Swift Kick Central

Facebook and The Adolescent Brain - The Emerging Employers' Dilemma

Two weeks ago, I asked my Facebook followers if they'd post differently knowing that 60% of employers search the web when considering potential employees. Several students came back with strongly worded annoyances about not wanting to change their online behavior:

Then my adult friends chimed in:

Though we were talking about online behavior, the difference in opinion between students and adults highlights that adolescent behavior online is no different than adolescent behavior offline. And the gap between adult cognitive processing and adolescent cognitive processing is still tangible.

The cognitive processing gap reminded me of the September 2008 Time Magazine cover story that took an in-depth look at the adolescent brain, led by Dr. Jay Giedd of the National Institute of Mental Health. The goal of the study was to:

... determine how the brain develops from childhood into adolescence and on into early adulthood.

After 1800 teenage participants and 13 years of research, Dr. Giedd is convinced we have miscalculated the links between adolescent behavior and adolescent brain development.

... the wild conduct once blamed on "raging hormones" is being seen as the by-product of two factors: a surfeit of hormones, yes, but also a paucity of the cognitive controls needed for mature behavior.

Dr. Giedd explains how brains generally develop from back to front. With the prefrontal being the last section to fully develop around 25.

The very last part of the brain to be pruned and shaped to its adult dimensions is the prefrontal cortex, home of the so-called executive functions--planning, setting priorities, organizing thoughts, suppressing impulses, weighing the consequences of one's actions.

"Scientists and the general public had attributed the bad decisions teens make to hormonal changes," says Elizabeth Sowell, a UCLA neuroscientist. "But once we started mapping where and when the brain changes were happening, we could say, Aha, the part of the brain that makes teenagers more responsible is not finished maturing yet."

... the parts for exercising judgment are still maturing throughout the course of adolescence. So you've got this time gap between when things impel kids toward taking risks early in adolescence, and when things that allow people to think before they act come online. It's like turning on the engine of a car without a skilled driver at the wheel."

In light of these new findings, even the American Bar Association has urged state legislatures to ban the death penalty for juveniles:

"For social and biological reasons, teens have increased difficulty making mature decisions and understanding the consequences of their actions."

Going back to my original Facebook question, it seems like Dr. Giedd's study is playing out in real time on the internet with employee/employer relationships.

The 2009 Deloitte LLP Ethics & Workplace Survey found that 60% of business executives say they have a "right to know" how employees portray themselves and their organizations online and 30% admit to "informally monitoring social networking sites." In reaction, 53% of employees said their social networking pages are none of their employers' business and 61% say that even if employers are monitoring, they won't change their online behavior.

We have a classic chicken/egg challenge. Will adolescents change their behavior online to suit their current or future employers needs, or will employers change their attitudes about online behavior knowing that the prefrontal doesn't fully develop until 25?

Dr. Giedd jokes that at least the rental car industry has it right because you can't rent a car until you're 25.

I tend to think that as more of our adolescent years are played out and recorded online forever, societal attitudes will shift towards a greater acknowledgment of "oh those were his/her adolescent years" and put less long term judgement on those actions.

It will be interesting to see our first "Facebook President," or watch a parent tell a child not to do something and the child turns around and Googles a video and picture of the parent doing the exact same thing.

How to Make Student Engagement Contagious

In 1969, famed psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a social experiment looking at the contagiousness of engagement. Wired magazine's Jonah Lehrer accurately summarizes the experiment:

In this study, Milgram had "confederates" stop on a busy city street and look upwards at the sky. He demonstrated that when one person was looking up, 40 percent of passerby also looked up, just in case something interesting was happening. (There was nothing to look at, just sky and buildings.) When two people were looking up, 60 percent of passerby looked up. When there were three people, the percentage jumped to 65 percent, and, when there were four people, nearly 80 percent of strangers stopped and stared upwards.

Here's a video of the experiment in action:

In the unrelated setting of the 2009 Sasquatch Music Festival, a replication of Milgram's experiment occurred as seen in the video below:

The first dancer was alone for a long while, but loved every moment. Some would consider him to be a bit socially off. Then #2 shows up, and from his facial expression, seems to look back at his friends as if he were doing it as a dare or joke. Then, #3 shows up and this is where it gets serious. From that moment on, the level of engagement exponentially grows. This is no longer one person dancing, or a dare, or a joke; this is a contagious social movement.

Connecting the ideas together gets me thinking about the role of student leaders on campus. The current paradigm for student leaders is to host engaging activities (e.g. dance party, cookouts, musicians, etc) and then try to get people to participate. Most schools have a very difficult time achieving success with this model. Also in this model, student leaders tend to look like the sole person dancing by themselves looking a bit off from the rest of the social scene as was the case with the Sasquatch dancer. Yes you are called a leader for being #1, but the real engagement doesn't happen until #3 shows up.

In terms of student engagement, maybe student leaders should stop trying to be #1 by hosting the events and instead find the random #1s on your campus and support them by being #3.

Stop creating events that you think are good and look for students on your campus that are doing cool stuff and support them. Stop being the leader and start being the supporter.

The Tech of Student Success: Comparing Facebook, Ning and Red Rover

John Jay College of Criminal Justice was reviewing a number of different social tools, trying to figure out where they wanted to invest their time and money. They asked me to help clarify how they fit together.

I did it with a little video and I though it came out pretty well - if just a wee bit long winded - so I wanted to share.

Here you go:

Comparison of Social Network Tools for John Jay from Red Rover on Vimeo.

Click here for the slides of the Junco / Heiberger (2009, March) You can use Facebook for that? Research-supported strategies to engage your students. NACPA Presentation

Correction: At one point I said "Mr. Junco" but I obviously meant "DR. Junco."

Tech Tip - Using Twitter as your Free Campus, Group Text Messaging Service

There are many group/campus text messaging companies that offer an array of services for a fee, but if you are just looking to communicate with a group via text, then Twitter might be your best free option. Mike Richwalsky over at HighEdWebTech demos how he uses Twitter as Allegheny College's free text messaging service for their orientation. The best part is students don't even need to know they're using Twitter beyond a simple welcome message. They can join the campus texting group without a pre-existing Twitter account. How?

Mike Explains:

Once you have a Twitter account, you advertise to students that if they text follow youraccountname to 40404, they will get updates on their phone. That’s it.

Last year, Mike used the Twitter trick to successfully promote athletic events on campus. This year, he's using the service to communicate with all the incoming students as part of his school's orientation program.

We’ve set up a Twitter account (@alleghenyorient) for our orientation team and we’ve trained them in how to post updates from the web as well as from their phones as they’re out and about around campus during the program.

Now that we’ve set up the team and the account, it’s time to start telling the students about it. We’ve posted on our Orientation site with a link to our regular Twitter page as well as how they text a follow message to 40404. We’re also going to start promoting it in our Class of 2013 pages.

They're also sending out the post card below with orientation information and how to join their mobile group.

Quick, easy, fun and free. Here's your campus tech tip for the week!

Are Blog Platforms University Hosted Email All Over Again? Is This Bad?

The goal of our project is to build a tool that all schools can use to create learning networks for all students.

We're working with schools of all shapes and sizes; all across the spectrum of technological savviness.

The system connects students using tags, or keywords. Tags which will eventually be created organically from web 2.0 tools that the students attach to their profile.

Now that we're getting into attaching blogs, twitter, delicious, etc. to the student profile, the simple question comes up: what blogging platform should we recommend to the schools that don't currently have one?

There are two main questions for me at this stage. The first is philosophical, the second is pragmatic:

1) Should colleges host their students' blogs?

2) Regardless of who hosts it, what should the criteria be for the blog recommendation?

The questions, discussed:

Should colleges host their students' blogs?

There seems to be a growing trend for colleges to use Word Press, specifically Word Press Multi User deployments. There's a great community forming, and they are doing an impressive job of organizing around the barcamp / Wordcamp model.

I love this direction and I applaud all of the schools that are exploring, especially those using the blogs as universal e-portfolios.

These schools show innovation is possible. They show the way.

But . . . is this just like email? Once email wasn't just a school thing, they became an identifier, like a phone number, that stayed with the individual.

It's fine to have your school or company give you an email to use professionally, but is that the model schools want to pursue with blogs? Should a "blog as e-portfolio" only be "professional" and attached to college? Shouldn't blogs from their 6-12 years in school (where they exist) be passed through to college? Shouldn't the blog continue with the graduate to help them maintain all of that 21st Century learning networking that we taught them?

What happens when a student transfers schools and all of their work is in the Word Press Multi-user install of their old school? (Can this be switched easily? I've never migrated a WP blog.)

Getting into these details is new for me, so I'm hoping some of the folks that have been thinking about this issue longer can shed some light on the process and their decision.

What I've read is something along the lines of "we really don't know if we're signing on to host a student's blog forever, but it's not as expensive at it used to be, and we'll figure that out later." I'm fine with that answer, I would just like to be clear on the issues.

What are the criteria for a blog recommendation?

I'm down to either Word Press or Tumblr. If there is another platform that we should consider, do tell. To make the conversation more specific

Simplicity vs. Flexibility

I'm a huge fan of Simplicity.

Here's the main screen for Word Press:

Here the main screen for Tumblr:

Which interface is going to get people blogging faster? Which one is clear and makes you want to click?

Comment system

I'm currently obsessed with using Disqus, because we can aggregate the comments of a student in their e-portfolio. Using the Disqus API, we can import "likes" and rankings of comments.

Disqus will work with both. Bonus points to the platform that has the quickest integration.

Open Source vs. Private

I'm not religious about this issue, but I am a bit of anarchist / idealist and open source fits nicely into this predilection.

If, however, a private and closed, even slightly evil, company provides a better experience of simplicity and quality (see: Apple) I will bow down.

IT involvement

It's nice if any excited individual at the university can experiment. Not using IT seems to rule out Word Press Multi User installs.

Also, it's important to note, one of the tenets of our projects is allowing student and faculty member choice. They should be allowed and encouraged to use whatever works for them. (We're betting that the majority of their choices will produce an RSS feed we can work with, someday Facebook might even share outside of the API.)

This is just me trying to parse the various issues in public for when I'm asked my opinion.

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.