Swift Kick Central

Smaller, Faster, DFT for Info

I'm working on becoming a faster poster.  It seems like a totally normal phase for bloggers to go through.

One of my personal strengths is thinking.  One of my personal weaknesses is thinking too much.  Blogging lands squarely on the edge of that two sided coin.  When I think, write and share, that's good. Often I think too much and write too little, that's bad.

It happens when I try to be comprehensive or thorough. 

I'm realizing comprehensive information is only good sometimes - and probably rarely or never in the blog medium.  Collaborative learning is about adding small pieces to the overall puzzle - the point is not to finish the puzzle on your own.   

The strength of the blog format is the ease in which small pieces of information can be combined, mashed, and recombined in comments, reposts, track-backs, cross references etc.

Here's a tasty re-post from Logic+Emotion. 

I will come back to specific ideas in future posts.  Let's start with my favorite slides on page 30 and 31. 

A simple networking rule that I reinvented in the shower this morning:

Any piece of information has value proportional to the number of its connections.

(By re-invented, I came to it new by way of thinking of learning curves and collaborative learning models, and it seemed so obvious that I thought there must be multiple books dedicated to the idea.  Then I realized this was the basic idea behind branding.  Oh well.  It was an exciting new gem to me.)

The reason I like Logic + Emotion, and this slide show in particular, is the design of the images. 

If the value of information is proportional to its connections, good informational design increases the potential value of the info by increasing its accessibility and resonance.  More people get it.  More people feel it.

On Their Terms: A Student's Take On Professionals On Facebook

Posted by Kevin Prentiss - Swift Kick

I'm sitting in a hallway at the NACA Northern Plains conference talking with Katie Mraz, who is student Activities Chair for Homecoming at Coe College, in Cedar Rapids, IA.


Katie was in our Advisor Technology Round Up Ed Session this morning and had strong feelings. She said she "Wouldn't be comfortable with professors or advisors messaging her through Facebook" and then afterwards she said that, through the session conversation, she felt like she wanted to clarify.

The best thing about these conferences, the thing that technology will never replace, is the sit down conversation to really understand someone and their thoughts. Katie is a thinker and articulate. She's one of the students that can really dig into an issue. She had reflected more on her first comment and wanted to dig in. I was excited to hear it.

I asked her if she would be willing to discuss the matter and let me blog about it, because this issue - whether staff belong on Facebook or not and how they should act - is a big discussion across the country. Any advice she could give would be invaluable. She agreed, pulled up a chair, and we took this picture:

To the discussion . . .

We started with her clarification:

"I'm uncomfortable with the social aspect [of Facebook] being breached with attempts at professional conversations. . . I don't think Facebook should be used for formal messages. That's not something I'm comfortable with . . . yet."

The "yet" seemed to be an undercurrent of our conversation, Katie had this feeling that technological "progress" was inevitable. She kept qualifying her statements with "I might be the only one" or "maybe I'm old fashioned. . ." She had a sense of futility - that she was alone trying to hold the line against insurmountable odds.

I love the students who are willing to stand up for themselves.

Katie made clear distinctions between her advisors and professors. Professors were more clearly in Katie's "business" category and she was more hesitant with them on Facebook. Like technological progress in general though, she was resigned with that as well:

"I get that professors are going to eventually use Facebook, it's a tool they are going to use. I accept that, though I don't know of any professors who are on it now."

"If they care . . "

She was more open to advisors though. "It's good for advisors to see who we interact with, it's good for them to know what's happening with me, if they care."

I love the distinction she is making here and think it is critical. In her words:

"Advisors decide how much more they care to know about their students. If they get on Facebook, they will see more about students than they would get to know on a normal basis. Then they have to decide if they want to care about that extra or not.

The advisors that I'm connected to on Facebook are the cool ones. They are the ones I want to be friends with, they are the ones that care. "Cool" is defined by the ones that really want to get to know the students, who are here for the students."

It's the words "cool" and "care" that I think are so confusing for advisors. (Let's start by saying it's certainly NOT the "care" that lawyers use in liability fear-flag terms like "duty of care." Katie does not want or need advisors to take responsibility for her.)


In the conversation, this is where the rich experience of sitting across from someone comes into play. When Katie is explaining "cool" and "care", she softens up, it's all in the eyebrows (So much connotative meaning is lost with fast paced tech communication.) She means sincere interest, empathy and understanding (opposed to judgment). She means, simply, friends.

"I compartmentalize my communication. I check e-mail first, then I check Facebook. my e-mail is professional, that's where my advisor talks to me about the NACA presentation, partially because of attachments. Then when I get on Facebook I'm looking for whose birthday it is and what is happening this weekend.


I'm comfortable with professors or staff being on facebook, but I will not be on my most professional in communication with them. I will be "LOL"-ing . . I wouldn't be comfortable IMing either - if their expectation was professional."

Katie's first concern is the relationship. Like most of us, she compartmentalizes her communication and strives to relate appropriately in a variety of contexts. This is an emotionally intelligent and efficient system.

She's right, I think, to protect her own system by saying she's not comfortable with professional relationships through Facebook. But she is NOT saying to professionals stay off of Facebook. She is saying cool is good. Cool means you care. If you care enough to be friends with me show up in Facebook and it's up to you to handle yourself as a "friend".

I know not every advisor wants to be a friend. I can just hear someone arguing the goal of education should not be to be "cool".

Right. Be authoritarian and lame, then try to influence at the college level. Try to dodge "care" and insist on not learning anything new yourself. Good luck.

I'm going to hang out with Katie on Facebook. We have lots more teach each other.

Bad Interface of Big Scary

Bad interface is a huge pet peeve.  Ever since I read Interface Culture a few years ago the idea of someone adding extra confusion and disorientation to our disorientating world bothers me.  Enter the US Government.  I travel all the time and every airport in the country has some version of this sign all over the place:

It hasn't changed since August of last year, when it was briefly moved to red after the british plot.  Every time I'm in an airport I'm reminded of simply this: HIGH RISK. What, exactly, is this colored, 5-level interface helping me

navigate?  Is it simply my level of fear and awareness?  If turning up and down my level of awareness is the goal, wouldn't it be important to change it more than once a year? Raise your hand if you think this will be green in your lifetime. This particular interface, setting out to control my level of anxiety and fear-tinged awareness, just makes me angry.  Then sad.

Swift Kick has left the MySpace

Swift Kick has had a company page on Myspace for a couple of years.  We've met people, it's been mostly cool. Recently, myspace has gone down hill. It was always a little rough around the edges, and this left room for creativity to flower and we enjoyed that. 

In the last year, however, it's just been lame.  Myspace has never worked well, but it has not been fixed.  There is a very low quality relationship between News corp and myspace, or the engineers and their work, or the company and its customers.  Google should be embarrassed about their bedfellow.

Certainly some individuals have designed and written beautiful things on their pages.  Quality can be found amongst the dregs.  I'll still leave my personal page up for a little longer (as a universe marker for anyone trying to track me down). But as for Swift Kick, myspace is now officially dead to us.

Facebook as a Forum of Action

Facebook provides a direct connection to college students. As student affairs professionals, we see the potential for building stronger rapport with our students by using this tool in Student Activities. In an earlier note I mentioned using Facebook to advertise events; however, that is only the beginning. Facebook can play a vital role in increasing engagement and involvement on campus. However, it is important that we not clog the drain…causing our students to scatter. I offer a few suggestions to increase involvement through Facebook…

First, hesitate in using Facebook as a mass-mailing connection. No group or network needs to receive all announcements. You can provide great customer service by making ads, notes, or Wall-to-Wall blurbs interest specific and sent by students to students.

Next, for institutions that have concerns with the legalities of information posted on Facebook profiles, provide educational trainings (include faculty, staff, & students). Try not to stress only the negative or what will happen if students are “caught” not following policy. Instead, more strongly emphasize how Facebook can be used to stay in touch with a global community and what resources are available. Provide information on how Facebook strategies or tools can be used in “real life” to encourage interpersonal communication. Students begin networking before they even get to campus…so why not encourage the use of Facebook to help facilitate positive connections?

In addition, Facebook can be used to enhance things you’re currently doing. Do you currently host focus groups on hot topics in your community or the world? Facebook can be used as a channel to begin the discussion. Ask your students to place hot topic questions on the wall of groups they may already belong to (hopefully on one that’s related to the topic, even if it’s loosely). Then, ask them to record the remarks/results. This is great for quick polling or to see where your network would fall on an opinion spectrum. For example, SGA was thinking of raising the activities fee on campus, so students placed hot topic questions on walls in groups relating to finance and campus involvement to gauge support before doing a physical campaign.

Finally, create a forum of action. Your campus probably already has activist/community involvement groups (Eco clubs, Relay for Life, etc.). Speak with these organizations and encourage them to spread the word on a global level by creating a Facebook group. (If they’re not interested in a Group, ask them to write Notes or Blogs about their experience. These also catch on like wildfire.) The Free Hugs Campaign spread internationally when the student creator took his local idea to a new level with Facebook. Our students post information to get attention, so why not encourage them to step into the spotlight?

The best press for us as professionals is our students in action, impacting the world on a global scale – educating others and making a difference at the same time. Facebook is a channel of communication that will help us to facilitate learning opportunities, engage our students on a different level, and work to create a forum of action. Try it! You might find you like it!

Emma Knows We're Not Wearing Pants

I love 37signals and reference their book all the time.  They are masters of the 90% solution.  They are masters at what they call "Judo": minimum effort, maximum return.  They have a very small team with a huge philosophical impact based on the reach of their tools (over 1 million users).  My dream is to follow this model in education.

We at Swift Kick are still learning Judo.  We are in the process of rolling out Red Rover (link will download the .pdf brochure) and are deep into the minute detail debates -

"When a student leader logs in to create a topic post, how many tags can they add to any give post?"

etc. etc. etc.

I called Emma (a Swift Kick employee who focuses on logistics and community) last night to ask her if she would get involved in some of the discussions.  I thought her college student leadership experience would really help with some of the prioritization.  She paused an awkward amount of time and then came charging out with it:

"Honestly I'm not in the best place to contribute to the project.  I'm not all sold on the value of this thing but more importantly I think we are taking on too much and I think the idea of taking on a huge software development project is insane."

Emma is wonderfully honest.  I love that this is the culture we are building here - honesty is welcome, from everyone.  She rattled off all of the things we are doing sub-par.  Sales calls, speaking engagement follow up, the community projects we've been talking about for 6 months, she said "We are a long ways from being good at the core of the business, why would we expand further."

As one of the leader's of this company, this is an important bit of information.  Emma may be the canary in the mine shaft.

I just wrote about doing too much just recently, about how I feel like we are half naked pretending not to notice.  Emma is just saying we should fix that first.

I'm clear that we are running hot without the wheels being fully bolted on.  I absolutely know that working on Red Rover has cost us sales of speaking gigs. 

This is the game of entrepreneurialism.  Doing too much is a risk.  If our cash flow drops too low, if our quality of service and product drops too low, if we upset customers, damage relationships or tarnish the brand, all of these things are very bad.  This is what Emma is worried about.  She wants us to focus on what we have been doing and what we have promised.  She's obviously not wrong to want this.

I see other risks too.  The risk that frightens me is doing the standard speaking thing.  I'm afraid of complacency and the "norm".  I see the risk of not fulfilling an even bigger promise to have an effect on education.

Red Rover is a good idea, and it will be even better with Emma's input.  It has the potential to be an iPod that seeds the philosophies we teach in institutions across the country.

The trick is finding the window of opportunity between the risk of too much and the risk of not enough. 

I'm glad Emma is here to help us find the balance.  I'm glad Swift Kick matters enough to her that she is honest. 

When I got up this morning, she had made comments on all kinds of things in the Red Rover development boards. 

Visions of School 2.0

From the blog 2 Cents Worth » Visions of School 2.0:

"My vision of school/classroom 2.0 is, more than anything else, about conversations.  Traditional schools involved teachers and textbooks delivering information to students, and students reflecting that information back.  To better serve their future, today’s classrooms should facilitate teaching and learning as a conversation — two-way conversations between teachers and learners, conversations between learners and other learners, conversations among teachers, and new conversations between the classroom and the home and between the school and its community. "

Christian Long, President and CEO of DesignShare and think:lab.

Conversations are certainly a beautiful and useful means to learn. Considering multiple intelligence theory and multiple learning modalities, I have one personal note: sub "conversations" with interactions.

It blows my mind that so many classes that are meant to set students up for the future are merely 'listen to lecture', 'read required materials', 'write papers', 'take tests'.

This is a pretty awesome context to set up kids to live in the 1800's.

Good day to you, sir!

Announcing Events Without Clogging The Drain: Recommendations for Student Affairs Professionals

Facebook debuted as a way for students to network and find “friends”. When asked, some professionals in Student Affairs are hesitant while others support its use as an innovative channel of communication – a place to directly connect with students and encourage their involvement on campus. In theory, it’s a great tool; however, quickly the channel can burn due to misuse. Think of your Email inbox. How much is spam and how much is worthwhile information? Without creating a feasible plan of action, using Facebook fool heartedly can create another clogged drain of communication.

I believe Facebook, and other social networking sites, are great learning and networking tools. I encourage student groups to utilize this forum of communication on a limited basis. To prevent burning the channel, I recommend a change in our approach to using Facebook as a tool to advertise our events. Overload is not the goal.

First, contact should be student to student when advertising events. As advisors, we hesitate to relinquish approval of advertisements; however, it is necessary to prevent attaching a stigma to the event. (Hopefully, we have enough trust in our programmers that they are aware of the message which needs to be relayed.) Plus, our students know the lingo better than we ever will!

Second, diversify the use of the Facebook tools. Create an Event Invite for one event and a Group for another. Post Wall-to-Wall Announcements and send individual messages. One student should not receive all 4 forms of contact. We don’t need to create spam, just manage our delivery.

Third, use Facebook as a teaser. Provide limited information on the Groups(s) page, providing strong enticement for the user to check out a webpage or billboard, online calendar or office. (Ask your students about all the ads for winning a free iPod or trips…don’t create pop-ups, just teasers.)

Next, be weary of buying ads within your network. Recognize that you are not the only “business” trying to get your message out there and have no recognized say in where your ad is placed. For example, your ad for a Leadership speaker may follow an ad for a “Kegger Karnival at Kyle’s” or “Free Wings at Big Bill’s”. What message are you sending to the recipient? The potential is there for your ad to be associated with free wings and kegs at the Leadership lecture, depending on how your user interprets the information.

Finally, create a profile for yourself. Encourage students to “friend” you. After all, you’re the one having the most fun on campus, right? (But don’t be discouraged if they don’t…they may think you’re “out to get them”). Also, use your photo album space to post pictures of your student leaders involved in campus events. We know actions speak louder than words, so speak up by showing what current students are doing on campus (especially if you have photos of your informal campus leaders…others will want to get their name out, too!)

These are simply recommendations. Even as I write students may be questioning the presence of advisors on Facebook and be hesitant to welcome advertising into their networking arena. So…step cautiously, but embrace Facebook for what it is…another way to connect to our students.

A Guide to Facebook for School Faculty, Administration and Staff

“Should I, as an academic professional in higher education, have an online social networking account?”  Yes, and here is why and how.

The phenomenon of Myspace and Facebook snuck up on us like a freight train with a silent running motor.  In just 4 years, social networking sites grew to over 300 million accounts with 93% of all college students using them and 63% logging in every day .  With numbers like that, its dangerous to turn our backs and pretend these sites will go away like the pet rock, big hair or the Y2K bug.

Many academic professionals already have accounts and see the benefits for themselves and their career.

For example, Facebook has several public groups directly related to student affairs professionals:

- Student Affairs Professionals Unite (2,300+ Members)
- Student Affairs (1,025+ Members)
- Student Affairs Professionals (1,376+ Members)

These groups are a database of collective knowledge from student affairs professionals around the country.  The group’s participants share and discuss real campus issues, such as:

- Marketing Ideas
- Low Cost Programming Ideas
- Residence Hall Research
- Black History Month Ideas

This technology allows us to connect and share information in ways we never could in the past.  So from a career standpoint, a great value exists in using social networking sites to connect with other SA professionals.

Now, what about the 93% of your students using these sites?

Part of the job of student affairs is to increase student engagement on campus.  To increase engagement we have to increase our relevancy to them and their world.  We have to keep up with the world they live in.  We understand our world, but how well do we understand their world?

To remain relevant to today’s students, we have to engage ourselves in their world, and that means having a social networking account.  However, having an account comes with rules of engagement.

The Rules of Engagement:

1) Facebook – Create a Facebook account, don’t worry about Myspace.  Wired magazine predicts that Myspace will splinter this year, and more importantly the majority of 17-25 year olds prefer Facebook.

2) Understand Your Purpose – Facebook is a social environment first, an academic environment second, or maybe even fourth or fifth.  The worst thing you can do is create an account and then post messages to all your students about work related activities.  This is equivalent to going to a party and bringing an Excel sheet with the school’s budget.  Your primary purpose should be to connect with your students.  Work will become a byproduct, as I will explain later.

3) Friendships – Don’t feel offended if you are not immediately bombarded with friend requests from all the students you work with.  Don’t feel hurt if some students who you request to be their friend politely decline. It’s nothing against you personally, some students prefer not to open up their entire world to your position in the institution and you should respect that.  It’s that kind of privacy filtering that also keeps them safe on the Internet.

Think about their Facebook account as their dorm room and understand that some would not feel comfortable having you hanging out on their couch.  Seek out those that you have a pre-existing relationship with and friend them first, then let the more distant acquaintances friend you at their discretion.

4) “Poking” – If someone “pokes” you as friends, it’s proper Facebook etiquette to “poke” them back.

5) Profiles – You have every right to share as much or as little about yourself as you want.  Just remember you are still their advisor and it might be awkward for a student to read about how their advisor has a passion for European nude beaches.  You are also still an employee and representative of your school or university. That said, don’t expect your students to have the same discretion as you do.  Their profiles may be filled with info that makes you want to cringe.  The reason for their lack of awareness comes partly from a lack of education on the topic, and partly from the stage of brain development in their prefrontal cortex, the processing center that, among other things, considers the consequences of their actions.  Full brain development does not occur until our mid-twenties.

Expect them to read all about you on your profile, but you should cautiously reciprocate that offer.  I suggest not spending time snooping around your student’s pages.  If they comment you can comment back.  If they ask you to read something then read it.  Otherwise remember you are a guest in their world, so you are playing by their rules.

6) Work Messages – The time will come, quicker than you expect, when a student will message you about something work related.  When this happens, first, stuff your eyeballs back into their sockets. Second, respond to the question.  There is a BIG difference between you initiating a work matter with a student and them initiating it with you.  Yes, it’s unfair but those are the rules of engagement.

One advisor told me about how he was using Facebook to stay in touch with his students on a personal level, but more often than not they kept emailing him about work questions.  It got to the point where he was upset because he felt like all the students wanted to use his account for was work when he just wanted to be friends.  If this happens to you, know you are still building the relationship simply by being able to communicate in their world, even if it’s work related.

7) Campus Marketing – Facebook is a great place to promote events happening on your campus, if you understand how.  Get your students to do all the promoting; don’t ever let promotions originate from your account.  If it comes from the students it’s cool, if it comes from you, it’s more often lame.  Sorry, I still think you are cool.

8) Networking – Take the time to be active in peer groups like the ones listed above.  In this environment be proactive in messaging, poking and sharing about your profession.  Don’t worry about the students, they are going to see everything you do in their “mini-feed” (a report of your Facebook activities that all of your friends get) so the more you use Facebook, the cooler and more savvy you’ll look to your students.  The real reason to use it is for your own networking as gold mine of information, resources, and relationships related to your career.

9) The Bad – What if, while you are online, you see something that is damaging to your school?  This is one of the hottest issues with schools right now.  Every school handles this situation differently, mostly because there is a wide range in behavior policies and understanding of the technologies.  Also there is a difference between public and private schools in terms of freedom of speech.  The extreme reaction has been punishing all parties involved and blocking Facebook on their campus.  Others have created yearlong educational programs for their students.  Most schools fall somewhere in the middle and have yet to develop a healthy policy that works for both the students and the administration.  If your school is in the middle, then it’s your discretion as to how to react. If you do see something questionable, often times a simple reminder message to a student will help them clean up their profile.

Whatever your school’s policy, remember that online networking technology is here to stay and will become a bigger and deeper part of our lives. Myspace and Facebook are just the start.  Being proactive by educating your students on proper and effective use is a great place to start.

These 9 points act as a starting point for you to venture into the online social networking world.  Facebook can be an amazing engagement tool for you to connect with your students.  The personal benefits of networking with peers from around the country is the icing the cake.  So go ahead and create your account and upload your first picture.  Afterwards, make sure to request to be my friend.

See you on Facebook. Poke!

When the Content is Crappy, the Pipe Doesn't Matter: Colleges and Facebook

After realizing the headline made all the difference in click through on my own RSS reader, I decided to spice up my own headlines. How'd I do?

Left a post about this on Kevin Guidry's Mistaken Goal and wanted to back up to some thinking and follow up with some visuals.

We spend so much time making pretty slides for presentations and they just lay around in between our travels. So I wanted to share. A couple of visuals does wonders for a conversation.

(Side Note: we dedicated ourselves along time ago to using Creative Commons copyright with our materials. Philosophically, we think it is silly to try to own/ protect education. So we will be releasing our slides and images as we have time to put them up. Of course this means some people will download our slides and try to do the presentations themselves and not hire us. That's okay. We want to change the world, not own it.)

(Plus, just for fun, we've randomly included a few really cryptic slides so that anyone who tries to give the presentation will have to admit in front of the audience they don't know what the hell that one means. C'mon, that's funny. We've all been there.)

Here was the comment:

We’ve found it helps the conversation to start with a distinction between content and channel.

Content is good or not, based on quality, freshness, and most importantly for education, relevancy.

Technology is providing new channels, Social Networking, Text Msg, e-mail, RSS feed, etc. Many of the schools we talk to confuse the content with the channel - and want to shove the same poor, not targeted / irrelevant, content down the new channel, thinking the channel makes the difference. (They think, as you mentioned, that the new channel is the panacea, and this results, as Tom said, in channel burnout, where students cut off the school.)

Students tell us all the time they don’t read the school’s e-mail, because “most of it is junk.” (Sad, isn’t it, that many students see their schools as spammers?)

There’s another layer of technology needed around the content, to improve it’s speed and relevancy. This will reduce the friction in any channel, and maybe then we can get into intrinsic benefits of one channel over another for different types of information.

The current excitement and focus around the new channel(s) misses the real issue.

Relevancy, btw, is the ultimate meeting them where they are at. I think this is step one. I would love to hear how your thoughts changed on this aspect of the conversation.

We start the conversation here:

I know that this simple pic might be controversial. Many immediately go to the parental mindset of education and think "Hey wait, education isn't all fun and games, we know best, that's why we educate."

There is a time where students should learn what society wants them to learn (i.e. the basics) regardless of whether or not they can see the value themselves. I'm talking about later high school / college, and there, I believe, it's all about engagement. About the same time students are capable of using their pre-frontals (even inconsistently) to see longer term value, they become very adept at tuning things out. If the students are engaged the educational process is efficient (fast and fun) if the students are disengaged, the process is a waste of everyone's time and money. (This is not new thinking, it's just in the context of technology, The Big Picture school, among others, are following the same thread.)

So here's the "hop":

Engagement = Education
and
Relevancy = Engagement

Therefore Relevancy = Education. It's all nicely circular, just like good philosophy.

Much of this is documented in broad strokes: Astin, Wulff, NSSE, et. al. It's just easier to work with in clear statements, rather than qualified academic speak.

We are interested in the practice, so we have to get clear. (Even if this means cutting off some of the ragged academic edges, as long as we know what we are cutting off.)

With the practice, there are three steps to building relevancy: Survey, Segment, and Deliver. Surveying, as the comment alluded to, is the first step to getting good content. The institution needs to know, individual by individual, what is relevant to them.

These are the fast free / lower cost e-mail survey tools. A place to start. To go further than aggregate data, to deliver relevancy, they need to be tied in to be either a) imported into a central database, or b) contact info distributed to topic leaders who will communicate with their interested parties directly.

(Side note: Banner / Sun Gard tries to deliver relevancy via "customizable" portal, but the channels are filtered by role (i.e. professor, student) not be individual, so they are missing big opportunities. The group feature set sounds good in theory, but is clunky beyond workable and consistently gets destroyed by Facebook Groups. Student leaders use what works, they know.)

First:

and then:

Giving the institution and the school:

Allowing the school to group, or segment:

Then and only then, does the discussion of how to deliver the relevant content come in to play. That's when when we can talk channels and the various merits, or drawbacks of each:

*Note: the chart on the left is taken from Chris Anderson's book, The Long Tail.