Presentation from "Evaluating online engagement: Practical and critical" at the 2013 Science Communication Conference organised by the British Science Association - slides by Shane McCracken and Rosie Schultz
3. Introduction
•4themes
1. What is happening on your site?
2. Who is on your site?
3. What do they think about your site?
4. Revealing the answers
4. Tips 1&2: Extracting site data
• How many approved questions did each
student ask?
• Tools:
– phpmyadmin
– Excel
• Graph showing distribution of questions asked
Whatishappeningon
yoursite?
5. Tip 3: Semantic Analysis
• What students are asking?
• Tools:
– Wordle
• Word cloud visualisation of top 100 most
frequently used keywords
Whatishappeningon
yoursite?
6. Tip 4: Measuring site usage
• How much was the Food Science Zone
visited?
• Tools:
– Google Analytics
• Statistics for overall page views and most
popular pages and questions
Whoisonyoursite?
7. Tip 5: Where are your audience
• Have we a national distribution?
• Tools:
– Google Fusion Table
• Map showing locations of participants
Whoisonyoursite?
8. Tip 6: Who are your audience?
• Are we widening participation?
• Tools:
– Excel
– Education.gov.uk & others
• Graph showing distribution of participants
across common widening participation
measures
Whoisonyoursite?
9. Tip 7: Who are your audience
• How often do teachers return for subsequent
events?
• Tools:
– Mailchimp
– Excel
• Visualisation of teachers’ participation in
events
Whoisonyoursite?
10. Tip 8: What do they think?
• Are we changing attitudes?
• Tools:
– SurveyGizmo
– Mailchimp
• Measuring change in attitude to public
engagement
Whatdotheythink?
11. Tip 9: Tell them about it?
• Disseminate our findings?
• Tools:
– Wordpress
• Series of articles on about.imascientist.org.uk
Revealingtheanswers
12. Tip 10: Tell them about it?
• Disseminate our findings?
• Tools:
– Twitter
– Gephi
• Find key people in your networks
Revealingtheanswers
Welcome to our Do It session! Over the next 60 minutes we’re going to show you 10 tools or techniques that we use to evaluate I’m a Scientist, Get me out of here. Would anyone like a one minute introduction to the event?Since we’d like to give you the chance to question each of the tools and techniques we’re going to try and demo each of them in under 2 minutes. That means we’ll be going quickly, too quickly for you to make notes and fully work out what we’re talking about. We’re not trying to instruct but hopefully to give you ideas that might help you evaluate the projects both on and offline that you run. Everything including the Powerpoint slides are available at about.imascientist.org.uk/scc13
The ten tools and techniques fall into 4 themes which follow this progression. We use them to provide the data that we use to create the Zone Reports we produce after each event. You’ve a copy on a seat near you.