This semester I feel like Jekyll & Hyde:

"This is amazing. I'm really impressed with the extra work and creativity here!"

"Unfortunately, you didn't actually do most of the assignment..."

"Wow, that's an insight I've never had. Great work."

"At some point, didn't you think that having no data and no results might lead to a less-than-optimal project?"

etc.

#professor #teaching #quotidian

I manage a #sonasystems service and I am also the "brand administrator" for #qualtrics in my department. There's an issue with confidentiality; I wonder if some #research or #survey person knows a way around it:

SONA's "Qualtrics integration" instructions describe how to set things up so research participants can click the entry for a study on the SONA page and be taken to the corresponding Qualtrics survey, then--when finished with the survey--be redirected back to SONA with an anonymous record of their participation in Qualtrics.

The problem is that it's not anonymous. Not even a little. Not if you're both the SONA person and the Qualtrics person, which is probably the case in many institutions.

SONA does indeed replace the research participant's name in the URL info string with an "anonymous" ID number. That number is sent back to SONA for purposes of giving the research participant credit in SONA.

This process is only anonymous if you don't have access to both SONA and the Qualtrics survey: SONA gives a random (?) 5-digit ID number to each participant and send that to Qualtrics, which uses it to populate an embedded data field called id. Then at the end of the survey Qualtrics sends the same ID number back to SONA.

I'm looking at SONA and Qualtrics. Qualtrics gives me the "anonymous" ID number of every participant sent from SONA. SONA has the ID number paired with names in a fairly easy-to-access dashboard view for users with the roles "PI", "administrator," or (I think) "researcher".

So every student researcher doing "anonymous" survey projects can see the exact responses on surveys for each student participant, by name. It's not hard. I don't think any of my students is savvy enough to see this and pair the two values, or that they care, but this is Very Not Anonymous.

Is there some way around this where SONA-Qualtrics integration works, and is also actually anonymous, even if someone (e.g., me, the SONA administrator) has access to both the Qualtrics data and the SONA system?

[edit: Since finding this, I've been just deleting the ID data from the Qualtrics data when downloading. However, it's not an option to delete the embedded data variable until all data collection is finished ForEver, so the possibility of identifying participants who were promised anonymity remains until then; I can manage this for my students, but not for other faculty, and of course this all depends on my honesty. I do not want anything like this to depend on my honesty.]

#security #anonymity #confidentiality

At my kid's HS choir & orchestra concert. This school has a regionally-recognized #music program with at least half a dozen vocal and instrumental groups. They regularly send kids or groups to state competitions, have dozens of kids score extremely high on regional or state juried performances, and pull in hundreds (small town) of paid attendees to their frankly amazing middle school and high school musicals. 80% of students are in a musical group or course.

Sports are ho hum: rarely any regional or state competitiveness, and when that happens it is more often for tennis or volleyball than for the Big Sports.

And when you walk into the lobby and down the halls--including outside the auditorium where the concerts and rehearsals happen, there is literally zero recognition of music achievements. These spaces are dominated by the "athletic wall of fame" with glossy photos of coaches and big-sports athletes going back 50 years and life-size photo posters of the basketball team, baseball stars, etc., rotated out for fresh new professionally made posters every few months.

You can see some of the music program's successes if you can find your way down half a dozen twisting hallways to the #choir, #band, and #orchestra rehearsal rooms.

I think this is a slice of the USA's problems on display in thousands of schools every day. It is like pulling teeth to get a community to consistently support arts and other enrichment education for large numbers of students, but just try to pry apart a town's death grip on a tiny number of strong boys (always boys) playing ritualized violence and dominance games, often at the clear expense of academics.

#education #musicEducation