Short, Basic, but Usable: On Logic Models

It's basic but basic is good. The evaluation firm Usable Knowledge, which serves the nonprofit world, maintains its 2006 narrated slideshow called Logic Model Tutorial on its web site.

At just under 15 minutes, the tutorial makes the lesson easy to make the time for. The main web site is actually a blog, with entries as recent as Spring 2010.

© 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.

AEA Blog: Daily in 2010

To my knowledge, no calendar publisher has created a desk pad for An Eval Tip a Day for 2010. But AEA did. Online.

AEA365A Tip-a-Day by and for Evaluators is a daily blog that's made it through the halfway point for 2010. As you might guess from the title, the blog is written by a large number of people. Contributions come from literally around the world although you'll pick up on some regular posts by AEA staff, as well.

Go to the Archive to scan the titles. That's how I found Canadian social researcher Linda Lee's essay on use of visual methods in evaluation. (See the June 17 entry on the blog site.) Of course, you can also simply keep up with AEA365. Every day.

The blog is published by the American Evaluation Association (AEA).

© 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: Support for College Readiness and Completion

Proposals forms are not available yet, but EDUCAUSE, the Gates Foundation, and a couple of other partners promise to support "islands of innovation" in the goal to utilize technology for college success—in terms of college readiness and college completion. That's the goal of the Next Gen Learning Challenges. Projects that demonstrate promise will then be "scaled," and presumably help to address the core challenge: producing more college graduates to meet the next decade's workforce needs.

As anyone connected to higher ed today will testify, the current budget cuts on campuses both public and private would suggest that larger student bodies are not likely. The planners behind Next Gen see technology as the answer, with four challenges for focus: open core courseware, web 2.0 engagement, blended learning, and learning analytics.

What caught my eye in the background materials: The League for Innovation in the Community Colleges is a partner. That bodes well for the project. Belle Wheelan, president of SACS, serves on the Advisory Panel. And a representative from Creative Commons, Joi Ito, also serves. There are plenty more participants, of course. But I liked seeing these especially.

© 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.

Higher Ed Learning at Wallenberg Hall

Stanford University's research into higher ed teaching and learning is best known as Wallenberg Hall. At least, that's the physical house for Advanced Resource Classrooms. Having visited a few of those rooms, I will cheerfully admit that I purchased 6 chairs (an award-winning Steelcase design) for grad students in copying a Stanford classroom set-up.

The driving force behind the physical structure is the H-STAR Institute for interdisciplinary research and, more specifically, SCIL. That stands for Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning. For a quick overview of the projects, use the Research Programs link at the Wallenberg site.

© 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.

AFT Higher Education: What Should Count?

Light on comments (by readers), but wide in scope, the website What Should Count? covers many topics on higher ed accountability. Short reports and essays include "news" from HE institutions and, of special interest, conferences. The publisher is "AFT Higher Education," of the American Federation of Teachers.

The portion of the site I found most valuable: Accountability Clearinghouse (link is on the horizontal green menu bar beneath the masthead). There, you'll find helpful analyses of issues and some comparisons of the 6 regional accrediting agencies. For example, how do the big 6 differ on expectations for contingent faculty? The trail is worth the read.

But the trail deserves a warning. The website uses roll-over-and-pop-up menus, the kind that are sometimes hard to control. I recommend keeping fingers at the ready to right-click and Open in New Window. Then, you can stay on a topic for full exploration without having to re-enter the menu sequence.

© 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: Entering and Exiting Clouds

Cloud computing isn't news anymore. And that's the cue to institutionalize it (meaning, in this case, embed it in the HE institution).

EDUCAUSE suggests that Shaping the Higher Education Cloud means dealing with what can be left to "consumer choice," what can be outsourced, and what can reside on the campus. That leads to a couple of new terms: premises-based and cloud-based, to refer to the services that range from applications (Word, Excel, and more exotic scientific programs) to repositories (libaries, databases, textbooks, research collaboration spaces).

The EDUCAUSE white paper reports on the thinking by 50 IT leaders in early 2010. Standardization, cost, flexibility—all are addressed. A section on Actions (beginning page 17) points out that some schools have already moved student email to commercial clouds. But that maybe some functions (enrollment or registration) deserve more caution.

There's likely something to be learned from the last decade's increasing reliance on LMS services. Although an LMS isn't what most people first think of when dreaming about the potential of clouds, it is actually already a good case for comparison. Institutions made premise versus outsourced decisions about LMSs and then realized how dependent they were on the source, wherever it was. The EDUCAUSE paper doesn't make the comparison to LMSs but does raise the need for exit plans. At least now, clouds offer elasticity (expand and contract as needed). That doesn't mean that in the future a commercial cloud will tolerate the risk of less business. So, reliance on any system becomes the issue.

The IT thinking behind the EDUCAUSE paper concludes with 13 recommendations (beginning page 24) that are not so technical that they exclude the lay reader. In fact, administrators and faculty should want to help with the shaping, starting now.

On the more anecdotal level, here's a brief report on how an iPad acts around Live Office's SkyDrive. Excel and OneNote files created in the Microsoft cloud (from a laptop) were stored in the "SkyDrive," which is the user's personal 25-gigabyte file cabinet. Accessing the office.live.com site from the iPad is easy, using the same username and password as on the computer. The account shows the files. The Excel file opens as a read-only display. About the only functionality is the iPad's copy/paste option. A set of cells in Excel copies nicely to a Notes page. Alas, the OneNote files do not open at all on the iPad. That's going to take some sleuthing.

© 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.

AALHE: new organization, new web site

The new web site of the new assessment organization, AALHE, is beginning to populate. AALHE stands for Association for the Assessment of Learning in Higher Education. With the focus clearly stated, the organization promises to lean heavily on its "largely virtual design" to reach its audience. That said, much of the web site content will be open to "members and non-members alike."

Membership (not yet executable online) is $120 per individual, or $105 per user if at least 3 from an institution enroll. Membership will provide a discount (amount not yet announced) at the AALHE first annual conference in June 2011.

© 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.

Google Calendar: Keeping up with Ed Tech

Ed Tech Events, a google calendar, is organized by Clark Shah-Nelson to serve as a guide to the many conferences on educational technology. Shah-Nelson is the Coordinator of Online Education at SUNY-Delhi.

The calendar entries link to pop-up notes with factoids and (typically) URLs for more information. For some, you will need to click twice, through a More Info link and then to a web site.

The google calendar opens nicely on the iPhone and iPad, with full hyperlinking function from the conference entries.

Thanks to the short URL [http://ow.ly/YB90], the calendar can be quickly accessed by plain old typing.

© 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: Web Apps for Office

You just may need to add one more user name to your roster. It's to take a drive through Microsoft's sky. Productivity just inched up a notch.

If you have enjoyed the development over the years of Google Docs and Spreadsheets, you are likely to cheer loudly at the Microsoft offering that brings on Excel, OneNote, Word, and Powerpoint. The major cheer: you won't have to watch them develop. They're already running smoothly.

I'll spend the next few weeks reviewing the sub-parts (on Thursdays) as I explore them. My immediate purpose is to create items on a laptop and access them on iPad and iPhone.

Here are the beginning points, not all of them wonderful:

1 - Microsoft has placed lite versions of its Office applications on the web. They are literally "web apps," meaning that users do not have to have Office on their hard drives. Users can access the web apps via a browser. (I usually call this type of program RIA, rich Internet application.) Not wonderful: file-opening and saving must be through the SkyDrive and not directly with the hard drive.

2 - Users can create (from scratch) a Word doc, an Excel spreadsheet, a PowerPoint presentation, and a OneNote entry. At present, they can also share works in Excel and OneNote--meaning, share them with other users for co-writing. Not wonderful: sharing is not yet available in Word and PowerPoint.

3 - These web apps are free. Not wonderful: you must learn more names. Microsoft Live is located at office.live, and requires a Windows Live ID. I'm sorry, but I'm getting old.

To underscore the major finding: the web apps work very smoothly. Development will center on addition of features, not on improvement of usability. And that will make me open a new browser window, rather than just follow my old path from gmail to Documents.

Disclosure statement: I have not received any compensation 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.

ePortfolio via Wiki and Blog

EPAC* is a free site devoted to the study of ePortfolios. Located at pbwiki, EPAC includes discussions and announcements by and about leading practitioners of portfolio technology. The organization also posts to a blog, EPAC Community of Practice.

EPAC also maintains a listserv, twitter feed, LinkedIn group, chats, webcasts.

*EPAC = Electronic Portfolio Action and Communication, a community of practice since 2002.

© 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.

ePortfolio Conference: AAEEBL in July

Formed in 2009, AAEEBL* has acted quickly to establish itself as the leading source of eportfolio knowledge and support. The global orgnization has 90 member institutions (the great majority in the U.S.) and an annual conference. Not bad for a history of one year.

The upcoming conference in Boston (July 19-22, 2010) is actually a joint conference with the well established Campus Technology annual event (nee Syllabus) now in its 17th year. Having both in close quarters, and sharing an exhibit hall, is one of the better examples of in-person event planning in this decade.

Cost of this conference, similar to most technology gatherings, is painful. Early bird discounting offers a bit of relief, ending June 18.

*AAEEBL = The Association for Authentic, Experiential and Evidence-Based Learning: The professional association for the world ePortfolio community

© 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.