Photo credit: uOttawa gazette So you say that you can’t hand your assignment in on-line because your prof won’t let you. Unfortunately that statement is bull$@!t and I think I have some proof to back this statement up. Have you seen the uOttawa lately? In a recent issue there was a nice little article about some Geography and Environmental Studies profs that decided to go paperless with their assignments. To make sure that their TAs (teacher’s assistants) were properly equipped for the task, the professors purchased some ipads and voila… a paperless semester was born. ( Article ) And of course there were the infamous Experiential Learning Sustainability surveys. I blogged about this earlier this year ( Love and Surveys ) but the results are slowly trickling in and it turns out that 45% of professors do allow students to submit their work electronically. Sure this is a little less than half but I bet it is way more than you expected. Another interesting tidbit came out of these surveys...

Photo credit: Vedrana Martincevic Green Space visualization (www.manyeyes.com) Let’s face it: there isn’t a single human being that willfully engages in the reading of 300 page reports filled with numbers. Some do it from necessity, but there’s hardly any joy to be found in analyzing countless statistics that eventually blur into little lines in front of your eyes. Yes, there are lots of useful numbers in there somewhere, but how do we extract them? How do we make this relevant to our target audience, and anyone else that may be interested? How do we dial back the agony of trawling through numbers for hours on end, praying they’ll end explaining themselves to you? In today’s world, particularly in the world of business, people have very little time. Everybody wants to get in and get out, and get tasks over with. That’s why we have abstracts, executive summaries, blurbs, overviews, and all those differently-named things that are really cut from th e same cloth. However, it is often diff...