I began the initial preparations for the second period of seminars
held in distributed multi-user co-operative environments (DMCE's) -
which would coincide with the collection of further ethnographic
materials for this current research- in conjunction with the
previously presented (Coppock in press) AVS 6: Hypermedia: a tool
for humanities studies?
course[8] already when I was still in Italy during the
summer holidays in 1996 - more precisely at the end of July 1996.
In this connection I sent out by post a three-page questionnaire with an accompanying letter[9] which was primarily designed to elicit in advance information about to what degree students already enrolled for the course had prior knowledge of, and/or practical experience with, the kinds of communication technologies that we would be using during the coming Fall semester.
The questionnaire comprised in all four main question areas:
1) concerning students' previous experience with the use of computers in general, with a subsidiary section which asked about which specific kinds of uses they had put computer technology to so far: word-processing, image-processing, Internet/ electronic post, programming etc..
This was followed by a more specific question:
2) asking about more specifically which types of Internet-based communication technologies they had used, if at all: e-mail, World Wide Web, Internet Relay Chat, DMCE, video-conferencing facilities etc..
In the third question
3) they were asked to make a tentative evaluation of their own skill and knowledge base with respect to the use of computers and network-based communication technologies.
Here there were three subsections:
a) skills and knowledge in relation to computer technology in general
b) skills and knowledge in relation to Internet-based communication technologies
and finally
c) skills and knowledge in relation to distributed hypermedia systems like the World Wide Web.
The final question in the questionnaire
4) was an open question asking the students to write a short summary, preferably in the form of a letter, explaining to me as the person responsible for the course why they had chosen to take that particular course that semester, and asking them to make a few comments about their personal and academic expectations and about their own understandings of the potential relevance of the course seen in relation to their previous academic and/ or professional background.
In the initial enrollment list of students who for the course in the Fall semester there were seven names, and the questionnaire was sent out to all of these. The respondents were asked to reply to the questionnaire before the beginning of the semester (which was at the end of August) either by normal post, or by e-mail.
I thought at one stage that it might have been useful to send out the questionnaire in advance directly to the students by e-mail, but this turned out not to be really practical for several reasons. One of these being that at that particular time university and departmental enrollment procedures did not include, or even as far as I know, request, current e-mail addresses to be submitted by prospective students for inclusion in the course enrollment lists which they normally fill out late in the Spring semester. In any case, many students, especially those in the earlier stages of undergraduate courses in humanities disciplines, do not actually use, or even have access to, such current e-mail accounts. Another factor is that since general university policy, at least at that particular time in history, required all student e-mail accounts to be closed and deleted from the university system after the end of each semester, and for applications for new accounts to be made again at the beginning of each new semester, this meant that even those who might actually have had an e-mail address to provide at enrollment time in the Spring semester, would not necessarily have had access to an account during the summer holidays in any case. Finally, a large number of students, especially those at undergraduate and early graduate level find it necessary to take summer jobs, or if not, are away travelling during the holidays, and thus would not be able to access e-mail accounts at the university even if they had had them.
I decided however to make the questionnaire accessible as a World Wide Web page, the URL for which was included in the accompanying letter. This seemed quite reasonable since the student computer labs at the university are open for most of the holidays, and if the students had been in town and had sufficient knowledge of computers to do so, they would have been able to access a Web page even if they did not have a current e-mail account. I thought it might also have been useful to make it possible to fill the questionnaire out from a Web browser by means of an interactive form, but I did not have the necessary software available on the Web server that I had FTP access to in Norway from Italy in order to do this, so this thought was not realised.
To begin with I felt a bit disappointed about this, as I thought it might have been easier to get respondents who I did not know in advance to answer a questionnaire of this kind by typing their answers directly into a browser form, rather than to fill the form out by hand and then post a letter, or to transfer the text from the Web-page to an e-mail message and send it in this way. In the event however, it did not seem that doing so would have made very much difference in any case, since the initial response from the whole group to the advance questionnaire was poor. While I was still in Italy at the end of the summer I received only one attempt at response from one prospective student for the course by e-mail, and this message turned out garbled and unreadable, most likely due to some kind of technical error during the attachment file procedure at the sender end. I realised at this stage that it would probably be necessary to lower my expectations quite considerably with regard to the initial general level of technological expertise among prospective students at the course.
