Swift Kick Central

Your New Best Friend, Social Networking in the First Year Experience (Part 3)

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

While I'm numbering these parts 1,2,3, etc., the sections themselves won't be in this order in the actual curriculum, this is just the order in which I'm finishing them. This section is towards the front. Please forgive my process : )

Your comments and critique, as always, are appreciated.

Keeping Up With The Students

Preparing Them for the World of Today

As society gets more connected, and technology gets cheaper, we collectively switch our tools faster. Social networking is just one example of many. Getting to 150 million users took the telephone 89 years. Television reached 150 million users in 38 years. Facebook did it in 5. The problem for Facebook is that the competition will do it in 3.

Back in the good ol' days, schools had to provide phones in the residence halls. Because the school provided it, the school could limit access and control the use. Values could be imposed on to the new tool. When the phone entered the residence halls, Resident Assistants metered usage to prevent overuse or abuse. The schools' values also came bundled with other school provided technologies - computers, email, and software.

Technology was expensive and complicated and this meant limited supply and easy control. Institutions in general and schools in particular became used to the control. Without frenetic competition, purchasing decisions had a more thoughtful pace.

Now, no student needs their college to provide an email - there are hundreds of ways a student can set up a free email account. Many students can afford their own computer, many more can afford cell phones that are increasingly as useful as a laptop computer. With website functions quickly supplanting installed software, students have both access and control of their technology.

A values debate that might lead to learning, about what is useful or appropriate, gets confused with simple fight about control of technology. High schools ban cell phones. Higher education fumes about behaviors it sees as unwarranted risk, unjustified by student benefits that are often dismissed as "not real". Overvaluing control prevents the institution from recognizing other possible institutional values, like connection and mentoring, in the new technology.

Students did not need, or ask for, permission to use Facebook. They simply found it useful. Where it was briefly banned by by a few campuses, students used proxy servers to get to it. This is the same technique monks in Myanmar and protesters in Iran used to get information in and out of the country. Institutions try to control. Mobs grow restless. The internet changes the balance of power.

Like many institutions, Higher Education, on average, has struggled to match the pace of technological change. The challenge then, for schools, is to catch up with the students. To accept the tools so that the school can be back in the business of modeling, teaching, and exploring values.

As technology costs drop, especially with web tools, the primary difficulty is no longer capital or hardware, the difficulty is in updating the ideas of the institution.

The big advantage students have is that they don't have old habits to unlearn. The don't need committees to approve anything. They just use what works for them. They don't have to be convinced to give up the way they used to do it to accept the new way.

It's totally normal to resist change, for individuals, institutions or societies. Especially when the change comes at a cost of lost power and control. Any progress comes with backlash. This pattern is as old as history. At least as old as written history.

Writing, as the technological innovation of its day, had a powerful educator against it: Socrates. Plato quotes him, in Phaedrus, on the terrible effects of writing:

“[It] destroys memory [and] weakens the mind, relieving it of…work that makes it strong. [It] is an inhuman thing.”

The backlash serves a purpose. It can help clarify values. Holding firm to values while changing with the times is not a new dynamic for colleges. Individual colleges will continue to find their rate of change according to their leadership, community and culture. The problem is that the world outside of academia continues to accelerate. Schools now have less time to react and still be relevant.

Socrates had almost 2000 years until Gutenberg's press gave the masses the incredible power of literacy. Even at the beginning of the 20th century, one could still agree with Socrates in practice, be illiterate, and still be successful. Being literate was not a requirement for success, though the educated and literate had a massive advantage. We are in that same position today with technology- schools who can move quickly to blend their values with the possibilities of technology will provide that huge advantage to themselves and their students. Students, as always, need to learn to value learning.

In effort to accelerate the blending of old values and new practices, let me address some of the common objections I hear when talking with administrators, staff and faculty. In general, my explanations will only convince those that want to be convinced. Perhaps that is useful. For those more hesitant, models of instructors successfully encouraging educational values with current technology will be more compelling. We will review those later in this text.

Frequently Posed Objections:

"What about predators and identity theft?" (Students put way too much information online.)

CNN has never run the headline "Today, 200 Million People Logged Into Facebook and Everything Was Fine." Nothing bad happening is not news, so society as a whole does not get a balanced picture of the risk. When a fear compliments a preferred stance (not wanting to change) people are all the more likely to hold on to the disproportionally negative image.

The more banal factual reality is that while online identity theft is a growing cause of identity theft, it is still, according to the FBI's own statistics, the 8th most likely cause. The number one cause of identity theft? A lost wallet. (Stolen mail and roommate theft are number two and three respectively.) Have you ever heard someone say don't carry a wallet because it is too dangerous?

Even though driving is dangerous, we do it because the benefit out weighs the risk. The risk of putting personal information on Facebook, such as class schedules and phone numbers, is outweighed, in the student's mind, by the benefit of finding other people in their class, forming study groups and being reachable.

"Don't students understand that anything that goes online will be there forever? (We need to tell them not to post this stuff.)

Try this: Next time you are in front of a class, ask them to raise their hands if they have a cell phone camera. You will get about 90% of the students with their hands in the air. Soon, they will all have cell phone video cameras that upload right to Youtube. Remember when the idea of "1984" with cameras everywhere and Big Brother watching was scary? That's the world your students live in - except it's not just big brother, it's everyone. Students have little brothers everywhere and they all have cameras that take digital pictures and videos. These images and videos are bound to end up online.

Every human being who has ever grown up has some moment in their life that they would like to leave behind them. Something they wore, something they did, some boyfriend or girlfriend that was an oops. This generation is the most photographed generation ever. Have some sympathy. They will likely end up with multiple photos of multiple moments they would like to forget. These photos will be online and the internet does not forget. As adults, their kids will be able to search those pictures on the future equivalent of Google. Students who care about the future or the their professional image have heard the message that they should worry about the pictures of them online. They know that these photos should be "appropriate." I have heard stories of students spending a whole day going through their 5,000 photos on Facebook, removing their name from any photo that a future employer might not like.

Here's the reality. We are a year or two or so away from searching the internet by photo matching using facial recognition technologies. This technology will allow an employer to upload one photo of a candidate and a search engine would go find all the other publicly available pictures of that person. This is a tangled mess. Most social networks have privacy settings, but what if a friend releases all of their photos publicly and the student is in them? Even the "good" students that did the work of taking their name off of pictures will have problems when those photos are searchable by their face. Society will have to change its expectations.

When this generation of students goes to elect their politicians they will be more willing to forgive unfortunate pictures of college shenanigans. It will be similar to the current, and new, willingness of voters to over look past recreational drug use of our politicians. For the next ten years or so, however, the students will be judged by people who have forgotten their own cringe-inducing moment and didn't have digital cameras to save it for them.

Students have heard "be careful what you put online" but it sounds, to them, a lot like "be careful when you go outside." It's not specific enough.

Those that care, make an effort, but they have to live. They have to be young and explore and try out new identities and make mistakes. When they do, just because of the number of cameras and video cameras around them, that information is likely to end up on Facebook and perhaps the wider internet.

Telling them to be careful is not enough. We can't just tell them to avoid the bad. Hiding in the basement for fear of saying something wrong is not a success strategy. The world has moved to greater levels of transparency and publicness. We must teach students to be public - this is how they will find success. We have to teach students to find, and project, the good in their record; To build, in the words of Joe Uguretz of Macaulay College "a museum of themselves." We'll come back to this.

"What about the "real world"?" (All this technology has robbed students of the ability to interact in person. They are shy and awkward and it's because of video games/Facebook/Text messaging.)
This is a normal generational fear. Past generations thought rock and roll was destroying the youth, making them rebellious and lazy. (Though I was never sure how one could be successful at both.)

Students will interact through the medium and in the language that has the highest social utility. Text messaging and online social networking have huge social utility for the students. That this utility was initially not appreciated, and is still not well understood, by the older generation is hardly a negative. Keeping parents out, and having a separate space, has long been an important function of teen culture and slang. Don't be surprised when your own children refuse to be your friend on Facebook.

Students use Facebook to organize their real world. The hard distinction between a real world and an online world is leftover from the days of video games, bulletin boards, AOL screen names, chat rooms, and early avatars. While certainly these elements still exist in places like Second Life, an immersive virtual world, none of them have anywhere near the pervasive level of adoption Facebook has.

Facebook has been amazingly successful precisely because it an extension the real world. It organizes and filters actual, if often tenuous, relationships.To students today, there is huge overlap between the real world and the online world.
Online relationships feel. Research shows that students get a sense of community from their online relationships, [Elison,et. al 2007] and it doesn't stop there. In orientation groups, students will often organize their own face to face meetings around shared interests, or shared hometowns. Students are comfortable with a wider spectrum of social relationships than previous generations had - they easily encompass online and real world, close friends and distant acquaintances. The previous generation had clean lines between close friends and christmas card friends. That technology has facilitated a wider spectrum, with blurrier lines, does not make the students wrong.

The students networking ability and skills will improve along lines of practice and intentionality. There is much we, as an older generation, can do to help students expand their thinking and increase their intentionality. We jeopardize much of our credibility, however, when we start by dismissing half of their world as something less than real.




"How can someone have 500 friends on Facebook?" (They're obviously not real friends, it's just some sort of popularity contest.)



In social capital theory there are two main categories for relationships: bonding capital and bridging capital. Bonding capital is limited to close friends, usually around three. Bridging capital in the past has been capped at around 150, known as Dunbar's limit. This number comes from Robin Dunbar whose research lead him to believe that 150 people is the carrying capacity of our social memory, after 150 it gets too hard to remember who is dating who. Bonding capital is made up of the people we share secrets with and the shoulders we cry on. Whereas bridging capital is made up of relationships based on things like high school, geography, church affiliations, and random happenstance. Friendships exist on a continuum between very tight bonding capital and very loose bridging capital.


According to Facebook's numbers, the average person on Facebook has 200 "friends," while the number is slightly higher among college students (Source: TechCrunch NDSU 2007 Survey). Because everything that happens online is trackable Facebook has an incredible amount of data and insight into the social capital structures of its users. Based on the research that they've released, it seems that bonding capital has not changed with Facebook use. People still have, on average, three close friends that they interact with substantially more than anyone else in their network. Bridging capital, however, has dramatically changed. With the use of Facebook the carrying capacity for bridging capital has increased allowing the people to easily maintain double, or more, Dunbar's limit.



The concern implicit in the objection that people have "too many friends on Facebook" is that the idea of friendship is being watered down. Facebook is not devaluing friendship. For the sake of simplicity all connections on Facebook are referred to as "friends" but every user maintains their own distinctions between bonding and bridging relationships. Facebook is a power tool for bridging capital. Bridging capital will contain new ideas, new opportunities, and seeds of new relationships to spark growth. 500 "friends" is a lot of positive bridging capital. Facebook makes this possible. The opportunity for the university is to teach students to make the bridging capital development process intentional.



"Are you going to tell me I have to be on Facebook?" (Because I'm too busy / old / bad with technology / professional to do that.)



It is beneficial to be on Facebook to give you some personal experience with the way students communicate in their social world. It's your job as an educator to prepare students to be successful in the world in which they live. Social belonging will be a foundation for their success and Facebook is a common part of that world. If you are between the ages of 30 and 85 there are currently 75 million of your peers on Facebook (and at current growth rates, that number will be 3 times larger by the time you read this). The most important thing to keep in mind as you explore is that you are in control. You determine what you share, who you share it with, and how much time you spend on Facebook.



Think of showing up on Facebook like you're going to a school barbeque. It's not a classroom, let your guard down a little bit. Be authentic. As to friending students on Facebook, the general guideline is to let students request to be your friend rather than the other way around. This is out of respect for the inherently imbalanced power dynamic between the instructor and student.



For the sake of this curriculum supplement, the information to follow will be more approachable if you have the experience of a Facebook account. So if you don't yet have one, set down this book and go to http://www.facebook.com and set one up, it will take you about twelve minutes.

Highered Technology, From 1.0 to 2.0 in 8 Mins: Do It For The Students

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.

Your New Best Friend, Social Networking in the First Year Experience (Part 1)

The following is a draft slice of an upcoming curriculum supplement I am writing for Bedford / St. Martin's press. I will be using the blog to post chunks of the supplement and open up discussions on the topics. While the supplement is aimed at FYE instructors, the ideas will be broadly applicable in education.

An extra big welcome to all the FYE folks I met at the national conference this last spring. Thanks for stopping by. I'm very excited to have this conversation with you, the hoped for readers of this curriculum supplement. As always, change is coming, and FYE, again, is a big part of the front line. Thanks for all your work for the students, and thanks for being interested in helping them in this new world.

Old Values, New Technology

"We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run."- Roy Amara, former president of The Institute for the Future

It's normal for new things to go through a "hype cycle" where proponents vastly over promise benefits. This hype helps fuel the backlash. There are lots of fears embedded in the backlash. 

Past the backlash, it’s easy to go too far the other way and just throw up your hands and rush in.  It’s easy to get caught up in comparing one website or tool to another. Should we use Facebook or Twitter?  Then the discussion shifts to who will do the work of the new projects. 

Reacting, and fixating on tools, is partially a function of the pace of change. There’s a sudden sense of “everyone else is doing it” and so action becomes an imperative.

The only fix for this is anchoring initiatives in goals. Only then can we measure results for future optimization. Only then can we evaluate a new tool against our goals. Only then can we learn.

As educators, we have a huge opportunity to use these new social platforms to enhance the student experience. There's an opportunity to have a huge effect in the long run. We won’t get it quite right the first time. We’ll have to try some things, measure results and shift around.

So let's start with the goals.

The Theoretical Perspective

Some students come to embrace their college experience – they get involved in campus events, grow, learn, join clubs and subsequently participate in alumni affairs – while others seem to quietly fall off the map. Twenty five percent of first year students will leave their school in their first year. Researchers have developed a series of models to help make sense of these completely different outcomes. They’ve formed models to hypothesize about how we can best enhance the student experience, grow retention rates, increase student success and satisfaction and, yes, increase endowments.

Some of the popularly accepted models, which may be familiar to you, include:

•    Chickering's 7 Vectors

•    Tinto's Model of Retention

•    Astin's Involvement Theory

•    Barefoot's Relevant Models of Success

In Chickering's Model, students are assessed along a series of 7 vectors- managing emotions, establishing identity, developing purpose, etc.  As educators, then, activities, programs and initiatives are geared towards moving students forward in their various vectors.  By first assessing students along this core set of criteria, and then working to build up necessary character traits and skill-sets, Chickering felt universities could help the learner grow and thereby increase retention and success rates. The challenge for the university is that implementation of this model is dependent on individual self-assessments and outcome rubrics mapped to possible experiences. Differentiated instruction is a substantial challenge in even a small classroom; as classrooms grow, it's nearly impossible without assistance from technology.

Tinto and Astin stress the importance of being - and feeling - connected to the place in which you learn and live.  The more ties one has to the people and ideas of a school, through activities, friends and meaningful experiences, the more likely one is to stick around. Astin's research showed, unsurprisingly, that involved students are more likely to have better grades, graduate, and be satisfied with the experience.  While these models have been around for decades, schools still struggle to increase involvement and engagement. In 2005, the National Survey of Student Engagement said that 60% of students at four year schools and 84% of students at two year schools, would never participate in a college sponsored activity the entire time they are at school.

Barefoot believes that fostering student commitment and motivation is the most important aspect of the first year experience, as success with this will mitigate other challenges. So how do we build commitment and motivation? Barefoot stresses the importance of role models, specifically relevant models – those individuals who have been through similar situations, or have similar backgrounds, and been successful. Students need to see an example of their own possibilities. Success is a product of connecting those just starting on their educational journey with “people like them,” who have come before and been successful. 

At their essence, all four models point towards a hierarchical path to success in education. We know the basic steps. Students must first establish themselves and feel comfortable.  This comes from orientation, from finding people like themselves, developing friendships, and participating in relevant communication. They will explore their identity in relationship with others.

Once the social foundation is set, some students will begin to explore connection around areas with which they identify. Their priority will shift from general social prioritization ("I want people to hang out with") to topic prioritization ("I want to hang out with people that like physics"). This connection may be in a major, student groups, around a hobby, career, or a unique intellectual pursuit. The student will explore and grow their competence primarily in comparison with peers who are similarly inclined. Through their new peer group affiliation and participation, some will find a combination of competence and confidence, and become recognized leaders in the peer group.

For these students then, the final stage is contribution. Their efforts become a model for others. At this final, most involved level, students actively contribute to their environment.  Some will lead by example, others will consciously dedicate themselves to helping, becoming mentors and guides for other students.  These model students are the institution's greatest resource. As examples of progress for Chickering's Vectors, Astin's Involvement, Barefoot's role models, or social super connectors to facilitate Tinto's goals, these students are paramount. 

The progression from comfort to connection to contribution is the path of success. At each stage there lies the risk of either not succeeding within that stage or simply settling for it. Some students won't find any social comfort and will leave for home. Other students will find social comfort in a group that they party with. This party group becomes their clique and they never move on. Other students connect to a topic group, but they come to see that group as the end-all be-all, never shifting their thinking to a bigger scope that would allow them to contribute to students outside of their group.

Similar to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, with its peak of "self-actualization," not all students will make it to the contribution apex.  Some will just need a little time, and they will move up well after they receive their degree. Others will take even longer.

Education is nothing if not hopeful. The goal of the institution is to move all students up this pyramid.

Any initiatives or technology must work towards this goal. They must also measure and prove their efficacy against this goal.

Making Them WANT To Do It (Apathy vs Engagement)

If you have ever attended a conference with us, you know we enjoy mixing stuff up through the use of Flashmobs and Blender Events, both of which stem from our Dance Floor Theory Leadership Training. The goals are to:

1. Have Fun
2. Increase Engagement
3. Build Relationships
4. Create Pattern Interrupts
5. Induce Positive Confusion (one reason why)
   

While some activities are repeated from conference to conference, others come from brainstorming sessions with the participants.

At a recent conference in New York, the associates (a.k.a. people/companies who pay money to attend with the intent of selling their product) were complaining to the conference organizer about the lack of conference attendees participating in the exhibit halls and showcases. As the grumbles of agreement erupted from the crowd, the conference organizer turned towards us and asked if we could send out a Flashmob txt about exhibit hall times and showcase times. Our reply? "No, that's not how it works."

It's not about making them HAVE to do it, it's about making them WANT to do it.

If we were to do what the conference organizer suggested, the Flashmob txt would have been something like this:

TXT A: @ 2:30pm the exhibit hall opens up, make sure you're there!

Instead our txt message was this:

TXT B: In the exhibit hall @ exactly 2:35pm howl to the moon for 10 secs like a pack of wolves. Then stop and walk on like nothing happened.

In TXT B we're making them WANT to do it, like they are missing out if they don't attend. TXT B achieves all five goals from above and, for the purposes of the conference, it also gets more attendees to participate in the exhibit hall.

TXT B also removes the marketing from the activity, which is a common mistake when attempting community engagement. If you're marketing, you're marketing, not relationship building.

The difference between them HAVING to do it and them WANTING to do it is the difference between apathy and engagement.

'Fun' can be the change behavior. If you're still not convinced, check out these ideas from The Fun Theory:

To implement change on your campus, start by creating an "I Wish List..."

• I wish more students would recycle
• I wish more students would walk to campus vs drive
• I wish more students would attend events
• I wish more students would smile
• I wish more students would wash their hands
• I wish more students would...

Next create a list of current solutions for each item:

• Post signs above recycle bins
• Don't do anything
• Flyers, posters, emails
• Don't do anything
• Post signs in every bathroom

Lastly, circle up with 2-4 other people and generate a brainstorming list of creative engaging ways to solve each problem that they will WANT to do. Then try it out and if you really want, you can collect quantitative data to determine effectiveness (e.g. Did more people wash their hands?).

It will take more time to implement some of these ideas, but, to repeat from above, it's the difference between apathy and engagement.

p.s. If your idea is really good, try submitting it to the Fun Theory Award for a chance to win $3,600.

The Value of Leveraging Network Nodes In The College Community

Last spring, I was traveling on a public bus from Laguardia Airport in New York to my hotel on the north side of Manhattan. When I got on the bus at the airport, the bus driver was in a heated argument with someone complaining about being charged twice for the ride. The bus driver was clearly not amused and went from zero to outrage in ten seconds. Trying not to be his next target, I smiled, paid and sat down in the first open seat.

For the next 30 minutes, I watched the driver mumble under his breath and shake his head in a perpetual state of anger. Each new passenger who entered the bus needed to only glaze quickly into the driver's eyes to see he was not happy.

The bus made its way into Harlam at about the same time the local high schools were getting out. I was worried about mixing an angry driver with agitating teens. At the first stop in Harlam, two teens jumped on the bus with big smiles and extended a ribbon-tied rolled-up piece of paper toward the driver.

Congratulations! For all the hard work you do on Bus Route M60, you've been awarded the Platinum Honorary Certificate of Greatness!

The driver didn't grab the paper, so the teens placed it on the dashboard and then jumped back to the sidewalk and darted down the street. Visibly annoyed, the driver closed the door and drove on.

A few streets later, we stopped at a red light. The driver used the pause as an opportunity to reach, untie and open the rolled certificate. Impressively, the certificate used fancy Letterpress printing, color images and even had a foil circle stamp at the bottom. I couldn't make out all the text, but at the top it read,

The Platinum Certificate of Greatness is Awarded to Members of Society Who Demonstrate a Commitment to Making Our Lives Better.

I watched as the driver laughed under his breath and then cracked a smile. It was like a magic spell was released when he opened the certificate because, from that moment forward, his attitude totally changed.

A taxi behind us laid on his horn because the light had switched to green several seconds prior. The bus driver calmly said, "ok, ok. I'm moving."

Amazing! Ten minutes ago he probably would have gotten off the bus to physically engage the taxi driver. When new people entered the bus, he welcomed them with a smile, which inspired the new bus riders to grin back.

I sat there in awe as the entire culture of the bus changed. People started smiling,laughing, and talking.

It's amazing how such a simple act targeted at exactly the right person can have such a large impact on the entire community.

The bus driver was a network node for the community. A node in that he connected with hundreds of people on his route throughout the day. His positive or negative attitude was contagious to the people he came in contact with and it set the tone for the culture of the bus.

Teachers and staff members are network nodes for college campus communities. They come in contact with hundreds of students throughout the day. If the teacher or staff member is in a bad mood, that feeling can be contagious to the students he/she comes in contact with.

As we talk about engaging and growing the college community, let's not forget about the teachers and staff members as the network nodes. What can we do to engage them more? Very few student activities' departments we work with have a formal plan on how to engage teachers and staff members. Teachers and staff members are very much a part of the campus culture and shouldn't be ignored.

The other interesting idea that stemmed from this situation is why would the teens bother to take the time to create such a fancy certificate, wait for the bus to arrive, present it to the bus driver and then run away and not see the end result of their effort? Some might answer that they did it for laughs or for fun or as a dare or class project. All of which might be true, but there is something bigger at play here; the teenagers' tiny action had a huge impact on the community's reciprocal social capital.

As author Robert Putnam of Bowling Alone defines it:

I'll do this for you now, without expecting anything immediately in return, and perhaps without even knowing you, confident that down the road you or someone else will return the favor to either me or someone else in the community. A well connected person in a poorly connected society isn't as productive as a well connected person in a well connected society.

More on the concept of reciprocal social capital and why and how you can create it in your community in my next post. Now get back to work!

Playing Catch Up: Colleges and the Web

(This is a cross post from the Student Affairs Blog)

"We shape our tools and then our tools shape us." - Marshall McLuhan

You've probably heard the term "Web 2.0."  The idea was that the changes in how the internet worked over the last 8 years were profound enough to warrant a whole new version. While the term has come to embody a whole host of ideas, for our purposes, I'm going to focus on one main idea: the shift from one to many to many to many.

At the beginning of the web, pages were published and static. The web surfer could read or look at multimedia. The early web was a book, magazine or television experience, delivered via the computer. There was one publisher and many readers. It was profound because there could be many publishers which massively expanded the total content. Soon the content was searchable. It was a good start.

The expanding "Web 2.0" insight is that the web, unlike previous mass media, does not have to be one way communication. The website does not have to just publish, it can be a conversation. Site visitors can leave comments, upload pictures, or edit the content on the website, and these new features provide a mass media experience entirely different than anything that has come before it.

The idea of allowing anyone to edit a website, enabled by a simple software tool called "wiki," lead to the explosive growth of Wikipedia. Turns out thousands of people around the world wanted to donate their time and expertise to a repository of human knowledge. Wikipedia was the first to let them. 

We are social animals, and it didn't take long for this preference to come to front. Comments were better if we could see the person behind them. Pictures were more interesting with a little back story. Interacting with the content of the site quickly became interacting with the people of the site. "Social networking" sites were the logical extreme of this shift back to our foundational values.

Sites like Facebook and Twitter prioritized the human and the social - people came first, with their individual content second. Neither Facebook nor Twitter have any of their own content. People do not connect to Twitter, they connect to other people using Twitter. These sites, and many others, are successful because they skipped the publishing model entirely and went right to a connecting and aggregating model. These sites don't produce, they collect content from the users and manage the delivery of that content through the network. 

The difference of these approaches is the difference between an expert publisher, and an old style telephone operator working the switchboard. Amazingly enough, it is now the "telephone operator" business models that are worth billions and the "expert" business models that are in trouble. 

Web 1.0: The "expert" publisher

Web 2.0: The connector and content aggregation

As the competition for attention heats up, and social sites experience explosive growth, firms that have a publishing model, like the New York Times, are desperately trying to figure out how they can make their offering more social. 

To make a website "social" is to add functionality that allows site visitors to actively interact with each other, to move from viewer to participant. Site owners see social features as a way to get users to stick around longer - because people are more interesting than content.

The desire to add "social" to a core function of an institution is not new to higher education. Student Unions were some of the first institutional efforts to make college more social. Students wanted to connect with each other, and, when it happened, this connection created belonging, engagement, collaboration, enhanced learning, and community. Student affairs, through student activities specifically, has long stressed providing students with opportunities to interact and socialize.

Based on the incredible investment of universities in social architecture: in quads, residence halls and lounges, it's ironic that most universities still do not see the internet as cost effective social venue, despite the countless examples online.

People want to socialize with their peers, both in person and online. Facebook's massive growth rate, and continued use, within college networks proves a profound need and opportunity was (and is) there. Universities just couldn't see how to extend the old value and investment into connecting and learning, to the new field.

It is still a challenge. Universities are following along the same trends of the internet as a whole, with a bit of a lag. College websites are still mostly "web 1.0": characterized by static content, controlled by a centralized office.  Curriculum and learning is still centralized and controlled in learning managment systems like Blackboard. Where there are discussion features in Blackboard, the content stays centralized with the class and is lost at the end of the term. Where there are blogs on university websites, they tend to be written by selected and edited "brand ambassadors" - an attempt to put a real face on a preferred message.

This year, often led by the admissions department, it has become fashionable for schools to use social media links on their sites. The thinking, however, is still mostly in the 1.0 paradigm: "follow the school on twitter" or "become a fan of the university on Facebook." In this paradigm, the university is still the focus, a one to many publisher in the center.

Based on competition and financial pressures, businesses based on publishing models are scrambling to decentralize, lower cost structures, and move their models towards connecting and aggregating. When will the paradigm shift for the University?

When will the goal of university technology efforts be to connect the students to each other, rather than connecting the students to the school?

These kind of institutional paradigm shifts - from one to many, to many to many - won't come from just one department. These shifts have to bubble up from many places. Do you think the university can catch up?

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.

At Student Orientation, Don't Forget About Bridging Social Capital

The Bystander Effect is a well-known psychological study conducted by Bibb Latane and John Darley that grew out of the stabbing death of Kitty Genovese in 1964 while eyewitnesses looked on but did nothing to help. According to Wikipedia:

...individuals are less likely to offer help in an emergency situation when other people are present. The probability of help is inversely proportional to the number of bystanders. In other words, the greater the number of bystanders, the less likely it is that any one of them will help.

Robert Putnam's famous book on the collapse of the American community, "Bowling Alone," notes that buried in the Bystander Effect research is also the finding that the amount of social capital within a group plays a large role in determining if someone will help or not. The greater the social capital, the greater the chance they will help. In other words, you're more likely to help a family member in trouble than a totally random stranger.

Social capital refers to the value one gains from the relationships with others (human capital) or things (physical capital). For this post let's only focus on human capital which can be further broken down into:

- Bonding Social Capital: The value one gains from their relationships with close family and friends
- Bridging Social Capital: The value one gains from their relationships with associates
- Maintained Social Capital (Newer Idea): The value one gains from their relationships with people who used to be close family and friends, but are now physically very far away (think transition from High School to College).

In the Genovese story, the lack of engagement by the eyewitnesses likely means they didn't know each other very well and that the level of Bridging Social Capital would've been presumably very low. (Note: I am speculating here as this is not documented in the study.)

Latane and Darley's study highlights the value of simple Bridging Social Capital with a test in which an actor walks down a hallway and either says "hello" to a subject walking in the opposite direction or ignores them. Then a few moments later the actor has an apparent seizure. If the actor said "hello," the subject was quicker to provide help than if there was no communication.

Little interactions, even saying "hello," add up to stronger Bridging Social Capital between people within a community. As Robert Putnam puts it:

Like pennies dropped in a cookie jar, each of these encounters is a tiny investment in social capital.

A theme for new student orientation is to funnel people into student groups as fast as possible because, as Tinto says, there is a correlation between student involvement and retention. This will likely lead to higher levels of Bonding Social Capital on campus because people will create more intimate relationships within the groups.

At the same time, don't forget about the little things that can be done to add more pennies to the cookie jar to increase the Bridging Social Capital of the campus. Sometimes a simple "hello" or smile goes a long way.

Whenever I run a new student orientation, I have student leaders stand at the door to welcome new students as they enter. It's not a big production nor is it glamorous, but the impact in terms of the new students feeling comfortable can be seen right away.

Then, throughout the year, think about what your student groups are doing to increase the level of Bridging Social Capital on campus. It doesn't have to be a big production, but rather something as simple as a Free Hugs Campaign.

Little interactions can have a big impact on student engagement.

Stop Making Parents the Punchline and Include Them in the EdTech Conversation

Digitally ignorant parents find themselves once again the punchline of a new website dutifully called MyParentsJoinedFacebook.com. The site was created by a daughter after her dad joined Facebook and his social networking activity quickly became obnoxious to her. With a swift gain in popularity, MyParentsJoinedFacebook.com joins others in exploiting (right or wrong) parents' naivete as a way to add a few laughs and clicks. 

Between the easy laughs and "Dateline" fear mongering, I can understand why a 2008 MacArthur Foundation supported study showed that parents tend to be in the dark about what their kids are doing online and 66% consider "the internet" as dangerous as drunk driving.

We need to stop scaring, laughing at, or excluding parents and instead start having real conversations. As James P. Steyer, CEO of Common Sense Media, said:

“Technology is a major part of our kids’ worlds, and that is not going to change. Parents need to know what their kids are doing in their digital lives, and they have to be well informed about issues like privacy, ethical behavior, digital literacy, and cyberbullying. When parents understand these potential pitfalls and communicate with their kids, the internet can be an educational, entertaining, and safe environment.”

Not surprisingly, research shows that the more educated and engaged a parent is in their child's online activity, the more positively they see the internet's potential.

Having said all this, we at Swift Kick are launching several new educational offerings geared toward parents and grandparents.

To kick off, this Saturday we're partnering with the world-renounwed education group QLN to host our first, parent/grandparent only, training in San Diego. If you are in the area, sign up today to reserve your seat.

Then, over the next month, we'll begin announcing a series of regional parent/grandparent programs, webinars, and an ongoing Web Coaching Program.

After 5 years and 300+ trainings with 10,000s of students and educators we know we've progressed the technology conversation further past the doom and gloom. Now it's time to work with parents as a critical third player.

We are bringing to parents the same level of quality and research that's awarded us the title as the #1 Campus Trainers for 2007, 2008, and 2009 by member schools of the Association for the Promotion of Campus Activities.

There are champions already promoting great work like Common Sense Media, iSafe, Digital Dialog, Cable in the Classroom, Radical Parenting, The Online Mom, and BJ Fogg that we'll parter with to help dispel the myths and promote positive, effective technology use.

These are just a few and we don't like to move slow, so if you're connected to parents and would like to partner, either leave a comment below or contact us.

Here's to parents, we got your digital back ;-)