Over on my personal blog, I’ve decided to try blogging every day in the spirit of November as National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) – that was a thing years ago when blogs were more popular. The idea is to blog every single day during the month of November. That got me thinking that it had been a while since I blogged here… and it turns out that has been more than a year!
I remembered that I had been doing a series on evaluator competencies where I wrote one blog posting a week on each of the Canadian Evaluation Society (CES) evaluator competencies and that I had decided to take a “short break” when stuff was getting busy with the courses I was teaching. So “short” may have not been the right word there. In my defence, the world was turned rather upside down for most of that time, what with a global pandemic and reckoning on racism.
My other issue with actually getting things up on here is my battle with perfectionism. During these pandemic-y times I’ve been doing a fair bit of professional development 1As presentations and workshops have had to move online in response to the pandemic, it’s resulted in a lot of events that otherwise might have been just held locally being available anywhere in the world. And with a reckoning on racism bringing more attention to the work of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of colour) activists, scholars, and organizations, webinars on anti-racism and reconciliation have been amplified. and from the various webinars and online workshops I’ve attended, I’ve started many, many blog postings as a way to capture notes from these events. But then I think “Oh, I need to summarize this better/come up with a good conclusion/figure out what actions I should take from what I’ve learned/find a good Creative Commons licenced photo to go with this/provide links to the webinar recording/etc./etc.” and then it sits in my drafts folder for ever and ever.
So here’s my new plan. I’m going to re-start on my evaluator competency series – I’ll post once a week on that. And I’m going work through my drafts folder and actually get my notes from each of these events in a reasonable, but not perfect, shape, and post those too. Or I’ll decide that I didn’t get enough value from a given webinar or workshop and hit the “delete” button. I won’t blog every day – but I’m going to aim for two blog postings per week in addition to my evaluator competency one, for the month of November.
Footnotes
| ↑1 | As presentations and workshops have had to move online in response to the pandemic, it’s resulted in a lot of events that otherwise might have been just held locally being available anywhere in the world. And with a reckoning on racism bringing more attention to the work of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of colour) activists, scholars, and organizations, webinars on anti-racism and reconciliation have been amplified. |
|---|
I can relate to that feeling, I literally have embroided this phrase on a hoop and hanged it on my wall. If it helps with motivation, as an emergent evaluator your posts on evaluation competences have helped me a lot in planning the next steps of my professional development. I’d love to see what comes next! Thanks for the hard work.
Thanks, Lais! It does help with motivation to know that my postings are useful to others!