’s blog post at the end of the week, and my other courses often had assignments due on Thursdays and Fridays. By the weekend, I was usually exhausted and wanting to rest. This trend was expected.
The next aspect noticeable is the relationship between time commitment and other major assignments being due. Again, unsurprisingly, with more major assignments due in other courses, I spent less time on that week’s blog post.
My time commitment only seriously dipped (on average) when >2 other major assignments were due that week. This is, for me, a little heartening; the number of other assignments refers to truly major homeworks. They were often labs or enormous assignments that took between 5 and 24 total hours to complete, so to maintain a general sense of commitment to this class is heartening.
It might also be useful to mention — there were many weeks where zero major assignments were due in other classes. This is why the first column is low; it’s an average of a lot of time commitment rates over a variety of time frames. A way to improve this analysis between time commitment and other commitments would be to also look at the relationship between time commitment and total assignments due in a block of three weeks around each assignment. This combined with the trend noticed in the graph below would show a more realistic trend across the semester.
Another aspect that was interesting and unexpected was the relationship between chapter connectivity and time commitment. I was expecting that lower time commitments would yield lower chapter connectivity rates, but at least on average, this was not the case.
It’s of course entirely likely this effect results from the small sample size used in this shallow analysis, but it’s nice to see nonetheless.
And finally, I seem to have, on average, enjoyed the assignments fairly well. The chart below has a pretty steep dip when 3 assignments were due in a week, but looking at the spreadsheet, this was the week where I had two major and heavy exams. I wasn’t enjoying much that week — not even a relaxing blogging assignment.
It’s important to note I’ve done very bad statistics here. Each category or rate has, at most, an N of 5. This woefully tiny sample size means producing error bars or estimating distribution variance is not useful even when a category has relatively many values in it.
More importantly, I’m the one who made these rates — I’m a terrible source for rating such things as chapter connectivity and overall effort, as I’m the one who wrote the examined material.
All these deficiencies aside, it’s been fun to look at the blogs from this perspective!
This little analysis has been fun and at least a little revealing.
I had a fairly steady average enjoyment, and I tried to connect the blog material to the chapter whenever possible — even when the week was demanding. My rating system indicates it didn’t take more or less effort to focus on connecting the blog to the chapter, which I wasn’t expecting. I felt like it took a good deal more effort to try to keep the blog on-topic with the book’s reading for the week.
Rereading the blogs was rewarding. I’ve learned a lot this semester, and I think the reason is the course’s medium (ha, pun). The blogs forced me to constantly connect the information we read and watched to something emotional — something that could be written about. And it’s this focus on application and connection that’s made this class so rewarding.
Thanks to everyone who commented and responded to comments — it’s been fun to explore this subject with you!
Happy summer, and best of luck with all your future endeavors,
-Melanie Cornelius (nee Dooley)
