The Christmas and New Year break is now past – and January 2016 has started with a rush! Some welcome rain is falling around Queensland and it gives some hope for many of the properties that have faced drought over recent years.A delight in a recent trip to New Zealand was a visit to Hobbiton. A great example of diversification! There in the middle of a sheep and cattle property, among the beautiful green rolling hills of New Zealand was this magical legacy of Hobbiton – with clothes drying on the line, food on the tables in front of the hillside dwellings and so well kept that you can imagine that the hobbits are just away for the day!
Spring, a New Prime Minister, and a New Reef Report Card
It’s now Spring – and it is very evident in Toowoomba – host to the annual Carnival of Flowers! This year we even got to the parade and viewed some of the flowers – usually we are away somewhere and leaving Toowoomba for the tourists!There are other ‘new beginnings’. Australia has a new Prime Minister and who knows what that will bring for rural and agricultural policy? One interesting change already is putting agriculture and water together in the hands of the rural focused National Party! Agriculture certainly has a strong interest in water and its management and it is hoped that it is mature enough to recognise other water needs and to be able to negotiate mutually beneficial policies and approaches.
Desktop reviews don’t have to be boring
Many evaluations I’ve worked on have either been focused around or include a desktop review. This could be of existing documents and/or trawling the web for other sources for information.
Trying to find relevant information is not always easy and can be very overwhelming, particularly when you have a big pile of documents to go through! It’s easy to fall into the trap of including too much information (just in case) into the report which then ends up huge and essentially just repeating what is already out there. This isn’t a very useful or analytical approach.
So I thought I’d share a few strategies which I have found helpful when having to trawl through a lot of information.
Winter 2015
The conference in Wageningen, The Netherlands, was great! It combined two extension streams – the Association of International Agricultural and Extension Education (US dominated) and the European Symposium on Extension and Education (European dominated) and brought about 380 delegates to the combined event. The theme was ‘Competence and Excellence in Extension and Education’ – and there was certainly a smorgasbord to choose from! I gave a paper on Changing Evaluation Approaches in Australia (see the papers section) and chaired a session on evaluation. It was fitting that the event was held in Wageningen – it has a long history of taking the lead in extension thinking and practice over the last decades. For me, it was where my family lived while I completed my Masters and then completed my PhD.
Is doing some evaluation better than nothing?
I was recently on holidays in Majorca (easy to do when living in London – not so easy from Australia!) where we stayed overlooking a lovely Mediterranean beach called Cala Esmerelda.
Now this is where I say something along the lines of while I was on holiday I was thinking about evaluation and had a ‘light bulb moment’ – except that didn’t happen at all! I was thinking about when I was going to have my next icecream, when the next swim was and did I want red or white wine with dinner.