Jeff Borden giving a keynote address in Germany

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

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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.

Innovation 101

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Google it.  Explore if through ERIC.  Do what you do so well!  Research the idea, the strategy, etc.  See how other schools have done it, or alternatively, see if there are reasons schools have chosen NOT to do something.  Look at the business stream in which the initiative was accomplished and then ask how it might be performed in a your specific higher education context.  Ping your network and ask colleagues what they think.  Go to Twitter or LinkedIn and create a post about it, looking for comments and feedback.  Just noodle with it.  Even if you finally conclude that it can’t work or if you never end up using it, the continual practice will help.  See, as you collect more and more of those ideas, you’ll start to have a throng of options available when the right day comes. 

What I Should Have Said…

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I couldn’t do what my mind was screaming to do which was to yell through the rant explaining that of COURSE it hadn’t worked!  The way he went about implementing it was ludicrous!  He had coupled poor classroom management skills with a half-baked attempt at a learning model he didn’t even fully understand, so obviously it hadn’t worked! 

Accessing Technology

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Think about a portal.  In my opinion, this is one of the most under-utilized (and therefore under-valued) pieces of digital real estate at a University.  And you can tell.  The typical portal at a college is the equivalent of a trailer park for links, notifications, and assets.  So what do users do?  They bookmark the few links they actually find useful and access them directly.  Of course that also means they never see the notifications, announcements, or new links over time.  

Placeholders

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Have you ever watched a classroom where the professor has no idea what active learning is?  They still perform the same lectures they have used for years.  You know in the first 60 seconds what’s coming.  Students will fall asleep, some will try to furiously write down every word while missing a healthy amount of it (and not absorbing any), and still others will simply stare off into the world, trying to remember why they are attending college, etc.  You KNOW it’s coming. 

Lying With Data Is Easy – Telling The Truth Without It Is Hard

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Data has just danced around the edges of usefulness for most colleges and universities over time.  We have MOUNDS of data, right?  We have historical data going back decades.  Granted, it’s mostly on paper, in cabinets, locked away in a storage room we only open every seven years, brushing off dust and cobwebs like an Indiana Jones film so as to cherry pick the best data to show accreditors…but it’s there. 

I Can Name Innovation In Three Notes….

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Is taking a solution used at another school…or maybe a hundred other schools, and implementing that solution at your school innovative?  You can argue that every school is a completely unique context.  After all, your school has your own ecosystem filled with nay-sayers, accreditation concerns, nuanced courses, niche enrollments, etc.  So, if that is your definition of context (instead of education vs health care, etc), then I guess EVERY school is innovative.  But that seems like an incredibly watered down version of innovation to me.  I don’t think that is innovative.