As with any other student life office, ours aims to provide vast opportunities for student engagement. We work with student clubs to create day to day activities on campus to promote student involvement with karaoke events, scavenger hunts, video game tournaments, chess game tournaments, special showings of movies and so on. But more than that we work hard to book tickets for off campus events which we believe our students will enjoy and attend. Unfortunately, students do not always take part in these off campus trips.

Within my year of working within the office of student life, I have noticed how our students do not purchase tickets for our off campus trips. Rather, it is our faculty and staff that run to our office to purchase tickets for our baseball games and Broadway shows. Now, the first thought that comes to mind is that we are not picking the “hip” trips or events for our students but how can a Yankees game or a trip to see Cirque Du Soleil not count as popular events for students? If I can guarantee that students know and appreciate these types of events, then what is the problem in getting more students to attend our trips?

When thinking of what the problem may be the first thought that comes to mind is that the discounted ticket prices we offer for students are still too high. Or maybe students know that primarily faculty and staff attend these trips and so they do not want to attend. Indeed, our lack of popularity as faculty and staff is highly noted at times within our day to day job. However, could it be that at a community college it is truly hard to engage students who may be working full time to support themselves and their family? As a four year student who gets the privilege to dorm is it just easier to take part in on and off campus activities due to proximity?

Do you experience the same quandary with engagement within your student population? If yes then what do you do to combat this growing dilemma?

Three quick stories, one important point.

Story #1:
Last week, before my soccer match, I watched a little league softball game on the field next to us. Surrounding the field was a collection of parents multitasking between the game, their blackberries, and babysitting their, even younger, offspring. One parent in particular was having a hard time keeping her little one under control. Her kid kept racing up and down the sidelines while mimicking a train. He put his hand in the air, pumped his fist, and as he passed us let out a loud, “Choo Choo!” Then 30 seconds later he’d come steamrolling back. The kid clearly had extra energy and needed to let it out. The parent, and most parents would agree, didn’t try and stop him from running, instead she calming kept looking a few yards ahead to clear away any dangers that might be in his way. The little kid was motivated to run, so instead of trying to stop him, the parent took on the role of laying tracks for him to keep running.

Story #2:
My brother and I were playing Frisbee Golf and he lodged his frisbee square in the middle of a mud pit. I quickly looked around for a large stick and without much thinking took two steps into the mud pit, reached out my arm, and started to retrieve his frisbee for him. With my foot half covered in mud, my brother said, “never get in the way of a motivated individual.”

Story #3:
At this year’s ACPA conference in Philadelphia, the conference organizers hosted a special social media strategy session with several individuals to talk about how they could better leverage social media for the ACPA community. Throughout the session it was clear that someone needed to step up and lead the charge. Looking around the room, there were many capable individuals, but the question was who was the most motivated and ready? Kathy Petras raised her hand and agreed to lead the group. Since then,  she has been a wonderful leader, and had we had enough data to work with, probably could have predicted so because Kathy was already a trending leader in the community. She was a newer associate that recently took on a leadership position in another committee as well as led an ed session for the first time this year. If we were to tally up her actions, we would’ve seen she was a trending leader and was hunting for her next level of growth. In this case, leading the social media adoption committee was a perfect fit for her.

Point:
Every student group/classroom can be broken up into varying levels of engagement. Based on a specific student’s engagement level, they want to be treated in different ways. A fully involved students wants to be treated in a totally different way than a student lurking on the edge of the wall. A student’s engagement level is constantly shifting though, with a hope of always trending towards more involvement. It’s up to the leaders of the community to thus recognize the individual engagement level of each student, and also to recognize how an individual is trending. Find out who the Kathy is of your community that is trending towards being a leader, then lay down tracks for her to continue to be great, because the worst thing a leader can do is get in the way of a motivated train.

James Fowler’s keynote address at the #ACUI11 conference this year stirred up quite a discussion after he made the claim that online relationships had little influence over behavior. As expected, our friends in the #SAchat community quickly expressed concern for the statement through the Twitter backchannel and afterwards in the hotel lobby as they’ve experienced a great deal of influence exchange through #SAchat. In talking over the keynote with Jeff Lail from UNCG that night, he brought up the idea of weak ties verses strong ties within relationships. In-person connections are more likely to build strong ties whereas online connections are more likely to result in weak ties.

Over the past year, it’s been interesting to watch this concept play out within the micro world of Student Affairs. The #SAchat community on Twitter is the most active hashtag for Student Affairs professionals to connect, learn, and grow from each other. However, within #SAchat there are many sub cultures such as Residence Life, Orientation Leaders, First Year Experience, etc. These subcultures have tried, several times, to create and maintain a hashtag to connect their members together. But most of the hashtags have faded away. Why?

Let’s start with #SAchat. The original group of people who started #SAchat knew each other in the real world. There were strong ties within the inner core. This meant that if no one else participated in the conversation, there would still be a longer term commitment to the conversation between the people in the inner core because they shared strong ties. As it happened, other people did join the conversation and over time it grew. If it were a dance floor, the total number of people on the dance floor increased through weak ties, but the number of people with strong ties in the center of the dance floor stayed the same. The critical shift in the community happened last year during conference season when #SAchat members hosted meetups at each conference. They wanted to meet their weak tie online friends IRL (in real life) and thus turn them into strong tie friends. The results were amazing, the #SAchat community grew exponentially. Back to the dance floor, not only did the overall number of people on the dance floor increase, but the number of people in the center of the dance floor increased as many of the weak ties were converted into strong ties. Each meetup repeats this process.

During conference season this year, I made it a point to connect with as many #SAchat people as possible IRL because not only did I want to get to know them better, but I also know how strong ties are what keep people engaged in the community longer.

On the flip side is #FYEchat. I started the #FYEchat community to mimic the success of the #SAchat community. But it has never quite worked [yet] even though I see the value it could provide to First Year Experience professionals. The difference is I started the community on a foundation of weak ties so the commitment to keep the conversation going wasn’t there. So it fades in and out.

Another example is the #WLsalt community. The community started online with a collection of weak ties but has since grown to a dedicated group. The critical difference between #WLsalt and #FYEchat was that soon after a collection of weak ties were created online, they hosted a meetup for the community at a conference to convert those weak ties into strong ties. The strong ties thus formed the inner core of their dance floor.

In terms of weak ties and strong ties, there are two options to creating and maintaing an online community. Either start with an inner core built on strong ties that are dedicated, or convert your weak ties into strong ties quickly. Once the inner core is established, and the community norm of inclusion is practiced, you’ll watch your community grow with little effort from you. Weak ties won’t have as much influence over you as strong ties whether online or offline.

A project I was assigned recently involved analyzing a set of grant applications. The proposals were centered on using technology to enhance student success. My job was to determine commonalities and missing pieces across the proposals. From a list of 20 or so findings, here are the four takeaways I believe are pertinent to our work:

1. Even in a fairly well-defined grant program, definitions for common terms differed greatly across the 81 proposals.
2. Many authors used buzz words in their application narratives, but failed to back up those words or concepts with knowledge or examples that showed they knew anything about the terms.
3. Risks and obstacles associated with the implementation of the project almost always dealt with resistance to change in other areas of campus.
4. Student affairs units were woefully absent among the collaborators in proposed initiatives.

In an era of fiscal responsibility and budget cuts, relevance matters. In era of accountability, meaningfulness is important. In an era of continued alteration, adaptation is key. In an era of “do more with less” (whether you ascribe to that theory or not), collaboration is necessary.  So, I ask you to consider the following as you plan for the upcoming academic year:

1. Does everyone on campus understand what you do? If not, why not, and how will you address that this year?
2. Do you use buzz words so you can be a part of the conversation, or are you driving the conversation because you and your area are the buzz of campus?
3. How are you addressing change head-on and helping others realize its usefulness and necessity?
4. Are you collaborating with non-student affairs offices to learn about their work and efforts, enhance their programs, and impact your campus’ students? If not, why not, and who’s at the top of your list for contacting?

It’s a new year, with new possibilities and new opportunities. How are you going to make this the best year yet? Not ever, because that implies you’ve no way to improve from now. Just yet… better than years past, setting a solid foundation for the years to come.

Matt Pistilli is a research associate in Information Technology at Purdue University. Connect with him on twitter.

As Student Affairs (or in my case Student Life) professionals, one of the key metrics by which we measure ourselves is the level of “engagement” with our students – how they engage with our programs, services and campus in general. We’re constantly trying to find ways to involve our students and encourage them to use our services and come to our events – to share knowledge and build community and, well, engage.

We’re constantly asking how we can engage with our students more. In fact, we ask it so routinely that when I hear it, part of me shudders a little.

As I look across the landscape of channels in which we push out to communicate and engage with our students (walk-in appointments, events, individual counseling sessions, workshops, infosessions, posters, TV screens, flyers, postcards, Facebook posts, Twitter feeds, Foursquare check-ins, blogs, vlogs, text messages, websites and email – lots and lots of email) I’m often left wondering: in what way are we not engaging with them?

We communicate and engage with them through pretty much every imaginable pathway, yet we still believe we’re not engaging with students and they’re not engaging with us as they should.

This brings up the next question: in what way are we expecting engagement? At what point will we believe students have engaged? Is this possible?

What do you think?

Are we over communicating with our students? Are we asking them to be too engaged? At what point will we feel we have successfully met that engagement threshold or are we truly asking the wrong question?

Nick Simonton manages the marketing and communications for Student Life and the Career Center at the University of Washington.

Most student club advisors will tell you that club engagement goes through waves; some years are rockstars and others are duds. Almost every club starts the year with aspirations of rockstardom, but within a couple weeks, the excitement and motivation of the leadership team fades, and thus, the entire club activity withers. In pondering this problem, I’ve been talking more and more about an idea called engagement-based leadership (EBL), meaning that leadership is not a one-time elected thing, but rather an ongoing, ever-changing position rewarded based on engagement. Before I talk more about EBL, first let’s dissect the problem of why student leaders fade within a month of being elected.

Several years ago, I walked the second day of a 2-Day Avon Walk For Breast Cancer with my wife and some friends. Anyone who’s ever done the walk knows how grueling it is. Blisters alone are painful, but the average Avon walker can expect to endure multiple layers of blisters building up until his or her entire foot becomes one big blister. It’s disgusting and painful and makes the second day of the walk intense. The organizers know that completion of the walk is extremely difficult without a continuous onslaught of support from spectators and volunteers. That’s why for every walker, they commit to line the entire path with at least five cheerers. On the last leg of the walk, my feet blistered up and shot a pain through my body with each step. Mentally and physically I was ready to quit. My motivation was gone. But then, as we turned the corner, there was a smiling old lady sitting in a wheel chair, wearing a cap to cover her bald head and holding a sign that read, “I’m why you’re walking, Thank you.” Like a bolt of electricity, my whole body reenergized and plowed toward the finish line. Imagine if the only rewards for walking the race were in the beginning when they pumped us up, and at the end when we crossed the finish line? The attrition rates would be horrendous!

Like the Avon walk, student leaders begin the year excited and motivated about the idea of the journey they’re about to start. They might have just attended an award ceremony where the outgoing leaders were showered in praise for the hard work they did throughout the year, which further motivates the incoming leaders. So much support. So much praise. And then, let’s say within a month or so, reality sets in. The real work starts, and the “blisters” of being a leader build up. But unlike the Avon walk, with a motivational checkpoint waiting for you at every street corner, the next motivational checkpoint for student leaders most likely won’t be for another six months, during their outgoing ceremony when they are praised for all the hard work they did throughout the year. Thus, within the first couple months of being a leader, the excitement and motivation fade and the attrition rates go up. It should be noted that some leaders drop off for other reasons, such as class overload, work overload, or personal issues.

What’s a solution look like?

As the advisor, you could make sure to set up a collection of individual checkpoints for your leaders throughout the year, so you make sure they stay excited and motivated. At bare minimum, let’s say you create checkpoints that happen once per week for ten minutes where you praise them for the work they are doing and remind them of the bigger picture of student engagement. Just one leader multiplied out for eight months, that’s just under five hours of your time. Now expand that to 50-300 leaders. If you don’t think you have a life now…

Enter EBL. The goal is still the same, keep the leaders motivated on an ongoing basis so they can survive through the typical student leader burnout, but in EBL, the tactics change. In EBL, you are moving the motivational checkpoints away from you as the admin/advisor and pushing it to the students. EBL builds in a peer-to-peer motivational system that is ongoing and ever present. Now it doesn’t matter if you have 50 or 5000 student leaders. Actually, the more leaders you have, the better.

How does it work?

It’s no secret I’m a fan of Whole Foods (also known as Whole Paycheck). Because there’s a WF on my way home from work, I tend to frequently stop in and grab a few items. Over time, I realized that WF is one of the top five places I visit the most every week, which makes me a pretty darn engaged customer. In fact, WF should probably be rewarding me for being so engaged. Enter FourSquare, Yelp, and SCVNGR. For those unfamiliar with these three sites, they are, simply stated, mobile check-in tools. I can be anywhere in NY and check in that I am there via my mobile phone. Nothing special yet, until you start to receive prizes, titles, and recognition for checking in more often. For a while, I was crowned the Mayor of our WF because I was the most engaged customer. But then my speaking travel schedule picked up and for several months I disappeared and rightfully so, someone else took over as Mayor.

EBL rewards students based on their engagement. The more engagement “points” you score, the more rewards, titles, and recognition you receive. To repeat from above, leadership is not a one-time yearly elected thing, but rather an ongoing, ever-changing position that is rewarded based on engagement.

There certainly is much more to debate and discuss here, but consider this post only a surface-level introduction to the idea. I’m not interested in getting into the weeds just yet, so I purposefully left out many of the operational details. This isn’t a pitch to integrate FourSquare, Yelp, and SCVNGR into student activities, because engagement is more than just being there. Engagement also could mean clicking on a link, reading/commenting on a post, or expressing your opinion at a meeting…etc.

The Value of EBL?

Admin/Advisor – Student Leader attrition rates will drop, which means student leaders will stick around longer and be more active in their clubs. The increased activity will make clubs more successful throughout the year. The admin/advisor also won’t have to do as much individual student leader motivational check-ins.

Student Leaders – Like a video game, the rewards and benefits built into EBL will keep the student leaders motivated throughout the entire year on an ongoing basis. They are going to have more fun because their clubs are more active and engaged. They also won’t feel as much guilt about dropping off the map and letting the club die due to some personal issues they didn’t plan for ahead of time. A new leader with the most engagement points is ready to step up to Mayorship.

Students – They will have a larger group of active clubs to join. After joining they don’t have to rely on a disengaged elected leader to keep the group going. Leadership is open to anyone who wants it and is willing to work for it.

Wrap Up

EBL is a blend of game theory and student engagement theory. Every student affairs professional knows the pains of deadbeat leaders and thus dead groups. EBL is a new paradigm in thinking about leadership. If we want to break out of the normal student engagement levels of 16-40%, we have to think differently. The ideas, tactics, and tech tools we use have to embody this new way of thinking. It’s not just about making paperwork more efficient, that’s just extracting more energy from the resources you already know exists. It’s about exploring new potential energy that is sitting dormant in the 60-84% of the rest of your student body, that’s a massive untapped pool of energy.

Editor’s Disclosure: This post reveals that the author is a 40-something interloper on the “Gen-Y” career network Brazen Careerist. For anyone disturbed by this revelation, the author claims to really only read it for the “stories.” And now, on to the show….

The other day, I got involved in an interesting discussion on Brazen Careerist about whether length of experience matters in establishing credibility these days.

The comment that led off this discussion:

The conversation really struck a chord with me, because I think it is central to understanding, and perhaps navigating, the divide between Millennials and their Gen X and Boomer managers. There is a disconnect between their generation, which wants to be acknowledged for their ideas, and those who came before, who do value ideas, but feel they’ve earned respect through hard work and years of experience (and sometimes feel they don’t get it from the youngsters.)

The discussion about the value of experience and status, versus the value of ideas, goes back much further. The young have always felt discounted, the old disrespected, the rich and scholarly have always felt more enlightened than those who work in the trenches, and those who work in the trenches have valued their experiences in life and work more than ‘book learning.”

My favorite example:

Socrates was a great example of someone who was in fact a great teacher (and a guru), but it’s useful to remember that he’s only thought of this way because of what others said about him, and none of that would have gotten down to us, if it hadn’t been for Plato.

Socrates was actually a stonemason, who spent his days in the Forum taking people down a notch, by asking them simple and pointed questions, giving his observations, and playing devil’s advocate. It was Plato who enjoyed his style, wrote about it, emulated it, and taught it in his academy.

So herein lies the crux of the credibility issue: Are you someone who is engaged in questioning as the means for discovery, in debate as a delivery vehicle for new knowledge and points of view, and in mutual interplay between others who might teach you something (including people you may not agree with, or even find to be “small-minded?”) Are you nimble enough, confident enough, and curious enough, to be engaged?

The key to wisdom, then, is to know a good question when you hear it and a good conversation when you are in it. And to ENGAGE.

There are many, many cartoons that depict a seeker going to the mountaintop to ask a wise guru for advice, only to be met with questions. The punchline here shouldn’t be lost on you…this is how people learn.

So you can’t be a guru if you only learn by osmosis, or repeat back what you have learned verbatim. To be a guru, you must light a fire in others for knowledge, ask them compelling questions, and send them away with their minds racing, frenetic, and full of wonder for the search.

And how will you know if you are a guru?

They’ll climb back up the mountain with more questions.

And this time, they’ll bring friends.

This article is a cross-post to both the Student Affairs Collaborative and HigherEdCareerCoach.Com

Attention: Crankypants Alert! You have been warned. That is all.

I don’t know if it’s something in the water or the air lately, but I’ve been in several internet conversations recently about “gurus” and how to differentiate them from the posers out there, as you seek advice for whatever ails you, life-wise, career-wise…whatever-wise. I’m not sure who stuck something in the internet’s collective craw, but now I can certainly tell you that my craw has been stuck. So allow me to spill some wisdom on you. I seem to have lost my Band-Aids ® and well…these thoughts have to go somewhere. (Beg pardon. Excuse me. So sorry about your new shoes.)

The first conversation happened on Twitter, from a tweet by my friend from State College, @Robin2Go, who also seems to cross paths with a lot of interesting people related to the Student Affairs chat (#sachat) community. It continued with a reply from Brian Panulla, one of my best friends, who used to live in State College and whose better half, Michelle, sang “Power of Two” by the Indigo Girls at my wedding with another great friend Beth Hayden.  (If you’re wondering where I am going with all this…I will return to my point…eventually.)

Here’s the exchange (Click on each image for full-size version.)

Now, I know that some of the youngsters out there, or those who weren’t college radio station DJs, music critics and wannabe hipsters (like I was in college) may not get the reference to the great Australian band the Hoodoo Gurus. It’s okay, some people are just cooler than you. (Or possibly older, deluded, and hopelessly self-referential)

But I digress…. Let’s move on, as I continue my effort to raise some dramatic tension, and build up t0 part 2 (yes, part 2) of what may eventually become a “field guide” of sorts to assist the less experienced in distinguishing the charlatans from the true gurus. (By the way, I really liked Charlatans UK when I was in college, too. Check them out!)

The Call of “Who-Dos”

There are true gurus and false prophets. Upon first glance, you may notice some similarities. You might listen to one or the other, and not be able to distinguish the twitter of one from the tweet of the other. Each has it’s own sweet particularities… pleasing to the ear, inspiring.  And either may give you welcome respite from the problems before you on any particular day. But the ability to discern between a “who-do” and a “guru” is essential for those who want to become experts in their own right.

Now, you may not have crossed paths with Robin, Brian, Michelle or Beth, or even heard their twitters and chirps. It’s probably because they don’t toot their own horn as much as they could. They don’t claim to be “gurus.” They just do what they do, because it makes them happy and keeps them busy with things that interest them. But let’s take a look at what these people do, and if it piques your interest, you can cyber-stalk them on the intertubes and arrive at your own conclusions.

(By the way, none of these people have any idea I am writing this about them, so won’t they be surprised? Consider this a  #FollowFriday-in-overdrive attempt at “crossing the beams” of my various twitter circles, to see if the internet explodes or anything. You can just call me the Large Hadron Superconductor Super-Collider of the web. And just wait until later posts in this series: I’m hoping it’s going to be the social media equivalent of those proton beams circulating around and smashing together….And I seriously hope to break the internet, and possibly unravel the fabric of space/time itself. (Somebody call Steven Hawking and tell him to follow me. I might be on to something here.)

But I will also settle for at least causing some discussion…hopefully it won’t start with “Who is this nutcase?”

Robin Smail describes herself as a “disruptive technologist” and she does something or other that is awesome at Penn State. I really don’t know her exact expertise (something to do with Joomla and Moodle, I think) but she is someone who is out there connecting people through social media…at Penn State, across the Higher Ed Web community, and well…with anybody who’s interesting.

Robin doesn’t just talk about social media. She does it. A lot. All the time. With anyone. With everyone. If social media has a “raving fan,” it’s Robin. Visit her blog, Renegade Element, and if you dare tweet her (@Robin2Go) you won’t be able to say you weren’t warned. She has a quote from Serenity on her blog, and it pretty much describes her level of engagement… “You can’t stop the signal, Mal.”

If you haven’t heard of Brian Panulla, you have probably been exposed to his work. For a time, he worked at HigherEdJobs.com and developed a lot of the back-end stuff that makes their site and their search manager run. So you might want to follow him. Besides being smart and really capable, he’s funny.

Michelle Panulla and Beth Hayden were college roommates, and my wife and I knew them because they all sang for the PennHarmonics. Michelle is a gifted web designer as well as a singer. She is great with Flash and Flex, and has designed many different websites and blogs, including contributions to the original GoPSUSports.Com site for Penn State. She’s also a great cook, a dog lover, and an expert at dealing with people with ADD (okay, I’m talking about Brian). Beth is a social media coach and consultant, a certified wedding celebrant, and she has designed some great blogs and helped many people learn the basics of blogging. Both are also great singers.

These people are a few of my friends. But they are also a great examples of “Who-Dos”: people who spend their time doing what they love, what interests them, and what they are passionate about. You can recognize the subtle differences in the energy they put into their songs. Much like a collegiate A Capella group, they are well-practiced, and high energy. There are occasional breaks, stutters, even pauses. They have looser choreography than, for example, Lady Gaga on American Idol the other night. They don’t fluff their feathers and strut anything like that…they just sing their songs…occasionally together with the group, occasionally solo, but always engaging, because it’s not just about the beauty of the song…it’s the beauty of singing together… harmony and dissonance, individual nuance and collective choral harmony…primal, organic, chaotic, and mysterious.

“Who-dos” are like protons ready for that 7 trillion electronvolt jolt. Some people may look at them and just say “there’s a hydrogen ion.”But what happens when they all start smashing together?

You might just unlock some of the universe’s great mysteries.

• Are you a “Who-Do” or a “Guru?”
• How do you sing your song?

(This is a cross-post with HigherEdCareerCoach.Com. Look for part 2 early next week on both the SA Collaborative and Higher Ed Career Coach.)

Related posts:

1. Take 5: Social Media Resources for Higher Ed Pros Today’s Higher Ed professionals often feel like dinosaurs, in comparison…

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With both the DAYTIME #sachat and EVENING #sachat in full swing yesterday, it’s safe to declare Thursday as #sachat day! The topic yesterday was Connecting with Students on Facebook, and once again we set new records for conversing and learning. The conversation produced 581 comments from 87 student affairs professionals!

In case you missed it, below is a quick recap. If you haven’t yet participated in an #sachat, learn more here.

Full Transcripts
DAYTIME:
View as webpage
Download as PDF
EVENING:
*There was a tech error with the EVENING transcript. We’re working on getting the transcript.

Last Night’s Top Contributers
@edcabellon
@cindykane
@reyjunco
@debrasanborn
@pereirap80
@thestacyface
@brockter
@lvanlysal
@gballingerjr
@ediemccracken

Here’s to another successful #sachat. See you all next week! In the meantime, make sure to join our Facebook Page.

Last night’s #sachat on Twitter about connecting with students on Twitter was RECORD BREAKING to say the least. The one hour conversation produced 590 comments from 67 student affairs professionals! That is more than double our previous record breaking #sachat. WooT! WooT!

In case you missed it, below is a quick recap. If you haven’t yet participated in an #sachat, learn more here.

Last Night’s Full Transcript
View as webpage
Download as PDF

Last Night’s Top Contributers
@edcabellon
@reyjunco
@ARL275
@cindykane
@debrasanborn
@inigral
@tomkrieglstein
@brockter
@danielwmurphy
@willistj

Here’s to another successful #sachat. See you all next week when we launch our DAYTIME #sachat!