The tale of the tape, 1.6 million page views over the last nine moths, with over 600,000 visitors and 400,000 unique visits.
I still don’t know how to parse this data effectively, but I agree with David Wiley that making sense of these analytics for open education projects will be crucial moving forward. That said, I wonder how we use narrative to illustrate trends rather than simply stats, I don’t know, still trying to make sense of this.
I have to say: even Bunny Colvin would be impressed by these numbers. UMW rulez!
Luke,
But am I undercutting the whole beauty of Bunny Colvin by even focusing on them? IS UMW Blogs Hamsterdam? I need your guidance Jedi!
Not at all. You’re using stats to reveal, not to conceal, and you’re doing so amidst the search for a narrative and an effort to ground the quantitative in the qualitative. You’re also doing so utterly unconcerned with rules and appearances and guided by a sense of what’s right that goes beyond the next funding cycle.
What your stats show is steady, reliable dependence, the accepting embrace by UMW of UMW Blogs as a central cog in the teaching and learning apparatus of the college. But what that means can only become clear with more humanistic reporting.
Jim, those numbers are insane. Wow. How many orders of magnitude larger than the physical on-campus visitors during those same 9 months?
That Luke will be the premise of my next blog post, thanks for laying it all out so eloquently. Your input here is always so valuable to me, thank you!
@D’Arcy,
That’s a good question, and I have no idea off-hand, but I would guess (given we are a school of roughly 4,000 students, it is 100s of thousands fewer. More than that, I like the idea of visits virtually as a visit to our campus in some way. It’s a neat parallelthan might draw out some fascinating relationships.
Well, and how many of those visitors to the campus got a glimpse of the life of the mind of UMW as they walked around?
[Also, what’s with the dips? Are those weekends?]
jeff,
Exactly, that is really the difference. And the coincidental experiences of that life of the mind is something I would really love to document.
Claudia has told me stories about poets whose books were reviewed by her students at http://ethershop.umwblogs.org writing her to thank her for having her students publish these reviews. Many of which are the only one’s of their kind. That’s important!
I just wanted to say that I find something really magical about looking at the graph (and, Jeff, those dips are the weekends. The low points are generally Saturday, with Tuesdays and Wednesdays generally at the peak.)
The visual (regardless of the actual numbers behind it, which are also impressive) represents a kind of biorhythm of the institution. There are natural lulls around the breaks (notice the dip in early February over spring break) and a lovely augmentation this semester as traffic and use grew a bit more.
There is something musical and, to repeat myself, magical about observing the life of a University through an image like this. It almost feels like it should be set to music, if that makes any sense.
I see these numbers and also wonder what it means.
To some extent, it seems like knowing what is happening at the institution by looking at how many cars are in the parking lots. We know they are coming, but what else?
I love the full parking lots, but what can we do next to understand what is happening inside the heads of all those drivers?
Where would we start?