Here is my initial thinking about sampling. My thinking is that we should target 3 groups with the questionnaire:

1. Moodlers who didn't blog

2. Bloggers who didn't Moodle

3. Those who both blogged and moodled.

Would this effectively cover all participants or would there be people who were not included? I suppose lurkers would not be included, i.e. those who only read and listened, but did not post.

In one of your emails Matthias you said that there were

44 active blogs

82 partially active blogs (stopped after some weeks)

27 blogs that didn't really get started (what were your criteria for this judgement)

• No formal criteria, just my impression, but in most case, a very strong impression, e. g. they just created the blog and posted that they enrolled in and look forward to CCK08.
• I will also look at the list from Stephen's feeds.  I think it would be good to cover both active and partially active blogs.  This will enable us to know why they have become inactive. John

37 who were active only with other stuff (did these people have blogs but not post to them? - not sure what you mean by this)

• They posted lots of stuff in their blogs on Stephen's list but nothing CCK08-related. E. g., Martin Ebner redirected hist 50+ twitter statuses per day to his blog on this list. Sorry for confusion.
• Good to know their reasons for posting - a good understanding of blog as a learning tool for these people (may be a lurker or a forum poster).   Do we also include microblogs?  Are twitters, blogs on Moodle (I have one - but it is private), and some private blogs (participants of CCK08) to be included? John
• (020309) - Glad you both commented here. My thinking is that the blogging we are considering is not microblogging. I see Twitter as something completely different to the process required to blog and I would not like to confuse or muddle up to two. I do wonder why Martin Ebner redirected his 50+ twitter statuses per day to his blog. What was the point?
  • This case only illustrates the weakness of Stephen's feed list. Ebner probably signed up, filled in SOME feed address (the form was confusing), and forgot about it. (If I remember correctly, he didn't even follow the course and linked to Wendy's final presentation only after another non-participant did it.) Did you notice that Jenny ist still not on this list? 
• t would be interesting to find out and might add something to the write up of the discussion in the paper - but I think our questionnaire questions be directed at bloggers not microbloggers. What do you think? Will we have to make this explicit?
  • Yes, no microblogging in the sampling. 

You also said that 19 of these were not in the Moodle forums and that 392 moodlers did not blog.

I posted on 270209 (I'm not sure if these figures are of any relevance.

559 participants registered. Of these

499 have been inactive for more than 3 months

386 have been inactive for more than 4 months

322 have been inactive for more than 5 months

... which suggests that only about 277 really got going on Moodle and of these according a post made by Jorge about the long tail - only a very small number (about 25) were posting regularly by September 18th

In order to be sure of reaching people, I think we might have to email out the questionnaire. How difficult would it be to find people's email addresses? We also have the Ning site - where else could we post it?

• Moodle Forum week 12 or General Forum. John