We have a winner.

I have a winner for the treasure-hunt map contest - congratulations Carly, who's going to be exploring some of London's city farms, as well as solving a murder mystery over the coming weeks. And thank you for jumping in!

***

Thinking in terms of the experiment element of that post?

The outcome I wanted was to get the idea of setting yourself a personal goal out there amongst our students, as I personally think it can be a useful way of getting deeper into London, and thinking about what they want to get out of their time here.

The contest post got a big surge in page-views, and I know from conversations that at least some of those readers were my students: so far, so good.

On the other hand, I got very few comments or emails. Maybe the prize wasn't interesting enough, or the idea of setting a self-challenge for the semester came up too soon, or too late, or isn't the sort of thing many people are comfortable discussing in public, or with someone who isn't part of their social circle. Maybe it just wasn't relevant to people, because they don't approach situations the same way I do!

Plus, it takes a certain amount of bravery to be the first person to post a comment in public, and I don't know how intuitive commenting on blogger is for folks who don't regularly read blogs, and I don't know how many of my students do. (I was genuinely startled to discover that less than 10% of last semester's students used RSS or subscribed to blogs, even though about 40% of them were thinking about writing one. It's such a key tool in my information handling toolkit, it's hard to imagine not using them!)

So - not an abject failure, but not a roaring success either: worth the punt, anyway.