Susan Kistler on Laughing With Evaluators

My name is Susan Kistler and I am the Executive Director for the American Evaluation Association. I contribute each Saturday’s posting to the AEA365 Blog. Recently, evaluators have been showing off their funny bones and I wanted to share with you the following, not only to make you laugh, but also because they make one think about evaluation practice.

Rad Resource: Patricia Rogers and Jane Davidson have ramped their new blog up to 11. Genuine Evaluation is consistently thought provoking, well-written, and…humorous! Keep an eye out for their “Friday Funny” among the regular posts that span the gamut of the field and related disciplines. One of the few evaluation blogs with regular new content, their wry wit extends well beyond the Friday contributions. Recent posts include:

• A ‘program logic’ for including ‘outsiders’ in evaluation teams
• What you measure and how you measure it – the Greek financial example
• Friday Funny – Reconciling insider views and hard evidence

Read Genuine Evaluation, and learn more from Jane and Patricia at http://genuineevaluation.com/.

Rad Resource: Inspired by the Evaluation 2010 Conference Theme of “Evaluation Quality,” John Gargani suggests that “There is a great deal packed into those two words, and my blog will be dedicated to unpacking them as we lead up to the November AEA conference.” He starts on a light note, positing “The Laws of Evaluation Quality” and offering the “Evaluation Quality Likert Scale” for use on your next survey. To whet your appetite:

• Stakeholder’s First Law of Evaluation Quality
  The quality of an evaluation is directly proportional to the number of positive findings it contains.
• Corollary to Stakeholder’s First Law
  A program evaluation is an evaluation that supports my program

Read the full post and other content from John’s blog at http://gcoinc.wordpress.com/.

Rad Resource: The AEA eLibrary is chock full of models, presentation slides, how-to guides, instruments, and papers. Included therein are two comics that appeared in last year’s AEA newsletters. I adapted each, with permission of course, from the XKCD comic. Teaching a quantitative analysis course? Try this on for size:

The eLibrary is public and extensively searchable. To find the comics, try searching on keyword ‘humor’ but I recommend browsing more fully to find the gems hidden within. Explore the AEA eLibrary at http://bit.ly/aeaelibrary.

This contribution is from the aea365 Daily Tips blog, by and for evaluators, from the American Evaluation Association. Please consider contributing – send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org.