Greetings from Canada! My name is Chi Yan Lam (@chiyanlam) and I am a PhD student working in the areas of educational assessment and program evaluation at Queen’s University at Kingston, Ontario. You are probably already familiar with legitimate uses of Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook in relation to evaluation learning, but have you thought about augmenting your personal learning network to other social media platforms?
In today’s connected learning environments, professional development is no longer confined to traditional codified sources of knowledge, such as peer-reviewed journals or conference workshops. Social media can inform your professional development by facilitating communications with those within and outside of your immediate network, connecting you to those evaluators who share your interests, and allowing you to create and share your learning with others. Augmenting your personal learning network with online resources can be tremendously valuable and rewarding.
Rad Resource: YouTube needs no introduction and, boy, is it a hidden treasure trove of evaluation resources. From short instructional clips to recorded lecture and talks, you can easily locate many hours of learning. Try searching for specific key word (e.g. Empowerment Evaluation; Developmental Evaluation), or for specific theorist (e.g. Michael Patton). You should also search for YouTube Channels organized by evaluation organizations (e.g. AEA; IPDET).
Rad Resource: Pinterest is the virtual equivalent to a corkboard allowing its users to ‘pin’ and collect great visuals from all over the web. Evaluators like Kylie Hutchison and others do a fabulous job of curating great, often visually interesting, resources on evaluation.
Rad Resource: Slideshare is a great repository of presentation slidedecks. Try searching for slidedecks from specific conferences (e.g. eval13) or by evaluation approaches (e.g. developmental evaluation).
Rad Resource: Attend live online PD webinars. AEA offers both their e-Study and Coffee Break series. Did you know AEA members have free access to previously recorded Coffee Break webinars! The Canadian Evaluation Society is also launching a webinar series.
One more thing…
Bonus Rad Resource: Institutions often make available lectures and debates online! For instance, take a look at the 2010 Claremont Evaluation Debate, Claremont Evaluation Center Webinar Series, or Western Michigan University’s Evaluation Café series.
Happy learning!
Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org . aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.
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