A successful blogger once told me not to return from a blogging hiatus with “Well, it’s been awhile since I’ve written.” So, I’m definitely NOT starting this article with that! 😉 How’s this?
This blog and site are dedicated to the power and promise of professional learning.
New site, new name!
The site certainly looks different than it did the last time you visited. I have a new business name, new logo, new colors, and new pictures. The site was long overdue for a makeover – but I’m no web designer. However, I wanted something customized and flexible. So… I set about to learn web design. Why am I sharing this? You’ll have to wait for the next post to find that out!
More importantly, it’s time for new content. This blog began with a strong focus on program evaluation, with articles on education, survey design, presentations, and data visualization. That will continue, but with a theme that ties all of these fields (my professional interests) together: professional learning.
You might know professional learning by another name – professional development, staff development, inservice, continuing education, or training. These terms have more nuanced definitions and different meanings in different fields. Also, you may or may not receive formal credit for licensure for participating in them.
Now, no matter what name we use, let’s recognize that professional learning can be much more than those formal sessions and seminars arranged by our organizations. It can be attending conferences, taking online courses, and listening to podcasts whenever we want to. It can be reading books, journal articles, and blogs. It can be collaborating with colleagues on projects and learning from each other’s expertise and talents. It can be following and interacting with others on social media, and participating in twitter chats and other online hangouts.
What’s my point?
Anything that serves to increase our knowledge, understanding, or capacity for our work is professional learning.
Your body of work is everything you create, contribute, affect, or impact.
-Pamela Slim, Body of Work
Let me show you around!
My home page now features some of my current writing projects, along with links to this blog, my workshops, and some resources and links that may be helpful.
Soon, subscribers will receive a newsletter (about twice a month) with the latest blog article, along with some additional juicy content (can’t tell you what, otherwise, I’d be spoiling it!).
It feels great to be writing for this blog again. That’s not to say I’ve been absent from writing and teaching. In fact, my first book, Designing Quality Survey Questions, a collaboration with my wonderful co-author Kim Firth Leonard, will be published in Summer 2018. As well, we recently finished conducting a very popular online course for the American Evaluation Association.
I continue to write and curate for AEA365 Tip-A-Day By and For Evaluators (check it out! It’s free, even for non-members) and I’ve just started writing for Frontline Education’s blog (also free!), while also writing a monthly article on presentations and contributing presentation tools and resources to AEA’s Potent Presentations Initiative (p2i) (all resources on the site are free, even for non-members).