Breaking for Spring Break

I'm taking off some time in honor of spring breaks everywhere. Back in April.

© 2010 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (http://www.marybold.com/, http://www.boldproductions.com/, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Tech Note: Royalty-free Photographs

Each category of photographs on SCX (stock.xchng or Stock Exchange) begins with for-sale items but then is followed by dozens, sometimes hundreds, of royalty-free photographs. The entries are shared by photographers, most offering the "Standard restrictions" clause, which permits wide use of the images.

Typical allowances are use in digital form (web, multimedia, film, video, cell phone), use in print (promotional material, magazines, newspapers, books, brochures, flyers, cover art for CD and DVD sleeves, business cards, letterhead), and even use in decorations (including public places).

The site provides a search box and a user-friendly interface for previewing and downloading images. Among the royalty-free image sources on the web, this may be the most professional and helpful. Recently purchased by Getty Images, SXC is reporting that it will continue to operate as it has in the past: as a community of photographers and users with emphasis on royalty-free images. The current stats: 350,000 images by 30,000 photographers.

Disclosure statement: I have no relationship with SXC and I have not received any compensation or free product for mentioning this service. (This blog's only monetary reward comes through google.adsense links, which are selected by Google, not by me.)

© 2010 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (http://www.marybold.com/, http://www.boldproductions.com/, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Batson on hedgehogs: A good read on ePortfolio

In an article that mixes philosophy and pragmatics, Trent Batson likens higher ed to a hedgehog. He explores the "enlightened use of portfolio" with a nice bit of history about how ePortfolio mnarkets developed.

Dr. Batson's focus on portfolio isn't new to readers of Campus Technology. But this article offers some new views. One of them is the opinion that portfolio systems (specifically, the marketing of them) shifted away from student learning to serve institutional purposes (assessment and accountability). I don't quarrel with Dr. Batson's observation but I'm one of those who continue to see ePortfolio as one of the only strategies that really can serve students and their evaluators at the same time.

© 2010 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (http://www.marybold.com/, http://www.boldproductions.com/, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Gen X Faculty: Harvard's COACHE Report

After enjoying the humor of comments posted to the Chronicle's short story on Gen X faculty, one might question whether the original report could hold one's interest quite so well. It does!

In keeping with scholarly traditions, we have very long phrases to get to the heart of the matter. Links permit direct routes to the source material.

Report in PDF file:
New Challenges, New Priorities: The Experience of Generation X Faculty

Study sponsor:
The Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE) at Harvard University

© 2010 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (http://www.marybold.com/, http://www.boldproductions.com/, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Tech Note: SnagIt

If you have ever fought with this key, Print Screen, you will be willing to spend $49 on SnagIt. The software from techsmith is user-friendly, supports nearly automatic download of images to PowerPoint and Word, and features plenty of editing tools.

You can find shareware that approaches the issue of screen capture and some free programs actually accomplish screen capture. But everyone I've spoken to who uses SnagIt, raves about the program. I use it for handling images and I sometimes use the editing features for adding text to a graphic.

© 2010 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (http://www.marybold.com/, http://www.boldproductions.com/, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Stout's resources on authentic assessment

A web page on Authentic Assessment resides on the web site of the School of Education at University of Wisconsin Stout. Materials (on the site for download as well as links to other sources) include journal articles on assessment as well as samples of tools. For example, information about and sample rubrics are listed under the sub-section, Why Rubrics?

At the bottom of the web page, find a list of web-based survey vendors and assessment-creation tools. Some of the materials are designed for K-12.

© 2010 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (http://www.marybold.com/, http://www.boldproductions.com/, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Benchmark for DL Quality

Benchmarks for quality in distance learning include an instrument born of Community of Inquiry (COI). That's a general phrase to describe a style of inquiry but also a specific phrase on a website for communitiesofinquiry.com . The distance learning tool is the CoI Survey now being put to use at some of the larger online universities.

The survey is a 5-point Likert scale for use at the end of an online course. It seeks responses on three "essential" elements: Cognitive Presence, Social Presence, and Teaching Presence. Reliability and validity are reported in articles published on the web site. The instrument can be downloaded from the Survey web page.

© 2010 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (http://www.marybold.com/, http://www.boldproductions.com/, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.