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Perception gap

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

CDW Government polled 1,000 college students, instructors and IT staff for their report 2009 21st-Century Campus Report: Defining the Vision. Some key findings:

81% of college students use technology every day to prepare for class.
74% of faculty say they incorporate technology into almost every class, but only 45% of students say technology is fully integrated into their curriculum.
52% of students report using social networking sites for educational purposes while 14% of faculty say they use social networking site for educational purposes.
67% of faculty say they are satisfied with their technology professional development, but 45% of students rate faculty lack of tech knowledge as the biggest obstacle to classroom technology integration.
32% of students and 22% of faculty strongly agree that their college/university is preparing students to successfully use technology when they enter the workforce.

Posted in Academic, Innovation, Strategy, Training | No Comments »

Nobody is happy

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

In a widely shared YouTube video, comedian Louis C.K. explains that, “everything is amazing right now, and nobody is happy.”

Communication technologies today are amazing. Yet, I hear more rumbling about The University of Montana’s inability to communicate effectively with students, employees and other constituents than ever before. Nobody is happy.

I don’t know if people are any happier at North Carolina State University, but NC State offers a nice contrast to UM when it comes to campus communication strategies. UM has (sort of) adopted a tool called “Official Notices” for official campus communication. Official Notices can be read in OneStop and/or delivered to email addresses. NC State has adopted Twitter as an official channel of communication. They built a page that aggregates “official” Tweets from multiple departments.

The medium is not the message. Twitter doesn’t guarantee better communication than UM’s Official Notices. But NC State has adopted a strategy very different from UM. Without judging the quality or effectiveness of the communication, here is a numbers comparison between UM and NC State on official communication.

Number of messages in my UM Official Notices inbox:

8 over the last 26 days

Number of Tweets on the NC State Twitter page:

39 in the last 21 hours

Number of departments with ability to send UM Official Notices:

Number of departments at NC State with Twitter accounts:

Percentage of UM messages that link to a web page for more information:

37%

Percentage of NC State Tweets that link to a web page for more information:

67%

Average number of characters in UM Official Notices:

1,782

Average number of characters in NC State Tweets

108

Comments?

Posted in Communication, Innovation, Leadership and Management, People, Policies, Strategy, Systems, Web | No Comments »

How cell phones, Twitter, Facebook can make history

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

As the world watches (and participates in) the election in Iran, Clay Shirkey helps us understand the transformation of media and communication.

Having trouble viewing the video? View at TED.com.

Posted in Communication, Innovation, Media, Network, People, Strategy, Web | No Comments »

All the king’s horses

Friday, June 5th, 2009

Keith Lynip in UM’s Extended Learning Services is contemplating our next learning management system. His blog post Synthesis lays out a vision for an integrated approach to academic technology. He foolishly asked for my perspective.

As Ramon the penguin said in Happy Feet: ”Big guy. Let me tell something to you. Come close. Don’t be afraid. You want answers?”

Keith laments that the University is “far better at analysis-separation, deconstruction-than synthesis.”

Yes, we excel at separating ourselves from one another-sector-by-sector-school-by-school-department-by-department-website-by-website. We can blame limited resources, organizational culture or bad management, but why blame ourselves. Google has separated and deconstructed us far beyond our mortal powers.

Information-including our information-has been smashed into a bazillion pieces and wrested from our control. It’s a done deal. Our best hope now is to figure out if the University can be relevant in putting the pieces back together.

Humpty-Dumpty Out of chaos comes order, but the emerging order is quite different. If we don’t start thinking differently, we’ll be like all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, who couldn’t put Humpty together again. Except that in the digital age, Humpty is capable of putting himself back together and we become obsolete if we don’t adapt. Don’t believe me? Google “death of newspapers”.

In “Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder,” author David Weinberger says that “miscellaneous order is changing how we think the world itself is organized and-perhaps more important-who we think has the authority to tell us so.”

He points out that before the digital age, physical limitations on how we organized information limited our vision, and gave the people who controlled the organization of information more power than those who created the information.

Then along came all the “bliggity blogs and the facey spaces and the tweety pages,” not to mention the social tagging, the RSS feeds and the data mash-ups.

If all that boggles your mind, here’s a simple guide for the new age:

It’s all about me.

If you want synthesis, don’t synthesize around academics or any other organizational aspect of the institution. Synthesize around ME. My life. My WHOLE life. My academic life. My social life. My love life. My health. My job. My finances. My responsibilities. My causes. My passions.

You (any department, administrator, faculty or staff) don’t care about me (any student) as much as you care about yourself. That’s just how humans and human-made institutions work. But I’m in control now. I’m calling the shots and I have to tell something to you.

Our bliggity blogs and our facey spaces and our tweety pages are thriving because they operate in a world that revolves around me.

We-the University-haven’t figured out how to function in that world yet.

When we do, the technology will be ready.

Posted in Academic, Innovation, Leadership and Management, People, Strategy, Web | No Comments »

Yes we can

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

Apparently, Barrack Obama was serious about this change thing.

A Time Magazine article last month, How Obama Is Using the Science of Change, revealed that a dream team of 29 leading behavioral scientists is advising the Obama administration on how to get us (you and me) to make better decisions about our finances, our health and our impact on the environment.

Turns out, humans aren’t all that good at making rational decisions.

MIT professor Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational and an Obama advisor, gave a recent talk where he demonstrated this idea. He showed data on organ donations from 11 European countries. Four countries had little success getting people to donate organs with 4-28% participation. The other seven were very successful with 86-100% participation.

The reason for the disparity? Culture? Religion?

Try the design of the form at the DMV.

In countries with low organ donation, the form asks people to check a box if they want to participate the organ donor program.

People don’t check, and thus don’t join.

The form in countries with high participation asks people to check a box if they don’t want to participate in the organ donor program.

Again, people don’t check, but this time they join.

The Netherlands-the most successful “opt-in” country-achieved 28 percent participation after mailing a letter to every household in the country begging people to join the program. To think they could have achieved 80, 90, or 100 percent success by understanding human nature and making a minor tweak to their form.

Default options pack power. As the Time article says, “Most of us will save for retirement, run our computers in energy-efficient mode and be organ donors if we have to take action to say no-but not if we have to take action to say yes.”

The Obama administration hopes to harness that behavioral reality to help people make better decisions.

Perhaps we should too.

Think about the myriad complex decisions and actions that confront UM students and employees: What course of study should I pursue? How will I pay for college? What benefits package should I choose? What’s the appropriate way to communicate and collaborate with others?

One answer is to create default options and design simpler processes that help people make better decisions.

On the first full day of Barrack Obama’s presidency, he issued an executive order on “Transparency and Open Government.” The order more or less says that we have to stop making information and processes about critical decisions people make so gosh danged complicated.

Web technology is a key player in all of this. Perhaps that’s why Obama charged his Chief Technology Officer with primary responsibility for the openness in government initiative.

“That’s exactly what this is about,” says Richard Thayler, co-author of Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness (and another Obama advisor). “If instead of the 30 pages of unintelligible crap that comes with a mortgage, you can upload it with one click to a website that will explain it and help you shop for alternatives, you make it as easy as shopping for a hotel.”

Now, that’s change we can believe in.

Posted in Governance, Innovation, Leadership and Management, People, Strategy, Web | No Comments »

The foray into Facebook

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

The April issue of IT’s Bits newsletter is out today. It highlights the UM English department’s experiment with Facebook to improve communication with students, and underscores potential pitfalls facing official University departments that choose to use non-UM systems like Facebook.

The English department, in collaboration with UM legal counsel and Information Technology, drafted a Facebook best practices document to help guide other UM departments. The guide was developed prior to Facebook’s recent upgrade, so it already needs modification. Your thoughts are welcome.

Posted in Academic, Administrative, Communication, Innovation, Leadership and Management, Policies, Strategy, Web | No Comments »

Facebook connects incoming students

Tuesday, March 17th, 2009

Jed Liston, UM’s Associate Vice President for Enrollment Services, was convinced that a social network could help UM’s recruitment and retention efforts. The question was whether to develop a UM social network, or go where students were already gathered — Facebook.

Focus groups initially told Liston to stay out of Facebook. But things change fast in the online culture.

“We were almost to the point of launching a third-party social network,” he says. “We did one last focus group and asked students if they would jump on our site. Everybody said they wouldn’t log off Facebook to visit it. In a relatively short time, perceptions had changed. Now it was OK to have institutional pages on Facebook.”

So Enrollment Services created a “closed” Facebook group for the incoming class. They sent postcards to applicants and admitted students inviting them to join.

“We told them they would only be talking to their fellow classmates, and that we wanted this to be a place for them to converse,” Liston says. “It exploded. In the first four weeks, we had more than 600 people join. We only have about 1,900 new freshmen, so that was pretty good.”

Liston and two staff employees are group members, but they mostly just “listen.” They only enter the conversation to correct misinformation.

“The idea is to let them build a community of their own,” Liston says. “It’s nothing that isn’t going to happen the first week in study lounges and around campus-that exchange of getting to know one another.”

Liston acknowledges the risk of exposing uncommitted applicants to unfiltered dialogue. But so far the experiment appears to be successful.

“We’ve found that these students really started sealing the deal for themselves,” Liston says. One group decided to all meet at the Grizzly statue on the third day of classes. They had already developed friendships. That makes or breaks a person staying here, if they feel connected.”

Posted in Innovation, People, Strategy, Web | No Comments »

Risk and reward

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

A nonprofit organization I work with has two websites. Both have been down for months. One of them — an online training site — generates significant revenue for the organization. Or at least it did. Now it’s costing the organization precious resources to rebuild the site. Revenues have stopped and loyal customers have dispersed.

The organization has one technical support employee. He’s a systems administrator, a desktop support person, a web designer and a programmer. He’s competent, but he’s stretched ridiculously thin. The organization has always been vulnerable. Now they’re paying the price.

The organization prospered by taking risks and developing web technologies to deliver quality online training. The revenue stream was just part of the reward. The organization enhanced its visibility, reputation and fund-raising capabilities by being on the web and proving itself an innovative leader among peer nonprofits statewide and beyond.

Management and the board of directors supported innovation in good times. Now, technical challenges and economic troubles present a test of leadership.

I sense an inclination to move towards safety. Abandon the experiment. Concede that the organization can’t afford to support technology at adequate levels to eliminate all financial, operational and reputational risks.

The instinct to retreat in hard times is understandable. The better response is to learn, adapt, change, get better and refuse to abandon the innovative spirit that made the organization a leader in the first place.

Posted in Innovation, Leadership and Management, Strategy, Web | No Comments »

Is big turnout a mandate for change?

Thursday, November 6th, 2008

With jobs, education and our economic future at stake, throngs of enthusiastic citizens made their desire for change clear this week by participating in an historic event. I’m talking, of course, about the first ever offering of An Introduction to Blogs and Wikis short course.

Blog and Wiki course participants Cynics depict blogs as too old, or perhaps too risky. They suggest evil intent when they inquire: “What do we really know about these wikis?”

But these slick, mavericky candidates for change have proven they can engage and energize constituents and turn them into passionate participants in the process.

When Undergraduate Advising needed a better way to help students succeed in the classroom, they saw an opportunity to turn an old newsletter into a new way: Yes we can.

When the Center for Ethics had graduate students all over the world eager to collaborate on climate change and biotech research, a wiki was the answer: Yes we can.

When the Alumni Association redesigned their website, they integrated blogs and wikis to engage old and young alumni alike: Yes we can.

You have ideas you want to share about new technologies and the future of the University: Yes you can. (see below)

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