ACET, Inc. Blog

Here is a link that highlights a variety of webinar hosts for small businesses.  This is a great place to start if you’re looking to add webinars as an option in your program.

Check out this video for what not to do in faciliating a dialogue! At just over a minute, this is a short and comical clip that teaches us a few lessons on what to avoid when conducting interviews and/or focus groups.

Notice the kitty’s pointing finger, negative facial expressions, threats of tattling, unnecessary directness and belittling. Who knew such an adorable critter could be so off-putting? That poor puppy didn’t know what to do with himself!

What are some lessons you’ve learned about facilitation?

We are always in pursuit of new and interesting ways to visually represent all types of data. Qualitative data often presents challenges in doing this – it’s tough making a pie chart out of focus group data! So what are some options? Try Wordle (http://www.wordle.net), an online tool that generates visual representations, or “word clouds” from text. The more frequently a word appears in a selection of text, the larger it appears in the word cloud. The fun part is that Wordle allows you to change the fonts, shapes, and color schemes of the images it creates. We are using this more frequently in our focus group and interview summaries because the images offer an additional dimension of understanding to qualitative data that is difficult to perceive from reading standard text. Each of the ACET staff took a few minutes to create a Wordle example from famous pieces of literature. Which are your favorites?

My Wordle is an excerpt from The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas:

Joseph created a Wordle using an excerpt from Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky:

Cassie’s Wordle is an excerpt from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Nights Dream:

Emily created a Wordle with an excerpt from Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin:

Stella’s Wordle came from Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven:

And last, but not least, Kirsten crafted a Wordle with an excerpt from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens:
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