Tech note: Apps for tiny devices

The actual apps are so varied that it's hard to take in the whole and plan use in higher ed. But there's no doubt that Apple's app library is being accessed by faculty (K-12, too) for either assignments or tools. The key word is library--Apple's apps are broadly organized and we'll soon see a convergence: everything we learned in building learning object repositories and everything we are now learning about cross-platform applications. Emphasis is on apps that fit on tiny devices.

For a broad view, visit Apple's web page on education apps. Top of page has links by subject; below that are links by function.

© 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.

Mapping and other Presentation Methods

What's on the radar of Mapping Tools in Overview: Visual Literacy provides that in a radar screen with hyperlinks to products (mix of commercial and open source). The tools are described briefly in mouse-over tags. The radar presentation is clever, which is to be expected from Visual-Literacy.org, the folks who also remind us of the range of possibilities in presenting information. That is best represented by the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods. Don't expect to leave that webpage in a hurry.

© 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.

From the UK: Delivering Student Workshops

Besides having won awards, LearnHigher's Resources for Tutors Delivering Student Workshops is just plain fun. It's a set of video resources for anyone planning to teach nearly anyone. Geared for tutors and teachers in higher ed, there's much that can be translated for community and K-12 education.

Topics include Report Writing, Note Taking, Time Management, Academic Writing. A resource on Assessment is a little different from the larger set. Coming soon: Doing Research and more.

Each resource presents guides, tips, activities, FAQs, and a couple of experts on video. A slide for online resources suggests that materials can be updated in the future, with or without renewing the video segments. The producers are from LearnHigher Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL), which partners 16 UK universities.

© 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: CDW-G's Latest Survey

CDW-G has published its third annual report on campus technology, highlighting comparisons between faculty, student, and IT opinions as to what's needed to support higher ed learning. The long title is 21st-Century Campus Report: Campus 2.0 but the key findings are neatly presented. The one combination of results that caught my eye: e-readers are coming to campus.

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.

External Evaluators - Link to Germuth blog

Amy Germuth's blog very recently served up a think piece on the benefits of using an external evaluator (see Germuth's entry of July 16, 2010). It would be fun to ask Dr. Germuth about the downsides of hiring someone external even though she is an evaluation consultant and thus very likely in that role much of the time. Her blog is insightful—I especially like the mention of identifying unintended outcomes.

Germuth's blog, Evalthoughts, goes back several years. The archives make for good leisure reading for an evaluator.

© 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.

Indicator for Colleges: Healthy Employment in the State

Placing higher ed economics in the context of (general population) employment projections relies on confidence in the statistics. In light of the economic downturn, projections are challenging but its reasonable to connect a college's future to its state's employment figures. The Chronicle's recent story on Financial Relief for colleges based its context on numbers from Moody's Economy.com. The story's power comes from an interactive map that permits you to look at individual years to 2014. The most startling of the projections is how many states will enjoy healthy employment rates before 2012: just three (Texas, North Dakota, Alaska).

© 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: Blackboard's new Collaborate tool

Spending no time comparing the product names Adobe Connect and Blackboard Collaborate, this blog entry is about the recent announcement of Blackboard's purchase of Elluminate and Wimba, arguably the most affordable of the webconferencing platforms used in education. Note: I don't receive any compensation from the companies mentioned here.

Blackboard has purchased other companies before and will surely buy more, in future. To buy two of the same type, at the same time, draws special attention, especially from the companies' current clients. Forum discussion at LearnCentral is example. LearnCentral is the virtual community of Elluminute users. Some of those users are at institutions that subscribe to Elluminate; others come to the space as individual customers of vRooms, the free 3-person meeting spaces; still others are paying customers of vOffice, which offers meeting spaces for 10+ people at a couple of hundred bucks per year.

It's the holders of free accounts speaking up first. They wonder how long it will take Bb to shut down their access to the Elluminate tools as Collaborate takes shape, this worry emerging amid corporate assurances of "no immediate changes." Suspicion about future access increases as LearnCentral reps in the forum respond to questions with the ominous words, "hopefully" and "I am hopeful." The promise of plenty of advance notice of future changes doesn't add to anyone's sense of security.

Blackboard's expansion of products has been steady over the past decade. Adding web-conference capability was an expected next step. And the success of Elluminate and Wimba in creating synchronous online classrooms makes Bb's interest in them understandable.

Expected and understandable pretty much sums up the situation. What comes next? I'd guess that dimdim and similar platforms will inherit some of the "free" users of Elluminate. And Adobe Connect Now's free 3-user space may be adopted by a lot more people.

© 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.

ASCD Lexicon of Learning

The ASCD web site offers a Lexicon of Learning, subtitled Online Dictionary and described with "What Educators Mean When They Say..." Organized into "chapters" of starting letters, the Lexicon includes common K-12 terminology but also assessment lingo.

ASCD is the membership organization of educators that provides professional development though its 60 affiliates (worldwide) and its online courses. Membership is 170,000.

© 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.

Rubric Grading: 2010 Awards

A top award for 2010 from the Sloan-C organization has high value for assessment, especially when compared to the 2010 CHEA award. Sloan-C recognized Metropolitan State University (MN) for Automatic gradesheets: A Holy Grail for simultaneously improving faculty and student satisfaction. Using familiar tools of Word and Excel, the institution has set about systematically converting grading to "automatic" rubrics to speed grading and reduce students' wait for feedback. Besides utilizing a rubric structure, the gradesheets provide for efficient entry of a professor's most common remarks. The gradesheets are customizable, besides.

With standardization of rubrics and scoring styles, this type of support by an institution is win-win-win for student learning, professor grading, and institutional effectiveness. When the rubric is part of an LMS, ease of use can include point-and-click (using a mouse click to select a cell in a rubric) and conversion of rubric scoring to the LMS gradebook. Embedded rubrics reduce the number of clicks (and file transfers) needed to review student papers. I like BrainHoney's LMS structure for grading. Very similar: eportfolio software such as TaskStream that provides automated rubrics as well as "on the fly" mark-up and/or track-changes to student works without having to download the file.

As previously described in this blog, CHEA's 2010 award went to Capella University for its demonstration of outcomes assessment. The Capella grading system utilizes embedded and automated rubrics that not only speed up grading but also populate the gradebook automatically and report on outcomes across multiple sections of a course and even across courses for program outcomes.

© 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 for MAC

If you use a MAC, you already know Preview, Apple's default app for viewing PDF files. For handling PDFs in more sophisticated fashion, you can turn to Yep. That's right. Only MAC users would have software called Yep.

Actually, the newer version of the document manager is Yep 2. The company also produces Fresh and Deep and Leap. The software permits you to add tags, organize, and retrieve works easily. Yep handles only PDFs so full description of each app should be reviewed. These are not free apps and also not open source, but the tone and sense of community on the Ironic Software web site make you feel like you joined a club.

© 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.

Dan Roam: Visual Thinking

Visual thinking is a Tufte-like (see yesterday's post for Tufte items) approach to communicating ideas. Dan Roam of Digital Roam presents his method for and on "the back of the napkin" both in a blog and a seminar. This particular link to the blog is from March 2010, which embeds a short video clip of Roam speaking on the 32,000-year history of humans and their visual thinking.

© 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.

Revisiting Tufte

Edward Tufte's web site deserves a re-visit every now and then. I have highlighted two pages here but the entire site is always a rewarding tour. All Tufte books are worth putting on your bookshelf; the best way to collect them is at Tufte's one-day course in Presenting Data and Information. The books are bundled into the cost of the seminar. (I've been twice. Years afterward, I still carry sharp memories of certain parts of Tufte's presentation.)

Tufte gets a gallery. It's in Manhattan. See photos on this web page for ET Modern.

Tufte doesn't get a royalty for a special element in the new Excel—but the web page on sparklines makes for interesting reading.

If you have not yet used sparklines in representing data in a report, make it your 2010 new technique. (You don't have to have the new Excel to create sparklines. Lots of free generators on the web, including several links from Tufte's web 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.

Tech Note: Free LMS

Large scale deployment? I don't know. But EDU 2.0 is a fine, free LMS for educators. My favorite use: a practice LMS for graduate students learning to teach online.

Technically, EDU 2.0 is a freemium service, meaning that the base part is free and more advanced features (premium) can be added for a fee.

© 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.