Okay, people, I just endured another heartwrenching conversation about the state of slideshows in evaluation. We all get it, right? Death by Powerpoint is a common affliction. Point well taken. But if it is such common knowledge that our slideshows and our reports are an utter bore to endure, why…
or How Semantics Constrained a Field
Our discipline is stricken with too many values. I’m speaking semantically, of course. We use the word “values” to mean many things, including personal values, cultural and organizational values, criteria (or dimensions of merit), general and specific values (in terms of standards), monetary value (or worth), and in the action form as valuing (or judging). A conflation of terms hinders the discipline’s ability to be accessible others, particularly our clients and stakeholders, and unnecessarily confuses beginning evaluators, and perhaps even those who are more experienced.
Last year at about this time I was knee deep in survey redesign. I had joined this awesome project that has been conducting an annual survey for over 10 years. The surveyed parties are grantees in one of NSF’s program streams. Nice as they are, they’d been quite vocal about how the survey doesn’t meet their own evaluation needs, is difficult to complete, is too long, etc. I sort of empathized… until I had to complete the survey myself.
We are big fans of the Harlem Children’s Zone around these parts. Like many others, I’m sure part of it is romantic – we aspire to see a social program work as well as HCZ appears because we love Harlem and we love magic bullets. If it works there, it…
Summer, as you  know, is proposal season. I’ve been up to my neck (literally – these proposals are huge) in stacks of papers, reviewing ideas seeking support from various federal agencies. Regardless of the agency, some proposals seem to fare less well for common reasons. Here’s my breakdown (and strictly…
Right now, the midwest’s largest oil spill in history is flowing through my backyard. The pipeline, taking oil from Indiana to Canada, burst sometime Sunday or Monday this past week (3-4 days ago), sending 840,000 barrels of oil into a creek, that flows to the Kalamazoo River, that flows to…
Without a TV in my home, I haven’t been privy to the awesomeness that is Rachel Maddow until last night, in my hotel room in Little Rock. She was speaking with Richard Holbrooke, US special rep for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Maddow had recently visited Afghanistan to report on the front…
Reading a decent book, came across a great point: The book is Start With Why and it really labors on the fact that great businesses lead with their WHY right out front, not their WHAT (or their HOW). Okay, but how does this relate to evaluation? The author discusses how…
Sigh. For better or worse, I am known as the qualitative person around here. While I do, admittedly, have a strong fondness for qualitative work, I know better that to think it is the right tool for every job. Yet, my reputation precedes me and I’m often asked to defend…
I found the cutest old-man optometrist. He puttered around the room, in cute old man fashion. He had a little cute old man mantra: “if it ain’t broke…” Him: Are your contacts working okay for you? Me: Sure, I guess. Him: Well, if it ain’t broke… Me: But aren’t you…
