I have posted a summary of the survey here:
http://e168f07.7fff.com/private/docs/
What do we know a lot about? HTML+Web apps, languages, and databases. In the chart, I put Advanced and Intermediate together and calculated their sum. The chart is ordered by that, and then the data is stacked for Advanced, Intermediate, and Beginner. There’s a second chart for what we don’t know about.
Next time I do this survey, I will be adding the following skill categories: JavaScript/Ajax/DHTML, Microsoft SQL Server, Python, J2EE/JavaEE, and XML/XSLT/XPATH.
Microsoft languages seem to be in decline. I was shocked that few students seem to do DB2 anymore (DB2 has its roots in the original SQL research by Codd). Few in the group have no experience with Java. Few have no knowledge of at least one database. Good.
Also, on the positive side, C is hanging in there, which is good because it promotes an understanding of machine organization.
Instant Messaging has significant penetration, with AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) still being the leading IM client, but not by much; Google’s GTalk is hard on its heals. About half of you are using Feed Aggregators for RSS, and Google Reader is in the lead there. I was surprised the so few people use Bloglines.
A significant majority of students have laptops, and Windows still reigns.
A majority of you think the course will be moderately difficulty; the others say it will be hard. On average, you believe that a reasonable number of hours for class preparation is 8 hours, and that the number of hours you will actually have to prepare is about the same. I also broke this average out by estimated difficulty, and the results were what I would expected: Those who think the course will be moderately difficulty think it will be about a 6 hour commitment outside of class, while those who guess it will be hard say 9 to 10 hours.
I will summarize the information about those who have expertise to share after I contact them.
If you have any additional observations, please post them here as comments. You will observe that the data doesn’t seem to add up in some cases: That’s because some people left blanks, and/or I was scoring this while my daughter was running around distracting me.
I may blog at some point about these results at my personal blog: A lot to think about!
October 1st, 2007 at 11:23 am
I did not see that survey on the website, how was it distributed?
October 1st, 2007 at 11:43 am
I distributed it on the first day. At that URL above (private/docs) I just added the original survey as distributed. If you missed the first day and would like to fill out the survey, get it, print it out, fill it out, and give it to me.