I’m back to blogging

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.