Today’s cartoon was inspired by a story on NPR about The Tabla Master Who Jammed With The Grateful Dead: In the 1960s, Western musicians were becoming interested in Indian music, and Hussain found himself working on a sitar record with George Harrison. He told the Beatle about his dream to get into rock. “And he said, […]
Defining Outliers – cartoon flashback
Today’s cartoon flashback comes from a post featuring ethics stories contributed by a silent collaborator. I think this was my favorite of the bunch. Defining Outlier Evaluators: “Here are the results from your program.” Client: “Those results aren’t accurate.” Evaluators: “How so?” Client: “The bad results are obviously outliers. You need to remove those people from […]
Participatory Evaluation
Today’s cartoon inspiration comes from Leslie Groves and Irene Guijt on Better Evaluation: Participation not for you? Four reflections that might just change your mind For us, “participatory evaluation” requires primary stakeholders to be included as co-evaluators, both to ensure the inclusion of their voices and values in evaluation and to help them strengthen their evaluation capacity. […]
Ethnography and Real Research
If you’ve taken enough sociology classes you likely had this assignment at some point, “go somewhere and watch.” And if it’s a grad class you might get asked to go back to the same place several times. Looking back today, these were some of my most memorable academic moments and something I’ve definitely carried with me over the […]
Summative, Formative and Developmental
Over the years I’ve noticed that many of the most influential thinkers carry with them some great metaphors to help describe their work. It also makes for great cartoon fodder. Today’s cartoon inspired by Michael Quinn Patton from his book on Developmental Evaluation: Distinguished evaluation theorist and practitioner Bob Stake has explained, “When the cook tastes the soup, […]
Human Side of Data
There is this tendency to get wrapped up in tech. If only we had that cool new dashboard or visual. Then we could really take advantage of our data. Of course the actual tech part is not everything. Not anywhere close. Sure, the tech stuff can be neat, but the human side is the […]
Eleanor Chelimsky on who evaluators are
After posting his guest post two weeks ago on the 4 missing ps in evaluation, Rakesh Mohan received a comment via email from Eleanor Chelimsky. For the non evaluators, Eleanor Chelimsky has been incredibly influential to the field in both words and practice, having directed the Program Evaluation and Methodology Division of the U.S. Government Accountability Office […]
Baby’s first logic model
Evaluation power couple, and conference friends, David and Amy Shellard are expecting a little one this year. One of their close friend’s reached out to me looking for a cartoon to go on a onesie. I happily responded with this one. Dave sent out a tweet the other day and I quickly had a few […]
Minimum Viable Explanation – cartoon flashback
Today’s cartoon flashback comes from a big Q&A post on blogging I pulled together a couple of years ago. Specifically from Nathan Yau‘s response when asked about his biggest blogging challenge. The biggest challenge with FlowingData is probably maintaining the right balance between academic and casual. If I get too technical, I confuse a lot […]
Professionalizing Evaluation
Like many evaluators I just kind of fell into the field from a career in research (my MA is in sociology). One day I found myself in a non-profit data position doing evaluation work. Then over the years I’ve learned more and more about the field through a lot of self-initiated learning, experience and participation in […]
Too many sustainable development goals or too few
The age-old question, how many goals should we have? I’m not really caught up on the overall discussion regarding the sustainable development goals, but the following sparked today’s cartoon. This quote is from Tom Murphy in No surprises in U.N. draft for next global development goals: The draft document for the goals that will set the global development […]
Ban Powerpoint… or Not
The way I see it, Power Point is not a presentation tool. It is a presentation illustration tool. And Power Point is designed in a way that leads you toward illustrating a presentation using bullet points. It can most certainly be used by great presentation illustrators to help support great presentations. But most of the time, […]