Swift Kick Central

Speaker, Edtech and Peanut Butter - The Case for Reengineering Student Activities

In college, I tried to start an Entrepreneur Club, but never got past the paperwork. The Student Activities office manager handed me three pages of clearly defined step-by-step guidelines she created on how to start a new group. It was evident she had spent a long time creating the document and was proud of the organization. The problem was I had no desire to go through three pages of steps. Lazy? Maybe. Normal behavior for most uninvolved students? Yes.

From the college's perspective, there's a cost associated to each new club and, under the current system, a college couldn't handle a mass influx of clubs. Instead, colleges have to focus on the front end of the participation tail such as German and Soccer Club to maximize the participation versus output. In the current paradigm, it makes sense to try and squeeze out the maximum value and say that's good enough, even if the current maximum value is only around 16 to 40 percent student participation.

Today there are many online tools that schools use to make the process more efficient. They do work and do speed up the process, but the problem remains that these tools keep us in the same paradigm as before. Student Activities continues to act as the gate keeper in organizing anything or anyone on campus and there is still a cost to maintaining each new club.

In yesterday's post, Kevin said:

"The individual goal then, for education, is to provide every student with a group where they can be on the positive side of the hierarchy, increase their engagement and participation, and experience all of the positive mental effects of that status."

My formation of an Entrepreneur Club was my attempt to get to the positive side of the hierarchy. I was part of much larger groups such as my major and graduation year, but, with both of these, I was on the lower end of the hierarchy. My school's organizing system blocked me from participating unless I was highly motivated. This needs to change.

In Clay Shirky's TED talk, "Institutions vs Collaboration," he lays out the mathematics of participation and what it would take for an institution to allow anyone to participate. It gets good around 9:30 when he says:

"If your system is designed so that you have to give up a quarter of the value, re-engineer the system...Build the system so that anyone can contribute at any amount."

It's time for Student Activities to re-engineer its "gate keeper" system and allow students to self organize and participate, no matter how big or small. Not only will the increased participation cost the institution little to no extra resources, but it will also allow people like me to find the positive side of the hierarchy.

An example of this self-organization is WeFollow. WeFollow is an extremely simple tool for Twitter that allows users to build a directory of interests.

A user can input up to three tags to describe themselves. Each tag is then grouped together and users are ranked based on popularity. Anyone can look at any tag and see who's in the group, how big is the group, and where they fit on the hierarchy of the group. Picking only three tags is a challenge, but reduces spam in the system and forces self-focus.

In thinking about adding myself to WeFollow, I had lots of tag options to pick from -- Chicago, Education, Human, Male, Husband etc... But, the broader the tag, the further I found myself down the list of hierarchy. So, I clarified my tags and choose "Speaker," "Edtech" and "Peanut Butter."

Speaker is the largest pool and I'm pretty far down the list. Edtech is a smaller pool than education, so I'm in the upper 1/3, but, with peanut butter, I'm right near the top, and, anyone who knows me personally, knows I love peanut butter! Granted the tag only has 3 people, but that's the point.

I then connected with my fellow peanut butter lovers on Twitter and off we went. This connection or participation basically cost Twitter and WeFollow nothing, but increased participation in both. By re-engineering an older closed system directory, WeFollow allows anyone to participate, no matter how big or small.

This is not about Student Activities using new tools that make the old paradigm more efficient, it's about Student Activities re-engineering itself to a new paradigm.

Embracing Hierarchy in Groups to Increase Engagement in Education

Two overlapping foundational concepts for this post:

1) Hierarchy Matters

In his best lecture submission to "Big Ideas," Mark Fournier opens by stating he will convince the audience that hierarchy formation in humans is natural, predictable and consequential:

"It is natural in that hierarchies will form wherever people congregate.

It is predictable in that where you stand in the hierarchy depends on your ability to attract and hold positive social attention.

It is consequential in that those who hold low positions are at greatest risk for depression."

He frames the last one in the negative, which isn't as much fun to work with. I don't want to put words in his mouth or stretch his research too much, but I can say, when I get lots of positive social attention, I feel more confident. So I'm saying hierarchy exists and it is consequential - it can foster either confidence or depression.

I'll get into more detail on this later, but Professor Fourneir is using "positive social attention" as the ranking attribute.

I'll come back to the emotional ramifications. For this post, I want to take it in a slightly different direction.

Social attention matters because:

2) Attention Creates Activity and Activity Creates Attention

The causal relationship between attention and activity is easily illustrated by visualizing the opposite: if no one was listening, would you keep talking?

If you stood up at a dinner party, the glasses pinged and all eyes turned your way, wouldn't you feel a strong need to say something?

Our attention is highly social. We want to pay attention to who and what our "friends" are watching, because we are primed to follow the leader (or the hierarchy), and social attention points the way to the leader. This dynamic is so strong that social linking within Facebook and Twitter on certain topics is starting to exceed self directed Google searches. This trend shows our bird like flocking is getting better as our social coordination tools improve.

The flocking and focusing of people's attention creates activity for the folks being watched. This cycle is largely responsible for the initial and continued success of Facebook. Facebook is solid in its market position due to the massive amount of content it has from its users (over 1 billion pictures a month are uploaded). Though Zuckerberg got a lot flack for it, the newsfeed was a way to increase the amount of attention users received for their content and this made them put up more content. More content created more attention, and the cycle continued.

Facebook's latest redesign is attempting to continue this virtuous cycle of attention and activity.

I learned it by watching Facebook.

The simple genius of the Facebook approach, and the huge lesson for education, goes like this:

Hierarchies will always form in a group. Embrace this. Facilitating the group formation and attention will increase participation for those receiving the attention.

The individual goal then, for education, is to provide every student with a group where they can be on the positive side of the hierarchy, increase their engagement and participation, and experience all of the positive mental effects of that status.

The systematic goal for education is to provide a fluid system of smaller overlapping groups. With this model, instead of one big group where some are cool and most are not, there are many small groups where more individuals will have a chance to "be on top." This design will mean more individuals getting more attention and increasing their activity accordingly. This design will systematically increase engagement. Facebook proves it.

Facebook's success with this systematic goal is why Facebook has more photos than Flickr - a site dedicated to photos. It's not about the type of content, it's about the fragmenting and leveraging the social attention of groups.

For education, the topic is not as important as the design of the social attention.

Let's say your college has a million bits of participation and that leads to x amount of student success. At best, your college is following the Flickr model of content segmentation by major.

What if an alternative social attention design could lead to a 4x improvement in engagement in activity across any topic? (4x is the current difference between Flickr and Facebook.)

What would your college feel like with 4 million bits of participation and 4x your current student success?

Let's Make Education Feel More Like Cocaine

Think of your college's orientation process.

Ask a few students how they felt during the orientation days, when they went through them.

Then spend two minutes with this slide deck, with your orientation and intake process in mind.

Discovery Is The New Cocaine - Going Beyond Engagement

View more presentations from Ming yeow Ng.

Andre Malan: What Education Will Look Like

One of my favorite quotes comes at 20:30:

Andre tells the story of John Beasley Murray assigning a wikipedia change as an assignment. He is criticized for outsourcing the grading to wikipedia editors, but his students came to his defense:

"It was harder [for the students] to get those grades from the wikipedia community than it would have been from any professor. They had to work harder. Not only did they have to work harder, but they enjoyed working harder."

The thing that drove me crazy in college was doing work that was arbitrary and being graded in an arbitrary way. Andre argues for "real world" projects graded in real world ways.

Let's focus on the network. What does your learning network think of your work?

This is a very exciting direction for accreditation and a key component of changing the fundamentals of the education system.

Well done Andre.

BTW: I love Canada, its people, and its idea exports. The awesomeness that is their edtech helps make up for the downward trend of Adbusters.

Laddering Student Engagement

In Swift Kick's Dance Floor Theory leadership training, we teach students to recognize and be aware of the gradient of engagement on their campus. We teach them to understand the system and its parts so they can improve it.

The simple comparison is a dance floor, where level 5 dancers are often in the middle going crazy while neutral level attendees are on the wall with their arms crossed, often making fun of the 5s.

Pretend you are hovering above a dance floor:

There are many interesting ramifications to this simple analogy, just a few examples:

Students have different needs depending on where they are at on the spectrum. The same thing that helps a five, e.g. louder music, will further alienate someone on the edge.

Students at the neutral stage need the most work to get them in. The jump from insulator (not effected) to merely resistant (can be effected with enough encouragement) is the most challenging.

Relationships create zones of comfort which enable lowered resistance to engagement. These are the dance circles friends always make.

Closeness is critical to increasing engagement conductivity. Proxemics founder Edward Hall puts it this way:

Like gravity, the influence of two bodies on each other is inversely proportional not only to the square of their distance but possibly even the cube of the distance between them.

So increasing relational density, by increasing intellectual, emotional or physical closeness, is always a good thing. (Keeping in mind the gradient segmentation, you can't dump a neutral in the middle of a bunch of sweaty fives and expect it to work.)

The college campus works just like this dance floor.

The school's goal is to have more people involved, engaged, experiencing, trying, and growing.

It's a momentum game. People on a dance floor, and students on a college campus, move from absorbing energy from the room to giving energy to the room.

They move from modeling disengagement to modeling engagement.

The exciting question and pursuit for education is this: how can we more effectively move students from needing work (time, energy and money) from the institution to doing work for the institution?

I'm using the institution as shorthand for "group," by the way. The dance floor "room" and "institution" are both arbitrary psychological constructs of group. The web allows us to move beyond the previous physical limitations and define groups very loosely, at almost any size.

These groups can, and will, be based not on location - though that still matters due to Proxemics - but on topic interest and passion similarity.

Even in these groups, the same small, highly engaged core, dynamic still applies.

The same question could be "How can we get more people to contribute to wikipedia?" Why is it only 2% did 73.4% of the work? How can we move more people from simply reading (passive education) to writing (active education)?

How can we hack the system to increase the engagement and participation systematically?

For a great conversation, and example of exactly this fluid grouping complete with 5 level dancers, with localized density, as the core of the group - check out the hackedu conversation on twitter.

What's Wrong With the College Speaking Market

There's one name all college speakers know.

That "brand awareness" is a great testament to his ability to market himself and his own products. Not surprising, then, that marketing is what he teaches.

People say he's very successful and that's great.

I'm sure he helps some college speakers with their marketing.

The problem in the college speaking market today, in my opinion, is that there is too much focus on marketing and not enough on meaning.

The marketing message, one of the hundreds of emails we've received from this marketing trainer, has this header:

It addresses a pain of many aspiring and even moderately successful speakers - they are financially stressed. I get it.

It also appeals to our lowest instincts and produces speakers who do the same.

Money is not bad. I'm not against being rich or getting rich.

I simply believe that if you have decided to go into education, in any form, you have to be in it to help first. If you help well, by all means, you are free to make money. If you put money first, however, you won't help much.

Take one minute to watch a segment of this video by Barry Schwartz at TED - start at 12:35

At every conference there are legions of new speakers that will come and go. They will flood the colleges with their postcards and phone calls. They will, in short, market.

But they won't last.

If Barry's morality plea is too squishy for you, Jim Collins will give you 300 odd pages of case studies showing putting money first is simply bad business.

Find your meaning in helping. Do this first.