EBSTC Literacy Outreach Resources on the Web: A Usage Analysis

by T.R. Girill
STC Fellow

T. R. currently manages the East Bay STC’s Technical Literacy Project.

For many years, the literacy outreach project of the East Bay STC chapter has shared, on a branch of the chapter Web site, both its general strategies and its specific classroom exercises, writing guidelines, and student activities. Late in 2008, we also gradually “instrumented” 16 of those files for usage monitoring: tiny Java-script strings hidden at the end of each HTML file now allow the Google Analytics service to track when and how those files are accessed.

As a result, 2009 became the first year for which we have 12 full months of usage data and comparisons for these 16 literacy-support pages. This article summarizes our most interesting 2009 usage trends.

Content Choices

We tracked only the core parts of the literacy outreach material: the comparative introductions to (“jump pages” for) all our instruction-design and description-design exercises, the general project overview (“home page”) and the more analytical handbook overview for teachers, the plain (printable) and annotated student guidelines (checklists) for both instructions and descriptions, plus a handful of more specific pages that happened to be updated when the monitoring strings were being installed.

Table 1, where the annual page views range from just over 4000 to fewer than 400, shows the six most active core literacy pages for 2009.

Table 1

Perhaps because of their central navigational role, the explanatory charts (with active links) that compare the features of all our skill-building exercises earned the most views. The general and teacher-oriented overviews were also heavily used. The other top spots went to a pair of guidelines on which most of our exercises build (the other guideline versions filled out the top-10 list). Interestingly, a few of the (other) tracked pages with very specific content earned only single-digit accesses all year. So we had a thousandfold spread in usage rates across the 16 monitored items.

Usage Overview

During 2009, the monitored literacy-outreach pages received just under 11,800 total page views, for an average total access rate of just under 1000/month. Google has a way of estimating “unique visitors” (presumably by checking for unique IP addresses) and reports that 8200 unique visitors generated this year’s worth of traffic.

Chronological Patterns

Plotting page views as a function of time reveals two interesting trends (see Figure 1, which covers June 1 to December 30).

Figure 1

The most obvious trend is the graph’s saw-tooth pattern, caused by repeated mid-week spikes and weekend troughs in viewing activity throughout the year. This strongly suggests that most usage occurs at schools; it certainly reflects the weekly school-life cycle.

More subtle is the gentle sinusoidal rise and fall of usage with the school seasons. Overall page views decline during the summer and mid-winter school vacations. Viewing rises in the middle of the spring and fall semesters. The sharp weekly peaks and valleys occur within the envelope of this broad seasonal cycle. (The lone tall spike in mid-July betrays the week when 30 teachers learned about this Web site while attending a professional development “academy” at the Edward Teller Education Center in Livermore.)

A third, distinct chronological pattern is the drift in what Google calls “traffic sources” toward search engines as 2009 unfolded. During the first half of 2009, about 70% of literacy-outreach access started with a search. This rose to over 80% during the second half of 2009, while referrals (links) from other sites dropped about 5% (as did direct accesses to site URLs). At first I thought that this might reflect more thorough indexing of our site by search-engine spiders.

A closer look showed this to be wrong: Bing (MSN) gained barely 3% and Yahoo gained less than 1% of accesses to the literacy pages during 2009, while Google-based hits rose from 57% to 68%. Dominant Google simply became more dominant, apparently replacing even some personal bookmarks (direct accesses) as the easy way to “remember” our literacy-outreach material.

Search Terms

Since search is a major intellectual gateway to our tracked pages, one might wonder if any unusual or revealing search terms (“keywords”) turned up over the year. Actually, from the most frequent search string (“technical writing exercises,” 195 times) to those terms sought rarely, all successful keywords were just simple combinations of a handful of obviously relevant words: writing, description(s), instruction(s), technical, high school.

Referring Sites

Several schools, school districts, colleges, and vocational centers across the U.S. have linked to some EBSTC literacy resources for years. But which ones actually generate visits? Google Analytics reveals that among the most active referring Web sites are:

• Teaching Recipes (teachingrecipes.com), an annotated directory of shared lesson plans and classroom activities (mostly by and for working high-school teachers).
  
  
• Technical Communication Eserver (tc.eserver.org), a user-evaluated directory of shared professional development material, including but not limited to educational applications.
  
  
• Tracy High School (tracy.k12.ca.us) in Tracy, CA, and a related student-support site (jkirkbrown.com) maintained by the head of the Tracy science department (J. Kirk Brown).
  
  
• Commercial publishers of technical writing books that could be adapted for high-school use, such as Bedford and Wadsworth.
  

Geographic Exposure

While the geographic focus of the EBSTC literacy project is the schools in the physical area from which chapter members come, resources posted on the Internet are available to the whole world. Usage monitoring confirms that during 2009, computer users from countries on every continent (except, of course, Antarctica) accessed our core pages, often hundreds of times.

Since all the exercises and guidelines are in English, it is not surprising to find English-language countries heading the access list (the U.S. is followed closely by Canada, UK, Australia, Ireland, and India in access frequency). Also among the top 30 viewing areas are those speaking Chinese (Hong Kong, China, Taiwan) and Spanish (Philippines, Spain, Mexico, Argentina). Other heavy viewers of the site include familiar locations in western (Turkey, United Arab Emirates) or southern Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand), as well as Europe (Germany, Poland).

Conclusion

In the 1980s, I worked at a computer center that pioneered detailed usage monitoring to better understand the impact of its documentation service. Such tracking is now routine, and it shows the remarkable breadth and depth of our literacy project’s influence.

To learn more about the literacy outreach project, to suggest a teacher who might want to host future technical-writing workshops for their classes, or to participate yourself, please contact T.R. Girill (trgirill@acm.org).