The Web 2.0 Winnowing

So I was researching a potential program I want to do on Science Projects and Graphing and came across an excellent site that makes it fairly easy for anyone to make a graph (it's much easier than Excel, but still requires a minimal understanding of how graphs work).

I was multitasking to see whether the last few of the 23 Things had been published while also looking for data to test the graphing software with. I decided it might be fun to graph participation in the 23 Things activities over the course of the nine weeks, using the numbers from the now updated 23 Things Progress Reports.

Below is the graph. We don't have any data (at least that a cursory exam could find) for Weeks 1 and 2 and Week 5 is absent because it was a Play week, so no data was collected. I did expect a downtrend just based on anecdotal evidence here at the branch, but I didn't expect the great purge. We've lost almost 3/4 of the participants! The steady downtrend makes me wonder whether it was something about the program itself, the way it was administered, or the difficulty of trying to squeeze this in to our daily schedules that lead to the decline. The big drop that occured presumably during week 5 also begs the question, What the heck happened there? Again from anecdotal evidence I am hearing that it was a combination of those factors along with simple information overload. People with next to no computer knowledge were overwhelmed by the number of things they felt expected to learn in such a short period of time.