Ask 500 Questions is a polling Web site where members can ask questions and poll participants from around the world. While some questions may get only a few responses, many questions get hundreds. The creators base their site on the premise of James Surowiecki's book The Wisdom of Crowds that diverse, decentralized people voting independently are better at predicting future events or trends than individuals or small groups. In Belgium thousands of high school students are using Ask 500 Questions to focus on finding solutions to real-worldd global problems.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Ask 500 Questions
Ask 500 Questions is a polling Web site where members can ask questions and poll participants from around the world. While some questions may get only a few responses, many questions get hundreds. The creators base their site on the premise of James Surowiecki's book The Wisdom of Crowds that diverse, decentralized people voting independently are better at predicting future events or trends than individuals or small groups. In Belgium thousands of high school students are using Ask 500 Questions to focus on finding solutions to real-worldd global problems.
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As a leader, students need to realize the value of gaining several different perspectives on any given topic. If my class were to give a survey to the entire 7th grade, the results would more than likely be different than if the survey was given to 7th grade students across the globe. That is why I like this Web 2.0 tool. It would allow students to pose a question and potentially get several different answers from people from every part of the globe. This would allow us to better gain an understanding of different perspectives on an issue. Students could carry this one step further and analyze their results from this site versus their results from our 7th grade population, looking to find similarities and differences between "our view" and a "world view."
In mathematics, part of learning about data and statistics is to interpret it or draw conclusions from it. This site would be a great tool for students to pose a question (or even look at data for previously asked questions) and then try to draw conclusions about the results of the survey. I really like that it shows where people are from, as sometimes that can play a key role in the way a question is answered.
Polling is a very hard task to accomplish. Some users ignore, sometime more men than women participate or vice versa. Knowing demographics could be an issue, I mean there are so many outliers in polling and surveying that one usually has to take a year if they want accurate results. I can see how using “Ask 500 Questions” could be implemented in a potential teaching situation. For a statistics assignment, I would have my students go and answer 30 questions that I have picked out for them to answer and we show how outliers work.
Conducting polls are very difficult to implement and reach the target group. This Web 2.0 tool makes this easy with the ability for students to conduct polls on their own questions. The data they receive can be analyzed then they would be able to adjust their polling question to obtain more data. Science students could see how data received in a certain area could be totally opposite from data received from other areas. Students would become more globalized in their views.
I think this website would make for an interesting discussion starter. As a class we could come up with a question or two to pose and use tools from the site to see where our respondents live and other vital statistics. We could also vote on questions others pose and then discuss the results in class. It would be interesting for my band class to discover other people's favorite music styles from all over the world.
I really enjoyed this website. It was very interesting to see the others beliefs compared to your own. I could click on any question with my answer and it would give me the percentage of those persons who agreed with me. I'll have to sign up on my twitter page for this link.
Being that my background is in Physical Education, it would be interesting to have students post questions to other countries about life time wellness activities. For example, What do you do to stay in shape? 1- Exercise on a regular bases 2- Manual Labor 3- Drink & eat certain things 4- Exercise regularly and maintain a health diet. 5- nothing, Or What types of physical activities do you do for fun in a group? 1- Running Activities 2- Activities with a round ball that is kicked 3- Activities with a long instrument such as a bat, racket, or stick.
I would want to keep the questions as plain as possible because students should realize that not all countries play sports like we do here in American and the names of the sports would be different as well.
Many times in my statistics class we are constantly polling to get data. What kind of car do you drive? Should the drinking age be lowered to 18? Divorce rate? Private school versus public school? Questions like these would be invaluable if we could simply go outside of our classroom, let alone county, state, national, and international. Our students would have such a greater perspective then their own little world they live in. We also know that to take a sample statistic and infer something about the population parameter only works well when our numbers "n" are high. For me, this tool would not only give students a state, national, and global perspective, it would also give more accurate results of what is really going on in the world. I am confident that I will use this site and tools this year in my stats class. Excellent idea!
This is a good site that I will use to help me meet one of my goals/objectives that I have set for my classroom this year: To help my students become more aware of tools available to them on the internet and to help those that don't have internet access at home, which is most, to become more computer savy. This site is good in that my students can read and see reactions to other students all over the globe. How cool! I will have student create a survey/questions and take the results from the survey and create a graph. This will be used for discussion of how students respond all over the globe compared to how students in their school responded.
This would be an excellent way for students to learn how students in other parts of the world feel about current issues like global warming or pollution. Students could compare their own thoughts and views about global issues, as well as those of their classmates, with other people around the world.
I think that this has potential at college level as well as k-12. It may be that I am taking the education research class this semester but my initial thoughts when seeing this site is that it would be perfect to use if you were going to have to design a research study that involved school children. Instead of having to limit yourself to one region due to financial constraints if enough interst was given there would be the chance to have a global opinion on your research subject.
In the school environment I think that it would be helpful to use this tool in teaching the students to think globally and not so insular. I see them polling each other within the class then seeing what people think globally.
Cool, a great way to see how your opinion rates with others globally. A great discussion piece for classes. Students can ask questions about anything of interest and see how others think of it. The great thing about it is that not only can they see how those react within their class, they can see it for cities, states, countries and the world. Definitely see myself using it for character education.
Ask500 is a fun tool. I like that users will be able to gain a perspective from others around the world. One potential problem is that there is a lot of clutter on the site, but the fact that questions can be embedded on a blog or other site can help get the question asked out to a legitimate community.
Great. Lets you see things from other cultures. For our teens it could be something as simple as clothing, or choices they are allowed to make. What about what classes are offered at what grades. This would work great for research projects, get a different prospective.
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