Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hannson in their new Rework published by Crown Business advise going against most of what we’ve come to accept as sacred business truths. Having worked with federal funded programs from education to drug and alcohol prevention, I know their proclivity toward forcing recipients to use business ways. So I am [...]
SPF-SIG work —
Category Archives: SPF-SIG work
Intuition plays a major role in making decisions in a parallel process
We are getting closer to finding out how our mind (in the broadest sense) operates in making decisions. And intuition plays a major role. For sometime now we have had Epstein’s dual processing model of rational and experiential cognitive systems and now we have a summary of the three decades or more of research by [...]
Planning not always effective for changing social complex systems
Is governmental agencies insistence on upfront planning undermining efforts to really improve education and preventing substance abuse in our communities? I came across a passage today in a 2005 publication of the Institute for Defense Analyses, Learning to adapt to asymmetric threats. A slew of retired Army, Navy and Air Force officers are credited with [...]
Will revelation of “science bought & sold” effect “evidence-based practices?” I doubt it
Notre Dame professor Philip Mirowki has long written about how money sways science and how science is bought and sold. Here’s another example, again from George Siemens’ current newsletter:
The big lesson of our wikipedia-era is not that amateur information is potentially false, but rather that all information must be questioned. The last week as produced [...]
Ah Ha! I’m on the track: Complex Adaptive Systems and Evaluation, Part 2
I had success this weekend Googling in hunting links between complexity theory and evaluation. First I found a publication of a foundation which has centered its funding strategy around complexity and something called the panarchy cycle. And for evaluation it recommends “development evaluation.”
The publication is on the web. Search for Katharine A. Pearson. (2007). “Accelerating [...]
I find complex adaptive systems a conundrum for evaluators, Part One
As you can tell I’ve become fascinated with the new attention and use of complex adaptive systems (CAS), particularly in the line of human CAS (not ants or bacteria). I believe complexity will give me a new angle, a new perspective for reporting and evaluation.
Maybe I should add, “it is new to me since the [...]
Don’t we need additional models for assessing whether something worked?
You may wonder what manure and rat dung have to do with statistical assessment of program and intervention effects. Read on…
Tuesday I attended the newly formed Tennessee Prevention Advisory Council (TN PAC) to the Division of Alcohol and Substance Abuse Services (DADAS), Department of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities. It is an honor to be [...]
We make choices as we journey along
I’ve long been intrigued by the notion of our life as a journey. The path we are on is a consequence of choices made at certain “decision points” along the way. I guess I’ve been haunted by Robert Frost’s lines since reading them early in school, “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood …”
This notion [...]
My Yugma saga
Yugma is a conferencing package that lets users share desktops, files, voice. Not only is it used for online conferencing, people use it for webinars as well. It is really good, but yesterday I ran into a glitch with it.
I begun using Yugma last year after searching for something that works equally well with Macs [...]
Guilt and shame, accountability and evaluation?
I’ve held the suspicion that as much as anything an evaluation unit serves as the moral consciousness of an organization. This may account for why some administrators do not know what to do with evaluators or misuse them. This suspicion was reinforced for me this weekend after reflecting on the week’s events and readings. I [...]