Category Archives: Uncategorized
Qualtrics Offers New Features for Mobile Compatibility Checker, Multi-Click Heat Maps, Goals Lines for Graphs and More…
May 14, 2013
Qualtrics recently added a series of features that you will see listed as you log into Qualtrics, along with links to instructions and tutorials. To review a few of those features, let’s start with the Mobile Compatibility Checker. This checker allows you to optimize your survey to be viewed and taken on mobile devices. Mobile [...]
Analytics and Utilitarianism: The Future of Big Data
May 9, 2013
In an age of “big data” – Excel spreadsheets with a million lines of code, SPSS and SAS files computing data far beyond the reaches of the human mind, and super-computers reaching distantly into our cosmological past and future(s) – is there such thing as a moral compass? Do our technological capabilities progress at a [...]
Analytics and Utilitarianism: The Renegotiation of the Student-Institution Relationship
April 12, 2013
As discussed in my previous blog posting, utilitarianism is a useful ethical model to examine academic analytics. Utilitarianism is the theory that ethical decisions ought to be made in terms of what benefits the most number of people. This is especially useful for academics because decisions are often couched between the needs of individual students [...]
Highlights from the EDUCAUSE Midwest Regional Conference 2013
April 6, 2013
I attended the EDUCAUSE Midwest Regional Conference in Chicago in March of this year. My primary reason for attending was to deliver a presentation with Pat Reid on Gradient, a peer review tool developed by the Informatics team here at Purdue. I also went to learn more about the wonderful projects that our colleagues throughout [...]
Analytics and Utilitarianism: Student Success
March 15, 2013
As discussed in my previous blog posting, utilitarianism is a useful ethical model to examine academic analytics. Utilitarianism is the theory that ethical decisions ought to be made in terms of what benefits the most number of people. This is especially useful for academics because decisions are often couched between the needs of individual students [...]
Gamification in Education
March 4, 2013
Last year, Knewton published a graphic on Gamification. They used the traditional definition of gamification, which is the use of game design elements in non-game contexts, to explore the following question: How can we use it to deliver truly meaningful experiences to students? The infographic they created explores the history of gamification in education, as [...]
Analytics and Utilitarianism: The Role of Institutions
February 19, 2013
Academic analytics provide institutions, faculty members, and most importantly, students, with valuable information on learning. Predictive formulas can take data and provide real-time feedback on behaviors students can alter for positive outcomes. With such advancements in computing and learning research, ethical questions about existing and future analytics systems should be asked. In a series of [...]
Advanced Search Techniques
January 5, 2013
In December, 2012, Fast Company published an article entitled, “A Google Researcher Reveals 4 Crucial Things “Average Users” Should Know But Don’t”. One section of the article looked at “basic” search techniques that could make the “average” computer user’s life simpler should they employ these tactics. I took a very informal poll of several techies [...]
3 More Outlook Tips: Just Trying to Organize my Life a Little!
September 14, 2012
Threaded conversations, double-filing, & the OHIO rule 1. Threaded Conversations on your Desktop You know how we tend to have a lot of emails back-and-forth about the same thing and they fill up our inbox and following the thread is not always easy? My iPad and iPhone create threads for these automatically: (BTW – to [...]
Blackboard Learn Workshops for June 2012
May 18, 2012
Hands-on workshops will be offered for Blackboard Learn during the month of June 2012. Faculty and teaching support staff who would like to build a new course in Learn or move content from Blackboard Vista into Learn will find the content and resources useful. The workshops include an introductory session, as well as topics on [...]