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Integrating Technology into Evaluation

Susan Kistler on Getting More From Google

Good day! Susan Kistler here, AEA’s Executive Director and aea365 regular Saturday contributor. Everyone has used Google to search (ok almost everyone) but here are five items I’ve used from Google in the past month that you may not yet know about. Hot Tip: First, in most cases, you’ll need a google account. They are …

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EPE TIG Week: Nick Salafsky on Miradi Adaptive Management Software for Conservation Projects

My name is Nick Salafsky and I am Co-Director and Co-Founder of Foundations of Success, a nonprofit organization committed to working with practitioners to learn how to do conservation better through the process of adaptive management. My colleagues and I have spent the past two decades helping biodiversity conservation project teams design theories of change …

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Xin Wang, Neeley Current, and Gary Westergren on Using Think-aloud Interviewing to Evaluate Web Applications

Hello! We are Xin Wang, Neeley Current, and Gary Westergren. We work at the Information Experience Laboratory (IE Lab) of the School of Information Science & Learning Technologies at the University of Missouri.  The IE lab is a usability laboratory that conducts research and evaluates technology. What is usability? According to Jakob Nielsen’s definition, usability …

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Susan Kistler on Leaving Wordle for Tagxedo

Good Morning! Susan Kistler here, AEA’s Executive Director. We’ve had a number of posts talking about creating and using word clouds, primarily in terms of creating them through wordle. Word clouds take a set of text and create a cloud of the most frequent words in that text with word size within the cloud based …

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Susan Kistler on Tableau and Users Groups

I’m Susan Kistler, the American Evaluation Association’s Executive Director. I contribute each Saturday’s post to aea365. I’m striving to improve my capacity to use Tableau, a data exploration and visualization tool. I’ve read the manual, watched their video tutorials, will be attending training, and have spent time working with the product on my own. However, …

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CPE Week: Susan Kistler on Sharing Tools for Collaborative, Participatory, and Empowerment Evaluation to Win a copy of Empowerment Evaluation Principles in Practice

Hello wonderful evaluators! I’m Susan Kistler, AEA’s Executive Director, and I contribute (almost) each Saturday’s aea365 post. Today, I wanted to thank our CPE colleagues for great posts this week (and – a preview for tomorrow – a bonus post form Abraham Wandersman) and all the work that they have done to bring together the …

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MNEA Week: Beth Robelia on Using Online Focus Groups

My name is Beth Robelia. I am the proprietor of a micro-business that focuses on STEM education research, curriculum development and program evaluation. In evaluating the effectiveness of social media, the disbursed nature of users may make face-to-face focus groups impractical. Online focus groups can bridge the gap in geography by placing participants in an …

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SIOP Week: Elizabeth Rupprecht on Using mTurk to Collect Evaluation Data

Hello! I’m Elizabeth Rupprecht, an Industrial Organizational Psychology graduate student at Saint Louis University.  I would like to tell you more about a great resource for collecting national or international evaluation data—Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (mTurk). mTurk is normally used to provide organizations with assistance completing tasks. Typically, an organization will set up a “task,” such as …

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MaryAnn Sorensen Allacci on Spatial Analysis

Hello – I’m MaryAnn Sorensen Allacci, Director of Projects for Environmental Health, Knowledge, & Action, Inc. We provide a wide range of evaluation and advocacy services that focus on improving people’s well-being by improving their environments.  As a result, we will often work on community environmental health issues that require our consideration of many levels …

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Cindy Banyai on Creative Tech Tools for Participatory Evaluation

I am Dr. Cindy Banyai and I am the Executive Director of the Refocus Institute, a consultancy specializing in planning and training in participatory evaluation using visual methods.  I have recently returned to the U.S. from working and researching in Asia, where I was a member and an editor for the English language journal of …

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