assessment – Collected Works

Are you a MOOC candidate?

We love MOOCs. Using a Massive Open Online Course allows you to log-in from anywhere in the world and take part in some of the best tutorial and learning opportunities available from major centres of excellence.

The Knight Centre for Journalism, at the University of Texas in Austin, U.S. is launching a six week course in January 2013 to foster a better understanding of Infographics.

Although primarily targeted at journalists, the course would enable anyone with an interest in project management, social research, evaluative assessment or needs analysis to develop skills in the area of making data more visually compelling.

Ideal for improving reports to funders, clients or helping to pitch that ‘argument’ for your upcoming project.

You can find out more about this on-line course and how to register on the Knight Centre web pages here.

For a very modest fee, over and above the free participation in the course, your can also get a certificate…mapping your Continuous Professional development trajectory?

If you do, the best of luck with your web participation.

(Image: Creative Commons

Jess3, geo-social networks visualised)

A picture, a crowd,
a forest of data!

We were recently thinking about the outputs of our projects and the types of document, web site or data CD we needed to compile for our client evaluations, research reports, market analysis or evidence based recommendations.

Basic principles of number analysis were reasonably clear to frame verbally, but what about visual design in terms of improving understanding for our clients. The dreaded phrase ‘…let’s do an info-graphic’ heaved itself over the horizon.

Blanching, we pressed ahead with trying to lay out some basic principles of how the data should not only be interpreted, but stylised and presented for consumption appropriate to the intended audience.

Never keen to re-invent the electric light all over again, in our research we came across a great Speaker Deck presentation which beautifully enunciated our thinking around how to present data in interesting and clear ways. (Great work by the author – zakiwarfel )

You can see the presentation on our data design page on the Collected Works main web site here. The author has laid out our forthcoming design template thinking perfectly. If we can use our principles to present your data, just let us know here.

Speaker Deck is a free pdf conversion app from Github – you can see more here.

Crunching numbers!

Across our two organisations we crunch a lot of data and format, style and produce thousands of words and images for paper and web publication.

We are always keen to utilise powerful, cost effective tools to produce trends, analysis and short data-sets that tell a story and illustrate the evidence of our findings.

Free, open source and powerful software like R. For statisticians and analysts R offers a number of useful tools, analytical and calibrational functions to produce real clarity from long range data sets.

You can discover R on this website.

Rob J Hyndman and George Athanasopoulos have produced an excellent online resource about the use of trends and forecasting. It also contains some handy hints about using the functions of R too. See more here of the Hyndman and Athanasopoulos online book here …

These are great, free resources. Another alternative to getting abstracts of your long range data sets, or clear analysis of research findings, with press or web ready graphics to go with it – is to contact Collected Works.

Let us do the heavy lifting.