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.

Leading Minds Say Blogging is the Single Most Important Thing

I wrote a few days ago that blogs were better for the student and cheaper for .edu.

Seth Godin and Tom Peters, pretty much tops in their respective fields, state the case as strongly as possible.

I wish I could embed the video, but you'll have to click through to watch.

Please do, it's two minutes:

Courtesy of @hacool and @johnheaney on Twitter.

Orientation Before Orientation: The New Work of First Year Social Network Development

We exist in overlapping, intertwined social networks: family, friends, neighbors, church groups, hobby acquaintances, christmas card friends, etc. etc. It's an old human thing, we've always been that way.

We get emotional well being from the close family and friends. We get growth from topic groups. We need well being first, then growth, it's Maslow's hierarchy.

When a college adopts a new, incoming student, the student's networks are paramount. The student goes through the official stages:

Contact -> Admissions -> Orientation -> Classs (First Year Experience) -> Advising

Through this college entrance process, students will be negotiating a dramatic shift in their networks. The process can be tricky. When I did it, I felt dislocated and uprooted. It's often different now.

Schools, through various methods, have always tried to help. Student ambassadors, shared interest residence halls, learning communities, multi-day orientation, and ice breakers are all examples of social capital creation efforts. There are many more.

The goal is simple - get the student in and help them find their niche. Connectedness, Tinto always says, leads to retention. It also leads to student success.

The feelings are the same; the tools have changed.

Facebook was built as a tool to help us manage our overlapping networks. It makes the whole process substantially easier, delivering similar social and emotional oomph with far less work. A simple status update from the cell phone instead of 150 stamps to lick at Christmas. (Remember those days?)

Facebook, et al., as social networking tools, allow us to carry more people in our networks. While most people, prior to Facebook and internet tools, topped out at roughly 150 people across their networks, now many college students, with Facebook, carry 300 or so with little effort. It's not unusual to see two or three times that number.

This dramatic expansion of our social network carrying capacity is a huge deal. To review, comfort comes from close friends and stronger ties, while learning comes from bridging capital, the weak ties.

Both strong ties and weak ties work differently now, because of the shift in tools.

Students just do it. It's up to the schools, and the rest of us, to figure out what it means and find the new opportunities to help.

Let's start with the changes to close friends, or bonding capital.

It's not what it used to be.

When I went to college across the country, I had to find new close friends. Back in my day, I could call my old friends (though they had to actually be home, cell phones weren't yet ubiquitous), or write letters (email caught on later in my freshmen year), but these occasional contact points always felt inadequate. To be emotionally sound, I clearly needed to move on from my old friends. I needed a new core group to build my confidence on. The lack of close friends was painful. It took me a while to realize this, and I did not do the transition well. If it wasn't for my family, I could have easily been one of those 30% that drop out in their first year.

With Facebook, and the current first year student, the game is different. Their close friends are simply kept in Facebook. There is still a desire for face to face friends, certainly, but the connection to the old networks can be maintained with video, status, pictures, and wall posts. The old network can be maintained without any additional effort. If "social" goes through Facebook, it costs nothing to have extra people watching. It's not face to face, but it's substantially easier to maintain connection and caring with the cell phone and the tools of Facebook than the tools I had in 1994. (Just look at the number of parents who want to "friend" their own kids to stay in touch. They wouldn't complain so loudly about being rejected if they didn't have a sense of the richness.)

It's rich enough to "feel" - to maintain a sense of identity in a group and to maintain the social foundation of a group of good friends.

There is diversity of course. Some students never had good friend networks in high school. They never had a social foundation to maintain. Some students are so confident that they are nearly self-contained. These are both extreme ends of the spectrum. The tools shift the middle of the bell curve.

Just look what a tool change did to parents. Helicopter parenting became feasible with cell phones. Prior to that tool, helicoptering, for the majority, was simply too much effort. It was almost impossible before answering machines.

The tool changes the need.

For most student it's no longer step one to find close friends. That will still happen, given enough face time, we can't help ourselves, but for most students it's not the "make friends with anyone" need that I had when I got to college.

When current students switch to a new place, they don't have to start over at the bottom of Maslow's.

Instead, college students are picky.

They want to find people like them.

They want easy conversation because they both love "x". And why should they settle for less? They are used to the web, where they find the video they want with a few clicks. They're used to search.

Emotionally, because their friends and family are still "with" them, they don't feel the pain that would justify lots of awkward face time to fix. They feel good enough and because of this, many more students are ready to group up. They've been trained to expect this will be an easy thing, because it is easy online.

They try Facebook, but as I've said before, each question pushes down the one in front of it. It's the wrong interface. Facebook is not designed for finding new people, it's designed for managing the people you know.

So they'll try all kinds of things all over the web: Twitter, Zinch, Unigo, and one hundred others, but few of these will have enough adoption to make the search useful.

Colleges have an incredible opportunity to fill this need in their orientation process. It will help retention and it will accelerate positive social capital development.

Here's the rub. Most schools don't know who the students are. They don't know enough about the students to make the "people like you" introduction. What the school does know, from admissions essays and other input, is buried, often in separate departmental systems, locked up in FERPA realities or misplaced fears.

Blogs as E-portfolios: Better for the Students, Cheaper for the .edu

Please don't pay for e-portfolio software.

Instead, help or encourage the students to set up their own blogs. Let me quickly explain.

The original idea of an e-portfolio was to help students keep a record of the work they did. This was intended to help them learn and show progress (the faculty and institution value) and get a job (the student's value). While there is some tension between the faculty and the students with their respective values, both are good simple goals.

Companies were set up to build technology to facilitate this collection and distribution of information, but times changed and new methods have become clear, easier, more effective, and cheaper.

Blogs are a much better way to go.

A simple rule of thumb: it's not an e-portfolio if Google can't find it.

The Benefits of Blogs:

Students learn best from their peers. They learn in groups and in discussion. Encouraging students to post reflective learning on a blog allows them to network around their learning. This can be in the school, or, when the student is ready, out in the world. Learners can also find models to emulate - people in their major who are just a little better. According to the NSSE 2007 study, the biggest factor increasing engagement in education was the connections between students. Blogs help increase these connections.

The student can continue to use their blog after school, unlike private e-portfolio software. They can keep adding to it and connecting to others around their passion, interests and work.

They are free. In our current climate, free gets bonus points.

Blogs increase the visibility of the students on Google. It's not about being famous in the traditional sense, it's about coming up under a search term that they care about and know about. This is how opportunities will come to them.

Blogs leave successful educational footprints and pathways through the institution. Most students will choose to leave their blogs open and public. The college then, can deliver these records of challenges, work, and success to other students. "Here you go, another student with your interest who took these steps from where you are and became successful."

Blogs are highly flexible. Blogs can embed content from anything - flickr (pictures), youtube (video), twitter (micro-blog), etc. The blog itself is only limited by the imagination of the student.

Employers will love it. When they get near graduation and are looking for internships or jobs, the employer is highly likely to search the net for information. If they see the student has a long record of participation and reflection, this will go a long way to getting the interview.

A Few Common Objections:

Students don't know how to blog.

Many of them do, but for those that don't, learning blogging is much easier than most of the stuff they are supposed to learn. I dare you to click here to go to tumblr.com. If you can't get a blog up in less than 4 minutes, I'll buy you dinner in New York.

Faculty won't do it.

Some will, some won't. I've heard a number of times how hard faculty are to educate, and that's wonderfully ironic, but it's not about the faculty, it's about the students. Give them videos and suggestions. Let the aggressive go getters implement and show the rest of the students how. Of course faculty are wary of more work. This is a student tool and the faculty can join in, or not.

We already have Blackboard.

Yes, and Blackboard does grading very well, but it does not help the students find jobs or create topic learning networks in the college and across the world. So use Blackboard for what it does well, and use free blogs because it helps the students.

Students won't keep it current.

They might. The more topics can be made social, the more engagement will flow. Just look at Facebook. If they don't keep it current, that's okay. They still have an official transcript. Live assessment will provide support where it is needed. The point isn't to give everyone success, college cannot do that. The point is to give everyone the best possible chance at success. A blog gives everyone that chance at no extra cost to the school.

They need privacy to learn. Being public makes them uncomfortable.

Being uncomfortable is a good sign growth is happening. Speaking in public makes everyone uncomfortable. If they only learn how to whisper in the ear of the professor, the college is not setting them up very well. Most importantly, on a blog, the student controls their own information. If they want to go back and make things private, they can do that at any time. If something is truly sensitive, it can be emailed.

Their work is not very good.

Imagine if 5 year olds were kept from going to school because their speech was hard to understand. Don't try to protect them from themselves. Do put them in a peer group where they can see models of success. The best way for them to improve is to be public in a group of peers, many of whom will be more skilled at something.

What if they complain about the school?

Then they will. They will do it on one of the 8 million outlets that the internet provides. A blog does not change this. It does, however, remove the anonymity. This will mean the school will hear criticism that the author is standing behind. A dialogue can ensue. It's much better than anonymous posts on unigo.com

The key, like many things these days, is to give the students the tools to organize themselves. Many of them will find the tools and do it on their own anyway. The opportunity is to help the other 20% + that are on the edge, just need a model, and a little push.

(If you'd like to see a couple of great examples, check out the student leader bloggers here.)

The Value of a College Degree in the Networked World

Working in San Francisco with the Red Rover programming team, so this will be quick.

Schools used to base their value on ownership of the books and the information. Now many are sharing what they know for free. As a group, schools are beginning to value sharing over hoarding.

The old frame was that schools transferred the value (knowledge) to students. This value was given currency: a degree.

Here's the key quote from Umair:

Yesterday, we build advantage on owning assets. Tomorrow, we will build advantage by sharing assets.

Selling students a degree does not fulfill the responsibility of schools. It's not enough. To prepare college students for success in the world in which they will live, schools must teach the students to share. Schools much teach students how to be public; public in the world of digital.

It's not enough to own the knowledge / degree. The value creation occurs when the knowledge is shared. We live in a time where this sharing is infinitely scalable.

And this is the focus of most digital sharing "education" I come across on campuses:

Sharing and public could be vague and this conversation can go many directions. Feel free to comment and take it there. There's lots to be said about educational ethics, citizenship, and societal change. At the moment, I'm very focused on the practical. In my little corner of the conversation, I can be very specific:

This means: don't give them e-portfolio's in a .pdf file. (It's not searchable and searchable = sharing. They cannot connect or be found with .pdfs.)

Do let them aggregate their involvement and interactions in tools they control. Teach them delicious.com, use Disqus for you campus community, use google groups and show them how to use google reader to keep track of their content.

This means: don't just teach them to be scared of drinking pictures or stalking on Facebook. Fear is not a strategy.

Do teach them to manage and grow their positive digital identity. Google is the new resume.

This means: don't restrict your students (especially your student leaders!) to closed, password protected, organizational systems.

Do teach them to blog. Encourage them to connect their public blogs at conferences and create a personal learning network of their peers.

Here's the whole post to give you some context and spark thinking:

Edge Patterns: From Owning to Sharing: "

Hertz imitates Zipcar and makes cars shareable - nice move. This is a killer example of a radical edge pattern: from ownership to sharing. Yesterday, we build advantage on owning assets. Tomorrow, we will build advantage by sharing assets.

Hertz's move is, of course, potentially disruptive in a recessionary environment, because microchunking cars offers significant efficiency gains across the value chain. But the really interesting part is this.

We talked not so long ago about bringing new DNA to Detroit. One of the questions we discussed was: how could we bring open-source principles, like sharing, to a moribund auto industry? This is a nice start.

The larget economic point is this. The pressure for sharing in a hyperconnected world is too strong to resist. It's not a fringe effect, relegated to geeks and hippies: it is one of the foundations, as we've been noting, of next-generation value creation.

And its doubly vital in a world where the fabric of value creation is breaking apart.

"

(Via Umair Haque.)

Podcast on Technology and the Future of Higher Education

In a podcast with Paul Miller of Project Xiphos, Kevin talked about technology and the future of higher education. The podcast runs 38 minutes, but if your time is short, here are some key quotes from Kevin I pulled while listening.

- Education needs technology to stay relevant

- Apathy is oil in the ground waiting to be tapped

- We are giving up control to participate

- If we don't give up control we loose the communication channel.

- Sequestering students in our private walled garden that we paid a lot of money for is really doing them a disservice.

- The role of the institution is....teaching students how to be public.

- Established big players don't typically make the jump to the next shift. They don't participate in the disruption of their own business model.

- One of the primary things Blackboard sells is privacy and security.

- The Ebay peer-to-peer assessment model is far more exciting than the professorial model.

- We can care about [the students] more than the lawyers who care about duty of care.