Unintended Consequences

A course based mostly on lecture has negative consequences.  A campus where student affairs and academic affairs don’t legitimately work together has negative consequences.  Schools that resist online learning have unseen negative consequences for students, just as schools who bound into eLearning without strategic considerations for quality and scale also see negative consequences.  Faculty Development being left solely to the discretion of the faculty can have negative consequences.  Athletics integration on campus can have negative consequences.  Hiding school email addresses from the public can have negative consequences.  Creating a school website for marketing purposes and ignoring current students, faculty, and staff can have negative consequences.  Recruiting volunteer faculty as adjuncts can have negative consequences.  And on and on and on…

Grow Up and Knock It Off!

Higher education is broken.  I’ve talked to educators and administrators from the most famous institutions on the planet.  All of them have horror stories of how impossible it is to overcome the baggage, the traditions, the paradigm that is higher education.  Not the Ivy Leagues, not the most innovative community colleges and not even the for-profits who were designed to do exactly that.  The system is broken and at this point it’s hard to find anyone or any way to fix it.

Is ASU Innovative?

The normal dysfunction of higher ed was clarified for me by a professor at ASU.  He was explaining how impossible it was to create a curriculum map.  He said that they have potentially 10 or more versions of any given class, often under different departments entirely.  Those 10 versions of the class are taught 10 completely different ways with no more than a nod to outcomes and objectives.  So, trying to find “the” course of truth to use for a large-scale experience is impossible.  They ended up creating yet another version from scratch.  That description is not only the opposite of innovative, it’s not even inline with the most effective practices for education. 

Karate Kid and Stage Magic (Frames and Mechanics)

Spend 3 days waxing on and waxing off, brushing up and brushing down.  Be sure to do this for 10-12 hours, each of those 3 days.  Then, get someone to explain how that specific stroke is for blocking, punching, etc.  Now, spend another week or so going through those movements while standing on a tree stump.  And finally, get in the ring with black belts who have trained for years / decades in your favorite martial art and fight.  Just give it a go.  After your brief hospital stay, come back to me and let’s talk. 

Read A Book!

Almost twenty years later, I created a mini-library of books that I asked my Directors and Assistant VP’s to leverage.  Being an office of innovation, professional development, content creation, and the University library, the books needed to be deep and wide.  But in the end, I would say it worked.  How do I know?  When Saint Leo took a cultural inventory (a survey taken every other year for two decades), my organization was the sole group at Saint Leo with a positive trajectory.  My people were connected in purpose and positive factors for the school (customer service focused, student-centric, problem etc).  I tried to push them to rally around concepts and ideas that are key to innovation, education, and communication, but are often absent from university contexts.

You Are Your Own WORST Enemy…and Science Can Prove It

Most people, when asked to think of themselves in the future, really struggle.  And by struggle, I mean they are mentally incapable of doing so in a positive way.  We know this through studies which have been replicated hundreds of times, whereby people are asked about people while sitting in an fMRI machine.  First, they are asked to think about friends, acquaintances, co-workers, neighbors, etc.  There is an “upturn” in how the prefrontal cortex begins to fire.  Scientists can see the electrical impulses flow from bottom to top when people think of these friendly or at least known people.  However, when shown or asked to consider strangers, the fMRI shows a different pattern to the impulses.  The electrical surge is a downturn, moving from top to bottom of the prefrontal cortex.  When shown an enemy, the impulse is sharper, but definitely follows this top to bottom pattern.  So here’s the kicker.  Guess which direction the electrical impulses flow when a person is told to think of themselves, ten years out?  You guessed it.  Downward.  It seems we think of our ten-year-away self as a stranger or worse, as an enemy. 

Jeff Borden on stage

Connectedness

He then showed a US map of social media sites trolling for young inductees which ranged from racist to anarchist.  How were they finding new participants?  Connection.  They were working to connect these teens via social media to fallacious arguments that “felt good” to young, manipulable minds.  They would find connection points with family, friends, religion, justice, and the list goes on.  But the strategy was the same.  Connect.  Because once connected, it was very hard to disconnect.