Angel Tip: Making Mandatory Yet Anonymous Surveys

First of all, Angel help at MSU is exemplary, especially when one uses the phone (5-2345). I almost always get a person and my question is usually answered pretty quickly.  Don’t struggle; just call.

So, I called to find out how to make an anonymous survey mandatory after struggling to get feedback from busy MBA students last year.  The way to do it is to set a survey to “anonymous” under the submission tab and then set a milestone for item completion under the assignment tab. Later, you can use the report function in Angel to generate a whodunit report for the item. You thus find out if they did it but you don’t have an ability to match person to specific answers.

A Zen Approach to Anxiety

Zen of Throwing it Away

Neat article with a useful principle. If you have some hangup causing you trouble, one way to deal with it is simply to abandon it. I think the principle works well with speech anxiety and perhaps other forms of anxiety as well.

Google Maps

Google Maps

I don’t know when this happened, but now I noticed Google Maps allows the same thing as many of the third party sites I have been reviewing in terms of making one’s own custom maps. Google maps allows annotations, shapes, lines, embedded photos and videos, and just about everything you need. Plus the scroll zoom and dragging functions are there (two of the best things about gmaps). This will make it easy to create an assignment or project out of this newish mapping technology.

Update: I don’t think Gmaps allows you to have teams edit a map. You can just save your own maps and let others see them. Communty Walk is back on top then.

Clipboard Recorder – Windows Clipboard Extender

Clipboard Recorder – Windows Clipboard Extender | LW-WORKS

I have been using the basic free version for a few months now. Sadly, many people are thrilled to learn about basic things like ctrl-x, ctrl-c, and ctrl-v in the existing Windows or Mac clipboard, but a clipboard recorder like this one (see link above) is a whole new level of utility. I have been using it in writing, tabulating contact info, etc.

Debaters might really find a clipboard recorder useful in brief construction (just be careful not to forget you are copying direct quotations).  In an electronic source, just copy all the necessary citation elements one at a time (no need to paste anywhere yet), then copy selected quotations.  Finally, inside a word processor, paste the citations elements in, paste the quotations in whatever order you thing makes the most sense and then insert your arguments and paraphrases; this creates a nice grouping of the “cards” that you cut from that source.  Format accordingly, put the whole brief where you need it (file it, put it in Endnote, or whatever you do),  and there you have processed a complete source into a usable form. Now, say you want to make a brief or outline a paper using multiple sources, you can do that too by working from your newly created individual source files or database, copying the cards you want to use, and then pasting them into a new document. If you like working with real paper, just make sure the source citation is on every quotation and you can print your source documents and cut them up into cards.

Presentation Zen: Is it finally time to ditch PowerPoint?

Presentation Zen: Is it finally time to ditch PowerPoint?

I have been collecting information about PowerPoint and this blog entry from Presentation Zen encapsulates the main issues involved in my opinion. As much as I love to transfer all my frustrations with bad presentations onto the software, Garr Reynolds is right to point out the tool is not to blame. Then again, the templates and defaults are created by the programmers and can we really expect people to make their slides the slow way? Okay, let’s blame it on bad design, but let’s also aim scrutiny at the software designers.

Grant money for middle school debate

A+ for ENERGY – A BP Energy Education Program

I attended the Middle School Public Debate Program national championships in Claremont last weekend. The above link describes the grant awarded to one of the MSPDP leagues this year for debating about energy. I met the folks involved with this grant, Kelly Beiringer and Greg Paulk of the Desert Valley Debate League, along with numerous other teachers, parents, and students.

I’m working on supporting the creation and development of speech & debate programs in the greater Lansing, MI area. I think the MSPDP example shows the viability and desirability of such programs.

Age shall not wither their distrust of you

Age shall not wither their distrust of you

Sure, this may not fit my theme, but I enjoy finding any direct link between ethics and economics, as in this article describing a study of trust in organizations. It links trust to employee engagement and engagement to corporate financial performance.

Those companies with high employee engagement levels demonstrated better annual total returns to shareholders, higher market premiums and higher productivity levels than those with low engagement, it reported.

Back End vs. Vision

Inside the Firm of the Future: Changing Lives . . One By One . . Until We’re All Done!

This post, from Christopher Marston, talks about an issue in the practice of law that I think relates to other professions as well: letting the nuts & bolts of the job override the story or the human element. For myself, I’ve been caught thinking, or at least behaving as if, the nuts and bolts were more important than the vision in teaching (the dubious practice of tinkering). You have control over the nuts and bolts; they are what hold the class together and directly affect learning. However, more intangible features of a class like its fun or desirability may have a larger effect even if it is less direct. Lesson: be methodical and thorough about the nuts & bolts, but don’t talk about it to your audience (students, clients, spouses). Talk about your ideas instead and give them something to be excited about. If you are talking about the nitty gritty, that’s also probably what you are most thinking about, and then where are you? Here’s a related quotation I chose from the post:

I see attorneys who are so entrenched in counting their entire lives in 6-minute increments that they go home to their loved ones and think of time with their family as an “opportunity cost.” These people know exactly how many billing units they are giving up by attempting to have a work life balance, and the very attempt to balance life is offset by a cloud of guilt and worry, knowing that they simply cannot beat the clock.

Abandon Office????!!

Firefox OS: Why My Hard Drive & Software are Obsolete – lifehack.org

This short spiel by Leo Babauta explains how at least a small chunk of the expensive software we typically use may be unnecessary given the host of high quality web-based tools out there now. He does disclaim by saying that a big chunk of the replacements are Google products, but I say that’s no real threat to the position. There are other free utilities besides Google’s. Also, there are implications that strengthen the argument. Okay, so I see the point and I’m looking for the most consequential and real world implications. Well, one is that you need a high speed connection (easy for me; I work at a university). Another of the biggest ones I can think of is the expensive Office suite of applications. I already do not use Outlook for Access, so that’s a waste. I don’t care much for PowerPoint. So, I’m using Word and Excel. I’m going to check how much my college spent on it and maybe give up the license to someone who is more committed to Office. I could almost give it up. That money could be spent on more carefully chosen software without guilt, like Camtasia Studio (very useful to me). Caveat: Endnote’s Cite While you Write feature needs Word.

20th WCP: Virtue and the Practice of Medicine

20th WCP: Virtue and the Practice of Medicine (1998; Paul Hoyt-O’Connor)

Interesting definition of “practice” as “cooperative endeavor.”  Not sure if it’s consistent with Aristotle or MacIntyre, but this article does deal with the important sense of the word as it interests me and cites the key sources. I am intrigued by the emphasis that practices are not private and depend on collaboration with others and with institutional reality. The article also seems to avoid virtue in favor of competence, as in the sentence here:

“Practices demand the regular and recurrent performance of certain tasks, and their swift, adept, if not masterful performance depends upon the acquisition of the appropriate competences.”