For a while, I made the case for a qualitative research project as my dissertation. Several professors told me I was crazy. “Do you know how many PAGES a qualitative project would be?” they asked. 

When I checked into how many pages a qualitative dissertation would be, I quickly settled on doing a quantitative one instead. I’ll be focusing on the effect of various quizzing methods on math scores of college freshman taking basic college math. It won’t be my magnus opus by any stretch, but it will be a dissertation.

Now let’s hope I don’t forget all of my statistical training so far before I get that project done!

The feedback on Twitter fell into the category of “hey, there are some cool new tools on this list.” 

I think someone could probably make a career (in the short term) of analyzing Twitter tools and publishing the results.

There’s actually quite a bit missing from the survey. For this go around I wanted to focus on tools. Maybe computing platform might make for a good follow up.

For what it’s worth, I can tell you that most people accessing my blog do so with Firefox (40%), Chrome (20%), IE (18%), Safari (16%) and are doing so via cable connection (80%) or DSL (15%). 

Those stats are not consistent with the general consumer trend. I understand from my Windows-loving friends that IE “still controls 66% of the browser market.” That means a disproportionate number of visitors are using advanced browsers and Internet connections.

That also means there’s no possible way to extend the survey results to a broader population. 

I think the take-away is: we’re still early in the product life cycle of social media and the doors of opportunity are wide open in the absence of universally agreed about standards. 

That means we can just keep having fun!

PS. I do intend to do more surveys. Do keep in mind that while I value the quants out there and I know someone has to do the number crunching, to the degree I am a researcher at all, I am a qualitative researcher. Biography, phenomenology, grounded theory, ethnography, and case study are my favorites. (most favorite is ethnography. I think corporations would do much better in hiring ethnograhic researchers before hiring social media directors.)

Great list. I justed started using Hoot Suite and connected my facebook feed and caught this article in the feed. Awesome.