Although Nancy White’s posting on “Feedback from Sydney LearnScope Event” was written at the end of her marathon in Australia, I’ve thought about it quite a few times since then, perhaps because of the strong feelings I had after our workshop at the Prato Conference during the same month. Capturing feedback in a wiki is an interesting example of how technology inherently changes our experience of face-to-face meetings just as it changes what’s possible. Reading what the more than 64 people said about the session with Nancy was a bit overwhelming so I made a note to myself to come back and take another look. One easy way to do it was to put the comments into a tool like http://tagcrowd.com/ (a tool that happened to hear of from Nancy). Here’s the output:

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audience bit boring clearly concepts delivery delved didn e-learners eb email engaging enjoyed entertaining esp excellent experiences feel felt flow food globally informative inspiring interaction interesting kept key learnscope loved messages mobile nancy ok parts practical presented presenter provoking really relevant resources sms speaker split stimulating techno tensions think via

The comments have an inherent linear structure that tagcrowd misses and which seems important. There’s an implicit “good to bad” Likert scale behind much of what people wrote. I thought that I could make up a kind of 5-number summary that systematically throws away some of the noise. This approach comes from John Tukey’s stem-and-leaf plots (I got interested in computing because of a long-standing interest in exploratory data analysis and statistics). So I did a rough sort of all the comments from the most positive to the most negative, and picked out the middle, the extremes, the quartiles, and so on.

(The text editor in WordPress seems to have trunkated some of the text, so I’m going to post the second part separately.)

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