During September all QualDATA directors were out of Australia. I attended a business development program held in Italy – so it appeared to me to be quite sensible to take another week and a half off and experience some of the real Italy myself! Not surprisingly the focus on food (pizza and pasta) and wine
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Posts Tagged working across cultures
Organic food and ploughs – Gordon’s postcard from Italy
Being aware of cultural noise in evaluation
One of the issues we try to avoid in evaluation is that of adding noise to our data collection. By noise we mean anything that interferes with the clarity of questioning, observing, listening or the responses we get. In a physical sense, noise can enter through poor communication channels, difficulty in hearing questions, writing that
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Lost in translation
A colleague who was involved as an evaluator in an agricultural development project in South East Asia told of a focus group that was run in one of the villages. The purpose of the focus group was to evaluate the work being undertaken in the village through the project and to learn from the experience
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Making a real difference: 5 Questions with Theo Nabben
Theo has over twenty years of experience working in the field of participatory approaches, initially in natural resources management, extension and community development and, over the past several years, in monitoring and evaluation. He has been passionate and interested in international work for many years with international opportunities starting in the late 90’s in South
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The state of play in the US
This month on Talking Heads – Gordon Stone talks about his recent visit to the United States and the state of R&D, extension and adoption and evaluation.
The travel diaries of Jeff Coutts
A tale of technology transfer in the Chilean dairy industry Having just returned from a short visit to Chile, I have been reflecting on the role of the private sector in delivering extension/technology transfer and hence the implications for evaluation. My visit to Chile was to provide some input into how to improve the effectiveness
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Indigeneity, web crawlers and social justice: Reflections on the 2010 AES conference
Kia ora! The beautiful NZ city of Wellington played host to the 2010 Australasian Evaluation Society (AES) Conference (Sept 1-3) which this year had the theme ‘Reflecting on Evaluation’. In NZ for holidays at the same time, I was able to drop in for the first day. After we were greeted in the traditional Maori
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A cultural ‘boo boo’
Recently I was providing evaluation training to a tourism delegation from an Asian country focusing on evaluating tourist promotion campaigns. To provide local examples, I contrasted the “Where the bloody hell are you?” campaign with Paul Hogan’s famous “We’ll put another Shrimp on the barbie for you” advertisement.