I was cleaning up some things on my blog today after adding a “Podcast” tab, and I realized that I only share ‘badges’ from two different sources. One is to show that I’m a Connected Principal. And the other is my Edublog Awards nominations… (That’s right ‘nominations’ not actual award winner). The interesting thing is that I really enjoyed reading over all the award nominations in previous years, but really didn’t engage this year. Why? The lists were overwhelmingly large and I didn’t know where to start.
My suggestion:
a) Require that people be nominated at least twice for an award.
b) Require the nominators to actually explain their reasons, share links to posts etc… like I do here:
http://pairadimes.davidtruss.com/2009-edublog-awards-nominations/
and here:
http://pairadimes.davidtruss.com/my-2010-edublog-awards-nominations/
…rather than naming the award and offering up a nomination with no further details or explanation.
c) Link back to the nominations so people can learn why these people were nominated.
Note: Without going back and checking, I think these criteria would have eliminated 3 or 4 of my 6 nominations. But I’m ok with that. It would lead both to me being more appreciative of the ones I did get, and it would promote my desire to explore the blogs of others who have been nominated… And isn’t that what the awards are all about?
If the awards are just a mass list like this again: http://edublogawards.com/2011-3/best-individual-blog-2011/
…Then I think it’s time for me to retire the badges from my blog.
Hi DavidThanks for your feedback. Pretty much most categories you needed to be nominated more than once to be included onto the short list and even that didn’t guarantee that you would make it to the short list; it really depends on how competitive the category is. A lot of people do explain the reasons why they nominate others and only public nominations that link to the awards site and who have submitted their link to their public nomination are accepted. The size of the lists is a hard one. There are a lot of people that feel that every single nomination should be included on the short list and get upset when their nomination isn’t short listed or they aren’t included on the short list. We’ve tried to compromise by making some of the more competitive categories include more nominations. Best Individual blog is a classic example of this where you can have over 150 different nominations. Sue