Let me step back before moving on with the QLN tenets.

Rejection to “this generation’s technology” is a common reaction that comes up during almost every faculty training I’ve attended . The frequency has dropped over the past seven years, but it still exists. Through the rejection, comes anger and frustration that spills over to cover a plethora of topics. Now is a good time to introduce the “Reaction to Technological Change” chart to help put the anger in perspective.

Sometimes in these trainings, I go on a mini rant to say how it doesn’t work to stay angry or frustrated at Facebook, Twitter, Texting, or Google+ because it’s the world this generation is living in. By rejecting their world, you are rejecting them, and they need you. They need you to show them your morals. They need you to show them your values. They need you to show them your traditions. They need you to help them be better people in this world. After all, that is your job as an educator. And you won’t be allowed to influence them unless you have rapport with them, which brings me back to the two QLN tenets.

• The Prime Directive
• Rapport vs Influence

The end goal of an educator is to influence an individual in such a way that they become better citizens of the world. Influence is like currency that you spend on someone that they gave to you, and the way to increase your “Influence Currency” is by building a relationship with the individual. As you build the relationship, they will give you more “Influence Currency” that you can turn around and hand back to them in the form of influence. So the question then becomes, how do you build rapport with someone?

Building rapport with someone comes down to showing that you are interested and care about an individual and the world they live in. It doesn’t mean you have to live in their world, just be interested and curious. You go into their world to build the relationship, then you bring them back to your world to spend some of your “Influence Currency” to give them your values, morals, and traditions. Then you send them back into their world to be better citizens in THEIR world, not yours. Theirs to ours, ours to theirs.

I understand anger in terms of the “Reactions to Technological Change” chart above, but if your goal is to better connect with this generation, then staying angry or frustrated won’t work. It’s time to reach past the CNN headline and open up your curiosity door to see what their world is really like so you can increase your “Influence Currency.”

Earlier this year, I was honored to be invited to attended the inaugural #140edu conference in NYC which brought together several hundred educators for two days to talk about the future of education. Modeled after TED, each person was given roughly 10 minutes to talk about his/her topic. My topic was on leveraging social media to increase student engagement outside the classroom. You can watch my keynote here.

After the first day of the conference it was clear that the focus of my talk was different than almost everyone else. While everyone was involved in education some how and had a desire to improve it, almost all the topics involved how to make “in-classroom” learning better, while my focus was on “out-of-classroom” learning. In higher ed this is often an area managed by a Student Affairs department.

I’ve attended dozens of education reform/revolution type conferences over the years, and I always end up feeling like the lone wolf talking about the “out-of-classroom” learning space. The informal learning moments that happen in-between classes.

Higher education analyst, Thomas G. Mortenson, revealed that a typical student will spend 15% of their day in class or working on classroom work and 35% of their day sleeping. That leaves 50% of the day for working or hanging around the campus community.

According to a UCLA national study of college seniors 4 out of 5 seniors say their most significant learning moments happened outside the classroom.

Academic researchers Astin, Tinto, and several others, conclude that the more socially involved a student is within the campus community, the higher his/her retention and graduation rates are.

With such strong data to support the work I’m doing, why do I always feel like an outsider at the education reform conferences where the conversation is dominated by in-classroom learning?

Luggage Porter by ColbyBluth

The day before Hurricane Irene made landfall along the Eastern Seaboard, a friend asked my wife and I to help volunteer setting up an evacuation center in NYC. While helping out, I was trying to be as nice as possible to the people coming in seeking shelter. I’d stop my work to help people carry luggage up stairs, answer questions, and clean up water spills. All of which I thought was part of my job as a volunteer.

After helping a family carry their luggage up some stairs, a supervisor stopped me and said…

“You shouldn’t be helping the evacuees as much because we need to train them to know that this is a self-help facility. They need to do things on their own. Training them that we will help them with everything is just setting us up for failure because there will soon be a lot more of them then there are of us and we won’t be able to help everyone.”

As soon as she said that, I flashbacked to the day before when I was doing an orientation training at a school and the president spoke before me. In his closing remarks to the orientation leaders, he said…

“No matter what, make sure to never, ever, ever let a parent pick up any luggage.”

Then a couple days later on Twitter I saw this Tweet…

So my questions are, are we doing too much for our new students? Are we training them that no matter what they need, we are going to make it happen for them? Are we turning college into a daycare facility verses a place where you are expected to carry your own bag because after all, it’s your life?

I spent some time at Carnegie Mellon University visiting a former intern last week. As we walked through their beautiful University Center, I noticed a large number of campus clubs with tables set up trying to solicit students to join their group. Every table was covered with reading material and a bowl of candy to entice students to come closer. My mom taught me when I was really little to never go towards a stranger handing out candy . We also passed several bulletin boards littered with posters for upcoming events. It all reminded me of an advertisement I saw for a marketing class I was invited to attend…

“If you market it, they will come.”

I don’t agree. Both in business and for student groups. I prefer this slogan…

“Show not tell.”

Instead of an info table for your organization, set up an interesting or creative activity related to your topic, in a place with high foot traffic. You’ll get a 1000x times more curious onlookers by showing what you do verses telling people what you do. If nothing else, you’ll have spent your time doing something verses just talking about it from behind a table.

Let’s stop marketing to prospective members and start engaging them.

“I know from my own education that if I hadn’t encountered two or three individuals that spent extra time with me, I’m sure I would have been in jail.” – Steve Jobs

“I’m a very big believer in equal opportunity as opposed to equal outcome. Equal opportunity to me, more than anything, means a great education. Maybe even more important than a great family life. We could make sure that every young child in this country got a great education. We fall far short of that.” – Steve Jobs

“It gave a tremendous level of self-confidence, that through exploration and learning one could understand seemingly very complex things in one’s environment.” – Steve Jobs

“School was pretty hard for me at the beginning.” – Steve Jobs

“[In school] I encountered authority of a different kind than I had ever encountered before, and I did not like it. And they really almost got me. They came close to really beating any curiosity out of me.” – Steve Jobs

“[My teacher] basically bribed me back into learning with candy and money and what was really remarkable was before very long I had such a respect for her that it sort of re-ignited my desire to learn.” – Steve Jobs

“I’d like the people teaching my kids to be good enough that they could get a job at the company I work for, making a hundred thousand dollars a year. Why should they work at a school for thirty-five to forty thousand dollars if they could get a job here at a hundred thousand dollars a year?” – Steve Jobs

“The unions are the worst thing that ever happened to education because it’s not a meritocracy. It turns into a bureaucracy, which is exactly what has happened. The teachers can’t teach and administrators run the place and nobody can be fired. It’s terrible.” – Steve Jobs

“The most important thing is a person. A person who incites your curiosity and feeds your curiosity; and machines cannot do that in the same way that people can.” – Steve Jobs

“…if you ask who are the customers of education, the customers of education are the society at large, the employers who hire people, things like that. But ultimately I think the customers are the parents. Not even the students but the parents. The problem that we have in this country is that the customers went away. The customers stopped paying attention to their schools, for the most part.” – Steve Jobs

“Each year has been so robust with problems and successes and learning experiences and human experiences that a year is a lifetime at Apple. So this has been ten lifetimes.” – Steve Jobs

“I dropped out of Reed College [Portland, Oregon] after the first six months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?” – Steve Jobs

“I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out.” – Steve Jobs

“The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.” – Steve Jobs

“Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later.” – Steve Jobs

NAME:
Booshaka

URL:
http://www.booshaka.com

WHAT IT DOES:
Attaches a point-scoring system to the activity of your Facebook Fans to help you discover your Top Fans through an engagement dashboard.

MY TAKE:
Long time readers will know that I’m a fan of the 90-9-1 rule when it comes to community engagement, so to have a tool that really brings this rule to life is a big deal and something I’ve been waiting for. It’s not perfect yet as it seems to only track month-to-month, but I’m sure in due time, they’ll have a full data dashboard.

The actionable outcomes of having a visualization of your Fan’s engagement will be huge. You’ll be able to identify your trending leaders. You’ll be able to reward the top engaged users every month. You’ll build a game layer ontop of engagement. You’ll be able to…what else? How do you see this being valuable to your work?

SCREEN SHOTS:

Okay, I made up that word, but before our etymologist readers split for the hills, hear me out as to what it means.

When it comes to social media, I’m a data person and every month I run an analytics report to measure what’s working, what’s not working, and the overall growth of a couple Facebook Pages I help manage.

One particular Page has over 20,000 “Likes” on Facebook. A poll or link generates a ton of responses on their Page. If I post that same link on another Page that is 1/10th the size, the response rate is extremely low.

Without “perspectivizing” the data, the smaller Page would probably feel unhappy about the online engagement in comparison to the larger Page. But if we calculate the average level of online engagement per Fan (ALE), we find a different story.

The 20k Fan Page generates a .096 ALE whereas the 2k Fan Page generates a .153 ALE.

Applying an ALE score helps both big and small players really see what’s going on with their accounts.

Here’s how to calculate the ALE of your account…

1. Log into your Facebook Page Insights.
2. Change the date to the date you want to calculate.
3. On the “Overview” page scroll down to “Post Feedback” and record that number.
4. Click on the “Users” page and scroll down to “New Likes.”
5. Toggle “New Likes” to “Total” and hover over the end of the time period and record that number.
6. Divide the “Post Feedback” number by the “Total New Likes” number to determine your Page’s ALE number.

Once you’ve calculated your ALE, please share it in the comments below so we can see a community norm.

In the 1800s, wagon circling was a strategic move by settlers to protect against Native American attacks. For our visual learners, here’s an image…

In nature, circling up is also a strategic move used to protect the herd against predators. Again, for the visual learners…

While it’s no longer the 1800s and we’ve evolved past our animal brethren, humans still unconsciously participate in the habit of circling up. The most obvious example of this is on dance floors…

When women step onto a dance floor together, the group unconsciously starts to form a circle. As a circle they can better see each other, feed off of each other’s energy, and protect each other from the hunters of the dance floor. Circle’s provide a sense of comfort and safety. Creating a circle with your friends is fine if you are just there to enjoy the dance with them. But if you are the host, or leader, of the dance, circles are your enemy.

Take the idea off the dance floor and bring it to any event. If your goal is to make the event successful for everyone, then you need to first make sure you don’t fall into the natural habit of forming a defensive circle with your friends, and second you need to become good at circle busting. By that I mean get good at recognizing circle formations and breaking them up before they become too defensively strong for anyone to penetrate.

Harvard Business Review writers Linda Hill & Kent Lineback recently wrote an article titled “The Three Networks You Need.” Here’s a quick overview of each network:

- Your Operational Network – People you lean on to complete your day-to-day work within your job role.

- Your Developmental Network – People you lean on for emotional support.

- Your Strategic Network – People who work on the outskirts of your profession who dabble in the worlds that surround your own.

The article argues that operational and developmental networks happen naturally, but strategic networks don’t but are equally as important because…

“the forces that drive change in your field will probably come from outside your current world.”

Education is known for its walled gardens, but with shifting times and increasing external pressures, the need for Educators to build up their strategic network is extremely important so they can better be prepared for the outside forces that are driving change in their field. This theme has been echoed at Student Affairs conferences I attend:

We agree H.Ed. fails to use outside expertise. I'd argue further: H.Ed. doesn't repect or value outside expertise. Thoughts? #heresy #sachat

29/03/2011 11:40 am via UberSocialReplyRetweetFavorite

@MelRoc7

Melissa Rocco

It’s an honor to have so many Educators include me in their strategic network and respect my opinion and thoughts even though I don’t work day-to-day at an institution. Instead, my time is spent working on identity development, technology, social media, and online engagement with hundreds of institutions and businesses. My view, and world, are different but often very relevant to the shift happening in Education. Some value my view, others refuse to listen.

I consider many within the #SAchat community to be a part of my strategic network because they DO work day-to-day at an institution. I lean on many educators almost daily for advice and suggestions. Some of my best ideas come from people who are totally outside the work I do.

What about you? If you were to map out your strategic network, what people from what worlds would you want to include?

Relationships are built on the number of emotionally charged shared experiences between individuals. 9/11 was a huge emotionally charged shared experience for America. The experience started on 9/11/01 and lasted for weeks and months afterwards. It seemed like all of America opted to put down their differences and pause to love their neighbor. It was unreal and amazing, but I missed it all.

I was studying at the Goethe Institute in Berlin, Germany during the Fall of 2001. Berlin is six hours ahead of New York City. When the first plane hit the North Tower at 8:45 a.m. EST, it was 2:45 p.m. in Berlin. I just got home from school and sat down to watch the BBC. I didn’t have a computer then, so the BBC was my only source of information. A few moments later, my parents in Chicago called. We cried on the phone together. Then I hung up and I sat alone in my apartment. My girlfriend, now my wife, called and we talked. We cried. Then I hung up and watched the BBC for the next 12 hours. I didn’t sleep because I couldn’t sleep. My parents called a few more times and we talked and cried. Then I was alone again. I wanted to so desperately talk to someone, a fellow American face-to-face. But I sat in my apartment and watched BBC. Too shocked to move.

The next day I went to class and everyone’s face was ingrained with hours of crying from the night before. We broke our “German Only” rule to vent with one another even though most of the class weren’t native English speakers. It helped. It made me feel like I was home. We cried some more. It was sad. The next day, one of the other Americans in the class decided to end her trip early and fly back home to Texas to be with her family. I stayed.

The next couple weeks I read, heard, and watched more and more stories of massive vigils and gatherings happening around the U.S. It was as if America was one big family and though we had our differences, it didn’t matter. Every house flew an American flag. The pictures were amazing. The videos were amazing. The stories were amazing. I spent hours at the internet cafe absorbing as much as I could.

I stayed in Berlin through the New Year for my class. By the time I flew back to Chicago, the emotionally charged shared experience of 9/11 was mostly faded. People were getting back to their routine. There were no more group vigils and the number of flying American flags went down.

My wife does her best to try and explain what it was like the days, weeks and months after 9/11, but explaining it is secondary to actually being there. It’s as if I went to the bathroom during the critical part of a movie and have to keep asking people what happened. But unlike a movie, I can’t rewind 9/11. I forever have to experience it through the lens of other people.

I have my story, but it’s not the same emotionally charged shared story as the rest of the country, so I still cling to every new story I hear as if somehow it’ll help me piece together what it was really like to be here, in America, with fellow Americans.