Friday Campus Connections

Join us every Friday to see how connectedness shows up in “real-world” stories and scenarios.  Here are 3 articles, blogs, or other resources that illustrate the power of connectedness.  Of course, we’ll keep blogging away too.  We hope you’ll stop back by on Monday, to see our newest post.  And don’t forget to follow us on twitter (@Ice_Inst_Org).  Happy Friday!

If I told you to care about something, would you?

Savvy administrators now realize that placing all of the responsibility and accountability around retention on the academic offices was unfair.  For too long we told students what to connect to (academics, programs, instructors, etc), instead of allowing them choices by which to connect to things that mattered to them.

Friday Campus Connections

Join us every Friday to see how connectedness shows up in “real-world” stories and scenarios.  We’ll post 3 articles, blogs, or other resources that illustrate the power of connectedness.  Of course, we’ll keep blogging away too.  We hope you’ll stop back by on Monday, to see our newest post.  And don’t forget to follow us on twitter (@Ice_Inst_Org).  Happy Friday!

Learning That Sucks…in the best way possible

If you allow a robotic vacuum to work, it will get your floors cleaner than you can yourself.  Likewise, if you create a student-led model for learning, and you cultivate it, your students will learn better than through the traditional, teacher-centric model.  And learning won’t “suck” either.

Asking Tough Questions (aka, did I destroy my career?)

For almost 25 years I have seen colleges and universities fail when it comes to any kind of holistic approach to the student experience.  It doesn’t matter if it’s on-ground or online, students feel disconnected.  (Heck, staff and faculty typically feel disconnected…)  When someone needs help, it often feels like there is none.  When someone is poking around on a computer at 3am trying to find support, there often is none.  Why?  Because education is a people business.  There are only so many hours in the day and only so many channels by which to communicate.  Students, faculty, and staff can go hours, days, and sometimes weeks before receiving help. 

Professional Development – A Better Approach?

We will get our audience to do, as we show and tell, before reviewing and asking along the way.  We will not only help people understand the nuances of critical (modern) learning research specific to Interleaving, Spaced Repetition, the Cognitive Science of learning, Varied Instruction, Generative learning, and Desirable Difficulties, but we will practice these methods at the same time. 

Jeff Borden giving a keynote address in Germany

Impression Management – it’s more important than you think…

Profiles are more and more a crucial component of our lives.  It’s not quite as reported today as it was five years ago when we were still figuring out just how profiles worked, but the web is littered with reports of people who lost jobs, scholarships, marriages, or worse, because a profile was not private enough, a person had multiple profiles, or because someone shared a profile of another person without their permission.  Those things still happen, they just aren’t newsworthy anymore.  But just because our information hungry brains also crave novelty doesn’t mean this isn’t an issue.  Especially for younger parts of our society.  It’s called impression management and it’s worth talking about.

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.