Swift Kick Central

Students Helping Students

Kansas State University's "Students Helping Students" campaign has the potential to be a national theme for peer-to-peer learning. For those who've had us on campus working with your student leaders, you should recognize the Blender Events and Flash Mobs throughout the video. Enjoy!

What If We DO Succeed in Increasing Student Engagement?

Over the weekend, I was talking with a group of students and advisors from Kutztown University about student engagement. In Swift Kick, we use dance floors to describe how student leaders are the ones in the center of the dance (fully engaged), and the rest of the student body (60-84% according to NSSE) are against the wall, not participating. It looks like this:

  

If the above image represents an oil reserve, the outside area represents the largest pool of potential energy at an institution.

Lots of tools are great at helping student affairs departments better extract 2% more energy from the, already involved, student leaders by automating paperwork etc, but what about the rest of the oil reserve?

The goal should be to unleash more of the potential energy, or in other words, get more students engaged, but what happens if we actually DO succeed? Image tomorrow, 20% more of your campus shows up at your office and wants to get involved...

When I told this to the Kutztown people, there was a look of joyous panic on their faces. Joyous because they succeeded at solving student apathy, panic because they knew they couldn't support a 20% increase in engagement with their current resources. Think about it....

• 20% more office space requests for their group
• 20% more room reservations for events 
• 20% more marketing material needing approved
• 20% more paperwork to fill out
• 20% more groups to monitor
• 20% more people needing an advisor to listen to their love spats
  

With school budgets already hurting, and student affairs budgets pulled as far as they can go, it's NOT possible to support much more engagement on campus with our current model.

If the vision is to see 90%,70% or even 50% of an institution engaged, the ONLY way to do this is to decentralize engagement by building systems that automatically facilitate peer-to-peer connections. It's about rethinking the role of student affairs from the gate keepers of engagement to the facilitators of peer-to-peer introductions.

The Value of Integrating Social Media into Education

Dean Long, of LAUS, only needs two minutes to perfectly explain how every educator should be thinking about social media.

And if your life is too busy for a two minute interlude, here are the highlights:

• Use SM (Social Media) to cultivate a community around the activities already being done on campus
• Support student bloggers
• Let students be the producers of the school's content
• Give students the capacity to think and reflect around their experiences
• Schools benefit by showcasing what they do to a larger audience
• Using SM will cultivate a larger community
• Reflective learning is nothing new, the new challenge is translating the goal into a digital era
  

Your New Best Friend, Social Networking in the First Year Experience (Part 4)

The following is the fourth draft slice of an upcoming curriculum supplement I am writing for Bedford / St. Martin's press.

Here are parts 1, 2, and 3.

Your comments and critique, as always, are appreciated.

Comfort

Comfort is curing the loneliness that inevitably comes with moving to a new peer network. Some evidence suggests that the brain may even process social exclusion using the same circuitry as physical pain. Loneliness hurts.

I grew up in Minnesota and went to college at the University of Oregon. In high school I had an incredible group of friends. I was never cool per se, but I felt appreciated, influential, and comfortable.

My first year at the University of Oregon was a social mess. I was lonely and often depressed.

In hindsight, it's clear that my sense of personal worth was embedded in my social network. The network I left behind. I went off to college and left my confidence at home.

My roots were deep in Minnesota - 18 years with pretty much the same group. The creation of my group while growing up was unconscious and slow; it was identity development in a crock pot. (For those not from the midwest, that's slow marination in low heat.)

It took me a few years to find my friends at Oregon, re-grow some roots, and reestablish my sense of belonging.

Those first few years were not very "educational" in the sense of engagement with my classes or academic ideas. Being lonely colored everything in gray. Belonging comes before confidence, aspiration, or problem solving and learning on Maslow's Hierarchy and this is reflected in my transcript. Big lecture halls just made me feel more alone - people all around me, but very few connections.

I had it better than many. My family was strong and supportive (if far away). I had models of college success nearby. It was still a very hard time.

Being in a strange new place surrounded by new people is disorientating. What has changed is that the tools to stay in touch with the old network have become much, much, better. When I went to college in the early 1990's, I largely left my network behind. I had no cell phone to keep me in contact with old friends and parents. I had to plan a scheduled time to call home, or rely on written letters that came few and far between.

Cellphones, instant messaging, Skype and Facebook, as connective technologies, all serve to keep the new student connected to their old network of family and friends. In 2008, a poll published by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that technology enables connections "that revolve around remote cell phone interactions and communal internet experiences."

Some see improved connectivity to home as a concern. The concern is that students will come to be addicted to their online relationships in their old network at the expense of new, real world relationships. The other common concern is that connected parents let students feel coddled, preventing them from growing up, and destroying their ability to make new contacts and become an independent person.

Embedded in both of these concerns is a preference for discomfort as catalyst for growth. The worry is that comfort - either through online relationships or frequent conversations with parents - will actively prevent growth.

A core tenet of John Gardner's First Year Experience movement is to move higher education past this "college as boot camp" mentality. The goal is not to make students suffer, weeding out the weak. The goal is to make them successful. More swimming lessons, less throwing them into the deep end. To abuse the metaphor, if Facebook and "Helicopter parents" serve as "social floaties" for those that need them, all the better, as long as they don't get stuck with them.

Switching networks, from old to new, is important for growth. Getting emotionally and mentally stuck in the old network does not help the student succeed. Cutting them off from the home network entirely is not the answer. It's also not possible.

Much like the media perpetuating fear around the internet, higher education loves to share ghost stories about helicopter parents. Did you hear the one about the student that brought their parent to a job interview? While surely some parents go over board, the name calling and stereotyping unfairly impugns the actions of the vast majority of parents who are simply being helpful. In an era of ruthless budget cuts, higher education can use all the help it can get from a student's supportive home network.

The benefit of a supportive network is highlighted by the stories and statistics of its absence. First generation college students are more likely to be an anomaly among their home peer network. For them, there is an acute need to connect to the new network and new peer norms.

Carlito Umali gave his commencement speech at his college. I found him because he was profiled in an article in the Seattle Post Intelligencer. Carlito is notable because he is a first generation college student who succeeded against the odds. More than half of first generation college students who enroll in a four year college will not graduate.

What does he think is the most important aspect of his success?

"Community, I believe, is really the foundation of all education no matter what you're studying," the English major said. "In one way or another, you're trying to find community."

If the student is lucky enough to have a supportive network, this early, now transportable, sense of emotional security and belonging is actually a great place to start. It's a terrific foundation on which they can build new connections to their new place, without having to endure the rootlessness that I felt.

These tools - cell phones, the internet in general and Facebook in particular - are great for staying in touch with the old network, but they are not as good at helping the student find comfort within a new network. They are designed for social capital maintenance, not the social or academic integration that is needed.

Finding Comfort Online:

Even though it's not designed for it, students do try to use Facebook to find comfort in common attributes among the new people. The nature of the web, and search specifically, changes the game. Online, search replaces small talk. This is especially true in asynchronous environments (anything other than live, synchronous chat). Students naturally start by trying to search and express their identity attributes as a starting point for social comfort.

Most schools will have an incoming first year student group on Facebook, called "Hamline University, class of 2013" or something similar. The wall posts on these groups show students putting up identity flags: "Who's playing soccer this fall?" "Who else is in Watson Hall fourth floor?"

The problem with the Facebook wall as a place to meet new people is that each question pushes down the question in front of it, so a typical wall has many questions and very few replies. While it's better than nothing, it's far from ideal.

Schools get concerned, and occasionally overreact, when the common facet of introduction on the Facebook wall sinks to the lowest common denominator: "Who else can't wait to party this fall?" These comments come from students who are not shy, but don't yet have a better conversation starter.

Students want to meet new people to create comfort in their new environment. Many of us find meeting new people in a new environment a bit of a challenge. For many students (or adults), if they can't find something positive to meet over, they will meet over beer. This can be an especially challenging dynamic for schools that serve as a "13th grade" - a second choice culture, where students end up there precisely because they have not yet found a direction for themselves. These students need the most support in connecting over something that won't lead to a hangover.

How can you help students find comfort within the First Year Experience?

Label the process. Let students know of the emotional challenges to expect. Help them frame the positive feelings they will get from Facebook and their online interactions with the old network, while at the same time emphasizing the fact that their success will be in finding community feeling and comfort within their new environment. Ask them about their success in using Facebook to find new people - have an open dialogue on the topic - experiences will vary. The students will learn from each other in this discussion and begin to place new goals on old (to them) technology. With the goal of feelings of community in mind, have the students brainstorm tactics for reaching those feelings. When I've facilitated these conversations in the past, it does not take long for some students to express the importance of finding possible connections online and then following through to a face to face meeting. This "don't get stuck online" reminder is best delivered by peers in discussion, rather than by the teacher or facilitator.

Invite student leaders, or other model students from past years, into your class to share their stories of finding an early community and what steps they took. These stories will add meaning to future assignments designed to help with social and academic connection and integration. If you are lucky enough to be in a school where there are blogs (online journals or reflective learning artifacts) from previous students at the same school, provide these to your students - prioritizing blogs of students from similar backgrounds. It is extremely interesting for students to read the thoughts of people like them who have been through the experiences they are currently going through. Second best are blogs from other schools. At the end of this supplement, there will be links to resources online to help you find these blogs.

Bring exercises into class that help students explore their interests through conversation and activities with other classmates or members of the college community. This will begin to grow their expectations of their network - moving past simply social comfort (people to hang out with) and into topic connection (people to learn with).

Work with orientation to expand the identity expression / connection pattern as close the admission process as possible. Studies have shown that a longer orientation time period leads to better retention rates. The more time students have to get socially situated, the more comfortable they become. Refer to the online materials for examples of schools using technology to implement various versions of this.

What to expect from technology in the near future.

Students will continue to share personal information online through Facebook, blogs, Twitter, and photo-sharing sites. Technology will continue to get better at leveraging this information to connect students to others based on shared interests, backgrounds, and goals. Many organizations and private companies are actively working on this challenge. A few schools across the country have already deployed "roommate matching" services that connect students with similar interests or levels of cleanliness. This is a small example of the possibilities.

The narrative of dislocation, loneliness, and finding one's place is very common and very old. As more students blog, schools will begin to aggregate these narratives, providing an authentic, journal like glimpse into lives of other students. Peer stories, combined with relevancy matching, will serve as a powerful source of comfort.

Engagement through social media (blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) creates huge amounts of live data. New tools will leverage this data to provide live assessments of a variety of online social activity. These behavioral metrics, will, over time, begin to supplant less accurate and less actionable self reported surveys for both focusing staff and faculty time where it is needed and providing feedback and encouragement to the students. Imagine a dashboard display that measures the social connectivity of students based on twitter conversations, Facebook photo tagging, new "friends" on Facebook, school fan page responses, etc. If you as a faculty member could map the social network of your class, and watch it develop over time, you would have a powerful feedback mechanism to help the students that need it. While the statistical models are still emergent, the collection technologies are here today.

The tools will evolve, but the goal will remain the same; Help new students find social comfort. Help them find comfort within the first year experience class and at the school. You are not competing with their home network, you are building on top of it. Creating or leveraging a foundation of social comfort for students reduces their risk of them dropping out and allows them to move to the next level of student success: connection.

Your New Best Friend, Social Networking in the First Year Experience (Part 2)

The following is the second draft slice (here's part one) of an upcoming curriculum supplement I am writing for Bedford / St. Martin's press.

Long time readers of this blog will recognize these ideas.  Swift Kick, and Red Rover, have been focused on social capital and engagement for sometime. As the overall curriculum comes together, we're tying all of the pieces into one framework. 

Your comments, as always, are highly appreciated. 

The Dance Floor Theory Engagement Model

Engagement is essential to progress at every level of the student success pyramid. If the student is engaged, then they will, at whatever pace they need, find success. Achieving engagement is a responsibility of both the institution and the student - it's a combination of the design and the learner.

Engagement as a term, and goal, is much more useful than other similar terms, like commitment or persistence, simply because engagement sounds fun. Engagement has a strong element of choice and exploration, where persistence has echos of discipline and drudgery. Engagement, as a goal, can be happily shared by a student.

Teaching students to be aware of their engagement, to expect it of themselves and to manage it to get what they want, is a very powerful addition to the standard curriculum.

An interesting way to explore the dynamics of engagement is by exploring the dynamics of dance floors. Dance floors and college campuses work the same way.

Imagine looking at a normal dance and rating the individual's engagement in the dance by their body language. Rate the engagement on a spectrum from three, meaning the most engaged, to neutral, meaning not yet engaged. (Where neutral is a friendlier way of denoting what comes below one.)

If you could hover above any dance floor with this rating system, you would  consistently see the "3s" clumped together in the middle and the rest forming this pattern:

This self segmentation is simple people stuff. People like to hang out with other people at the same level of engagement - "3s" with "3s" and "2s" with "2s" and so on. There is some natural friction between disparate states of engagement.

If you were to drag a "neutral" into a pack of "3s," the "3s" would attack, and try to get the neutral up to their level (probably freaking out the poor "neutral" in the process.) Most people will increase their engagement slowly, needing time to make connections and increase their comfort, competence and confidence. It rarely works to pop one person from a "neutral" state of engagement to a "3", but, crucially, "neutrals" will watch "3s" for inspiration, even while they get their next new move from the "1s" (because those look a little easier to pull off).

Everyone will likely be effected by everyone else, and the whole system, the whole dance floor, or the whole institution, will be judged by the collective average level of engagement. 

Though it might have been awhile, we’ve all been to good dances and bad dances. A good dance has all levels, but the average is high. At a good dance, a new person is likely to give it a go, just based on following the crowd's average. A bad dance is defined by a low average level of engagement. It's just not fun.  More people will leave a bad dance (and be less inclined to attend the next one).

If, as noted earlier, 60% of students at four year institutions never participate in college sponsored activities, we have a dance where 60% of the people present are not dancing. Our college campuses, on average, are not great dance floors. 

So how do we increase engagement? How do we turn a bad dance into a good one?  We shouldn't be surprised that students, like many of us at awkward wedding dances, look to alcohol as social lubrication, but there is a better way. 

If you ask one hundred people on the street, "What makes a bad dance?" ninety-nine of them will say bad music. They will blame the DJ. Just like students will blame professors or the activities department (as the analogous DJs on campus.) But yet, what I saw, all through junior high, was groups of friends forming circles. If the bond of friendship was strong enough, and the vibe was supportive, it didn't matter what the DJ played, that circle would go crazy to any song that came on.

In short, circles of friends trump bad DJs, or, put another way, social connections are more important than music.

While the DJ's music does matter, as does the professors' curriculum, focusing on social capital of students is a more effective method of increasing engagement and making a better dance floor.

Research on college campuses supports this. The 2006 National Survey of Student engagement put it succinctly: "The most important factor in student engagement is the connections between the students." The dance floor analogy gives us further subtleties. There are crucial patterns to the connections.

The goal is to increase the average state of engagement for the entire campus. We do this by moving one person, one level at a time. In short hand - the goal is simply X + 1.  

To help students maintain their engagement at every level of the success pyramid, education should design systems that use various technologies to provide dynamic assessment of engagement and interests to provide the following:

1) Relevant introductions to other students who are at a similar level of engagement. Neutrals to neutrals, 1s to 1s, etc.

2) Connections to students who share interests, at a slightly higher level of engagement (X+1), for a model and a new, accessible, peer group in which they can develop competence and confidence.

3) Visibility into the most engaged and most competent circles for inspiration.

These dance floor patterns of engagement are how people work. These successful engagement and learning patterns are how education has always worked. What is now new is that we now have accessible technology that can combine publishing, expression, automatic match making, and live individual and systematic assessment to optimize all of these processes.

This is the huge opportunity for social networking. Social networking in general, and the many varieties of web 2.0 services, now allow us to map, teach, and intentionally facilitate the social learning systems of students.

As students publish where they are at now - in words, pictures, or videos - systems can match them with other students who are producing similar content. Various search methods allow learners to easily find "people like them." Assessment can be based on live behavioral data already being provided by students. This new data allows educational stakeholders, faculty, staff, peer mentors, etc. to focus their energy where it is needed.

As students progress, they'll leave a record of their educational path for other students to follow, providing many +1 examples.

The most successful students will continue to publish their content online, where it can serve as an inspiration to an unlimited number of students simultaneously.

While it will take awhile for all of these broad goals to be realized in an experience as simple as an iPod, you may be surprised by just how much of this is possible, and already happening, today.

In the next section, I'll review each of three phases of the student success model and discuss what is currently happening, what can be brought into the classroom, and what future developments will bring.

The Anyone, Anything, Anytime, Anywhere Education

Whether educational institutions like it or not, education is changing and walled gardens are evaporating. New ideas in education are emerging...or, probably better to say, old ideas are finally able to be technologically implemented. Whichever the case, the change is no longer bound by old ideas like nationality, income, time, or location.

ANYONE:

The One Laptop Per Child Association is a non-profit organization whose mission is to:

Create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning.

To date, the non-profit has shipped approximately 1.4 million laptops to the world's poorest school children in 24 countries such as Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Colombia, and Uruguay.

The laptop connects to the internet through a mesh network which provides a cheap but powerful connection. That means 1.4 million of the world's poorest children have access to the internet and soon ANYONE will have access to the internet.

ANYTHING:

The current tuition at Stanford University is around $35,000. Don't have the money, but still want a world class education? No worries. Stanford, along with other institutions such as MIT and Harvard, post many of their classes online for FREE. You won't get a degree by taking these courses, but if your goal is to learn for the sake of learning then you now have free access to courses on ANYTHING you want online.

Update 9/6/09: Academic Earth aggregates course videos from leading universities and allows you to create you own "academic playlists."

ANYTIME:

Every Tuesday, educators on Twitter start tweeting up a storm as they begin another session of their weekly digital classroom conversation. The main topic of discussion is voted on by members the previous day (Monday).

To coordinate the conversation all the participates use the hashtag #edchat in their status updates. The idea was started by Tom Whitby, Shelly Terrell, and Steven Anderson as a way to coordinate the many education conversations happening on Twitter at any given moment.

While the majority of the conversations occur within standard business hours, people like Chad Sansing of Charlottesville, VA decide they want to ask the tough questions at 3:57 am Wednesday morning!

Chad isn't alone in participating at extremely off hours. Hundreds of tweets happened between 1:00 am and 4:00 am on Wednesday morning. Participants have the ability to plug into the #edchat conversation ANYTIME they want.

ANYWHERE:

This week's Tuesday #edchat included 1,446 tweets from 235 contributers from all over the world as displayed in the map below.

To be expected, many countries in North America and Europe participated as well as a few in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. But, look closely and you'll see the most impressive country on the list is the Falkland Islands.

According to Wikitravel, internet access on the Falkland Islands is still primitive, but someone on the islands was motivated enough to be a part of the international #edchat. You can be ANYWHERE in the world and plug into an international conversation on education.

The Anyone, Anything, Anytime, Anywhere Education

It's been a dream for a long time to have free, open, and equal educational opportunities for every single person in the world. Now that anyone can learn anything at anytime from anywhere in the world, that dream is not far off.

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.