I am Susan Kistler, AEA’s Executive Director, and this week I’m posting about two completely separate things: On the one hand, I want to tell you about the AEA conference program and on the other hand, I’m trying out curate.us.
Rad Resource – Evaluation 2011 Searchable Conference Program: This highly searchable online program is a great resource even if you aren’t attending the American Evaluation Association Annual Conference this November in Anaheim (although I truly hope to see you there!).
Hot Tip for Conference Attendees: The online searchable program includes abstracts for each session. The hardcopy program that you will receive on site does not (if it did, it would be well over 800 pages). Take time in advance to search the online program as it will give you details to help make your decision about which sessions to attend much easier.
Hot Tip for Everyone: The conference program is a great resource for identifying colleagues for collaborative work. Search the program for presentations related to your needs, then reach out via email to network.
Rad Resource Curate.us: Curate.us takes a screenshot of any website and makes it embeddable in email, blogs, and websites. I’m trying it out so that we may add more visual appeal to aea365, but also because it should speed up loading of aea365 on the aea365 website. It’s working well, at least from the back-end – easy to clip, resize the full clip, and embed. I can see all of the clips I’ve made nicely in an archive on the curate.us website. I love being able to add a yellow posty too. And, if you click on the screenshot, I can track clickthroughs. Downsides? It only clips the full width of a site, and I can’t seem to resize the posty.
And, I’m turning to aea365 readers – are there other downsides? Does the above screenshot come through for you well in your email reader or browser? Add to the comments if any problems.
Hot Tip: Try the “share this clip” link that appears right below the screenshot above. It will take you to the interface for curate.us so you can see how it works. Go ahead and play around a bit – you won’t need to log in and you won’t change how the clip looks on aea365.
Hot Tip: On a side note, I could see curate.us being useful to evaluators in other ways, for instance embedding small screenshots in a report as needed, directing colleagues to a site via email, etc. I’ve also discovered that it is a good way to archive notes to myself about particular resources. I take the screenshot and put the note in a posty. Then, I can check on sites for which I have annotations in the curate.us archive.
Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.
This a great resource! Thanks for posting!