Greetings loyal blog readers and Happy New Year! I’m Sheila B Robinson, Lead Curator and sometimes Saturday contributor for my favorite evaluation blog! It’s no news that I call myself aea365’s biggest fan, as this was the first evaluation blog I so fortuitously discovered on December 31, 2009. On that day, an announcement appeared on the AEA website that a daily blog would begin the next day, January 1, 2010.
Now, as we approach 2016 and aea365’s 6th birthday, I want to broaden your horizons and introduce you to other evaluation blogs. Since aea365’s inception (and even years before) evaluators became bloggers and began populating the evalusphere with generous evaluation know-how.
Hot Tip: Choose a day during which you would like to read up on some evaluation topics. Only after you’ve read the day’s aea365 blog post (well, what would you expect me to say?!), head over to one of the many other great evaluation-related blogs and take a look around. Here are three ways to find some gems:
1.) AEA’s list of evaluation-related blogs. AEA maintains a list with links to evaluators and their blogs.*
2.) AEA365 Bloggers weeks. Check out the aea365 archive for several weeks in previous years devoted to introducing readers to bloggers and their blogs.
3.) EvalCentral – Chris Lysy started aggregating evaluation blogs some years ago and his collection has now grown to more than 60! It’s like the Mall of America for blogs – one-stop shopping! Just one daily email brings you on average 1-4 blog posts from evaluation bloggers who post as often as once per week, to those we seem to hear from only once per year.
Cool Trick: Blogging isn’t just for evaluation, of course. Several (if not many) well-known evaluators maintain additional blogs on areas of interest well outside of evaluation! Do you know who they are?
Lesson Learned: There is a great range of opinion on the future of blogging, especially in the business and marketing world. Some say blogging will be eclipsed by other content delivery strategies such as audio (think podcasts and the like) and video. Others think the written word will stand the test of time.
Educator and marketing consultant Mark Schaefer is among these and predicts, “Written content is an important pillar of ‘rich content’ and will remain so although people will diversify the way they consume content” (see What Is The Future Of Blogging? for additional predictions).
What other evaluation-related blogs do you enjoy reading? Let us hear about them in the comments!
*Are you an AEA member with an evaluation-related blog not on our list? Write to info@eval.org with your blog’s title and URL.
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.