We managed to get in at least one more member into Diigo this last week and the door is still open so please don't hesitate to reach out so we can get you in on the fun. I think we will keep adding things to our diigo list for the next couple weeks while we start hashing out discussions about evaluation criteria, and systems we may us to facilitate our evaluation process.
To help us start exploring possible evaluation criteria, it may be helpful to step out of education circles for a bit to see what forms of evaluation we like in the "rest of the world". It's time to go shopping and act like a critical consumer. For this week, explore online evaluations you find when shopping for many different items(not educational!). You may want to focus on items you just love to shop for because your passions may help you give a more critical look at how people evaluate your favorite stuff.
For example: I may enjoy building things and I might want to look at how Home Depot, Lowes, and Amazon all market and evaluate common resources or tools I might buy from any of those sites. What elements are common, what features differ, which reviews or evaluation styles do I most appreciate when critically shopping? Let us share our thoughts and findings keeping our focus outside the educational realm.
This is a short week because of my tardy post, so if you get some time to look over shopping sites and how things are evaluated or compared, please share what you found, what you value and what works best or worst in your searches.
Meanwhile, if you have not start in on Diigo yet, please feel welcomed to come on in and tag some of your favorite online things. We have dozens of items tagged already and the hope is that we can continue to grow our collection as people get more time.
Comments
After my move to a new house late last fall, I am finding many projects that require me to bite the bullet and get a table saw. I figured I would go shopping in order to illustrate this week's task and learn more about table saw options. It is always nice to build in two purposes into one playful experience :)
Here are evaluation features I found
Both sites had...
Differences:
The options in the margin from Home Depot included a few more options. Most significant for me was the inclusion of a star rating so I could quickly refine my search to see the best products or the worst products to compare. Although both sites had a filter that would sort, the side margin option to cull out all but the options you choose can sometimes make finding or comparing things easier
The Lowes site included videos on the products I was looking for and a full 360 degree view of the product that allowed me to look at the product from any angle I wished.
When filtering for "Top rated products" (Home Dep) or "Customer Reviews" (Lowes) there was a significant difference in results. At Lowes, the filter stuck to my primary search topic of Table Saws while the Home Dep included all sorts of accessories. This was annoying on the Home Dep site as I had to scroll through lots of high rated accessories to see which saws were actually highly rated. Key take away, just having a filter does not ensure it is a functional filter.
Under the reviews, HD included two sub categories of ratings; Quality and Value. Lowes had 5 sub categories. Both had approximately the same number of reviews for the products in spite of one asking for more input from reviewers.
In the reviews, Lowes offered a way to link a review to many social media tools. Home depot did not, but one could easily copy/paste url and put the review into a site I suppose
Wow, I knew there were lots of features in these sites for review, but this experience really shared with me just how many were available. I am quite shocked by how many features (bullets above) were included in both sites. I did not have time to do the same search this morning with Amazon, but after this review of these two sites, I know I wish to add in Amazon this afternoon if I can or maybe tomorrow.
Later this weekend I will be looking at other genera of products to check out other types of sites and how they work. Please post any of your shopping adventures and what nuggets you find as I am sure we would love to see what diversity exists out there. Perhaps someone out there has a very specific hobby and they can share an exotic search and what was found in terms of features?
Online Tools and Resources Colleagues,
There is a relevant conversation taking place here whose comments you may wish to read.
I will try to add in the OLPs to our Tools and Resources Diigo.
If you have thoughts to add to the OLP discussion, please join it.
David J. Rosen
djhrosen123@gmail.com