Introit

Transformations in Next-Generation Research

by Diane HessancloseAuthor: Diane Hessan Name: Diane HessanSite: http://www.communispace.comAbout: Diane Hessan is President and CEO of Communispace, one of the fastest growing social networking companies in the country, “with a Blue Chip client list that would make a Madison Avenue giant jealous," according to Advertising Age. A pioneer in creating online communities to help marketers deeply engage customers, Diane helped found Communispace in 1999 and hasn’t looked back. A summa cum laude graduate of Tufts University, Diane received an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. She is the mother of two college-age daughters and co-founder of The Sound Bytes, a cappella group thaSee Authors Posts (15)

via blog.communispace.com

Be sure to click on the link and read the entire post! KJR

Mad at Everyone

No, not you. Not anyone in particular, actually.I'm angry at the idea of 'everyone' and what they want and what they say.Everyone says you should do your site and your online presence a certain way.Everyone is upset at what you did.Everyone is frustrated at the slow pace government is getting this done.Everyone knows you should listen to your customers and do what they say.Everyone knows that our school is wasting money.Everyone says you need to go to a 'good' college.You get the idea. That everyone.The one that's almost always wrong.

via sethgodin.typepad.com

Most of us know "everyone." Don't you?

Admirable Faculties: The Playing Fields of Eton--and 21st-century Waterloos

Of necessity I have been thinking quite a lot about branding and independent schools lately, and I am hereby decreeing that the most enduring tagline ever created about our schools is that attributed to the Duke of Wellington: “The Battle of Waterloo was won upon the playing fields of Eton.”The line has a suspect provenance, but that doesn’t really matter. What matters is the way in which the sentence encapsulates by implication all the virtues that elite British manhood required to defeat Napoleon and, in time, ensure that the sun would never set upon the Union Jack: courage, stoicism, resourcefulness—all the qualities of the student-athlete.Which has me wondering, at the end of a globally discouraging winter, what the battles of our century will be. Right now all the forward-thinking educators I hear and read seem awfully fixated on the vocational skills and workplace attributes enumerated as “21st-century skills” by various employers and business councils, and I am assured that subtle technological proficiencies in social media and other Web 2.0 skills will guarantee success to our students in the world of the future. They will need these skills to conquer global warming and spread health care, peace, and prosperity around the flattened globe. Some of them will be the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, changing lives with beautifully designed products that are solutions to problems we never knew we had.It’s a lovely picture, progressive in its optimism and focused on the things that education is supposed to be preparing kids for: college, jobs, and responsible citizenship. This is all good, and I’m all for it.But maybe it’s time to take a cue from the past and ponder the kinds of real experiences our students are having in our 21st-century schools and whether we are serving our students well with either our programs or our platitudes. Will our schools prepare students for the battles—and I use the term here in all its meanings—they will face in our century? The hundred years that followed the famous victory of Wellington and his schoolmates saw the expansion of European empires and European democracy, but hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of people died in the wars of conquest and the revolutions that brought the Industrial, Imperial Age into being. While sun-kissed heroes of Western Civilization like Wellington, George Armstrong Custer, and Kipling’s Stalky pulled on their boots and primed their guns to spread Victorian blessings, European families as well as indigenous communities from Alaska to Arabia to Afghanistan to Australia saw their lives and worlds shattered. The dawn of the 20th century saw a new version of the elitist avatar, and prep schools worked to embody “muscular Christianity” in their missions and practices. The new heroes were Dink Stover and the Rover Boys, privately educated in the glories of the Strenuous Life, somehow combining the best qualities of Jesus and Theodore Roosevelt. (This version of the prep school hero managed neatly and ironically to ignore the authentically strenuous lives of the majority of teenagers who left school at age 12 or 14 and worked in agriculture, resource extraction, industry, or urban commerce.) The poets of the British trenches and the novelists of the Lost Generation provide us with all too many autopsies on the body of values and beliefs drummed into schoolchildren a century after Waterloo.Those who survived the trenches and could sublimate their bitterness and cynicism soldiered on into the Great Depression. Their children, of the generation of Phineas (in A Separate Peace) and Holden Caulfield, either missed World War II or they became Mr. Roberts or (a bit later) the self-righteous, over-bred crew of the U.S.S. Caine, deeply affected by but eluding the worst consequences of the war that killed 417,000 American soldiers but as many as 70 million people worldwide.Ahead of us in 2010 we have global climate change, an exploding population demanding access to shrinking stocks of global resources, and a backdrop of terrorism and war with a daily death toll that would appall us if we paid attention. Political civility even in old and established democracies is seriously on the wane; crazies who fly their airplanes into tax offices are cheered as martyrs, just like Islamic fundamentalists who blow up marketplaces. The rest of this century could shape up into something distinctly unpleasant, and we need to be educating people who can help pull the world out a real nosedive, not just earn a living by their cleverness and sophistication.On one level, and I’m not ready to linger here, screeds on the irrelevance of the lectures at TEDxNYED are pretty much beside the point. What schools need to be focusing on, along with the effective use of social media in the classroom, is how to provide experiences that are like the playing fields of Eton—experiences that will bring forth (or instill, if you are Old School) the best qualities of resourcefulness, critical analysis, courage, and committed engagement that will prepare students for a world that could look more like that of Mad Max or Blade Runner than The Jetsons.I’d actually look well beyond curriculum and pedagogy here. Wellington (or whoever) didn’t cite the classrooms of Eton, and I suspect that character—real character: values, courage, optimism, even faith—is still largely a product of advisories, of discussions of school and social values in dormitory common rooms and club and activity meetings, of chapel talks and school meetings, and—yes—of athletics.Society’s needs, though, have moved beyond a stiff upper lip or muscular Christianity. We’re going to need innovative thinking and the ability to face large-scale, immediate, and even horrific problems—to improvise, lead, and endure when cyberwarriors bring down the Internet, when resource wars threaten to engulf both developing and developed worlds, or when violence becomes a regular aspect of political disagreement even in our own communities. Where are we teaching our children how to confront challenges on this scale? Where are we even admitting to ourselves and our children what the future might look like if things go wrong?Neither Wellington’s teachers nor his coevals could have foreseen the struggle against Napoleon, and the faculty and graduates of St. Grottlesex in 1938 didn’t understand that America would soon be battling the forces behind the Anschluss and the Rape of Nanjing. What calamities don’t we foresee, and are we truly giving our students what they will need to face them?

via www.admirablefaculties.org

Peter is very thoughtful here (as usual). Morals and ethics are paramount in the 21st century. It is time to lead with conviction!

The Risk of Not Making Mistakes

How does your school handle risk?

From Bill Alberti at Verbatim, the Communispace blog.

Risk is a tricky concept. Business typically wants to limit, manage, or mitigate it. Eliminating risk altogether probably would be seen as the ultimate success (thank you, Six Sigma). But in life, most great things don’t come without some level of risk.

Getting married, having kids, quitting a job, taking a new one. Think of any of the biggest developments in your life or the broader world around you and I’d bet none of those happen without a fair amount of risk.

However, from an early age we are taught to avoid risk. We understand that with risk comes mistakes. And mistakes can be painful. But making mistakes is also how we learn.

We aren’t born knowing that the square peg doesn’t fit into the round hole. We need to try it for ourselves. We experiment. We learn not only what doesn’t fit, we also learn what does. And in that process of learning we begin to see relationships—those between shapes and spaces, challenges and solutions, effort and satisfaction. More is learned from the time spent trying than if we got it all right on the first attempt.

But in business, mistakes mean more cost, more time, and lost opportunities. With the drive towards higher levels of productivity, higher margins, and more efficiency we don’t have room for mistakes.

Without that room, the ability of business to learn and grow is limited. Sure, companies can capitalize on incremental opportunities but they will miss the bigger breakthroughs because they didn’t see as many relationships, have as many experiences, or try as hard. They won’t learn as much from their mistakes, because they won’t make as many of them.

Companies need to create room for mistakes. To explore and try out stuff with their customers. To learn. And to do so faster, to get to the right solution sooner. When companies can make mistakes (ideally outside of the public eye) they can learn invaluable lessons from doing so and bring their customers better solutions because of it.

Risk isn’t that tricky of a concept if you think about it differently—not as the negative value of an event, but as a process capable of yielding positive, even breakthrough results. Make a practice of making mistakes. Create a private space in which to do so. Build a “learning agenda” for your company. And embrace risk. Because what’s true in life is true in business—most great things don’t happen without a fair amount of risk.

The Brain and Social Technologies

Brain research tells us that the brain is extremely social, that "being social" actually increases brain activity and enhances learning. In other words, a brain learns better when it is in the company of other brains.

Should it be any surprise, then, that the more we learn about how the brain works vis-a-vis learning, the more we see a rise in social media? Social networking sites are, in a sense, an extension of how the brain works.

Doesn't it stand to reason that so many people are using them and enjoying them precisely because they (the networks/systems) work in tandem with the brain?

If you've been reticent to engage brain-based learning AND you've been reticent to embrace social networking technologies in all their mutations, you're missing THE moment of the early 21st century. And if you think this is crazy, imagine what the next permutation will be! Social technologies that encourage differentiated learning exist already, and they will only improve with the months ahead (that's right, months, not years).

Technology committees at schools? Old-fashioned. At least the way they were constructed in the
1990s and the first decade of this century. Schools should re-evaluate these committees. At the very least, schools should make sure that at least 50% of committee members are current students, preferably a blend of middle schoolers and upper schoolers. What is more, the subjects discussed shouldn't be the latest hardware as much as it should be the latest Web 2.0 technologies and how schools might use them with students.

Educate and Innovate

Thought-provoking article from Thomas Friedman in the March 2 edition of The New York Times.

What is your school doing to educate our country's innovators?

It's Easier to Teach Compliance than Initiative: Seth Godin

Of course, now that's all changed. The economy has rewritten the rules, and smart organizations seek out intelligent problem solvers. Everything is different now. Except the part about how much easier it is to teach compliance.

via sethgodin.typepad.com

On Evaluation

Tom Peters gets downright disturbed when HR departments use standardized forms for evaluations, as these forms force homogeneity onto folks who are clearly heterogeneous. In other words, if we as educators pride ourselves on being unique, why should those in administration turn around and treat everyone otherwise? Granted, there's arguably room for a few standard questions, but the vast majority of the evaluation should be tailored to the individual being evaluated. We're all about meeting the students where they are; shall we be hypocritical and not meet teachers where they are? Is that incongruous? Will a standardized evaluation form really lead us to Excellence?

Endowment Plan

Many advancement (development) offices have a written plan for the various functions of the office, ranging from one year to three or even five years. Plans are invaluable when it comes to mapping a trajectory to follow: setting goals, establishing metrics, etc.

Why don't schools do the same for their endowments, specifically? To be sure, the overarching advancement plan may include sections on major and planned gifts, both of which feed into endowment growth (or so I would hope), but why not take the time to develop a standing endowment plan? Clear goals and data-driven metrics will help school leaders to determine whether more attention to the endowment is needed.

And in most schools, more attention is needed.