Beer, Brats, and Bots!

Are you brave, bold and powerful? Ready to test your mad skills in a robot competition?  You can be the robot command team! If you have what it takes, then step up and take your place among the gods: sign up your team for Beer, Brats and Bots at The Launch Pad, 201 East Broadway, North Little Rock.

To Be, or Not to Be Social: Is participating in social media good for your career?

“Create your presence on social media to be found, heard and respected; otherwise, you won’t be.” – Susan Beebe, Chief Listener at Dell.

Inchoate Agency: Technology, and the Liberal Arts

A few weeks back, I shared a few thoughts on being a Social CIO at a Liberal Arts College. The post had its genesis in a magazine article that I had been working on, and generated many subsequent conversations, offline and on… like the one below:

Which begs the question – why is it that at liberal arts colleges, those who have the biggest stake in the role of technology – faculty and students – are disengaged in the decision processes that govern institutional technology decision making?

Naturally, each school’s unique situation will be fact dependent and history-bound. But I’ll make a run at what I see to be the obstacles that keep stakeholders from actualizing their decision making agency.

The following are observations I’ve made directly, and are informed by my interactions with instructional technologists and CIOs at other liberal arts schools. My biases as an administrator are undeniable and unhideable.

• Faculty experience technology from the perspective of their classroom… and personal abilities. Faculty members (like the rest of us) frame their views on technology from personal experience. Their comfort with technology informs their attitudes – pedagogically and professionally – with regard to the (proper) role of technology in their classroom. It is the role of instructional technologists, instructional designers, and professional technology services staffs to not dictate how and when technology is to be used in the classroom, but rather to support and inform faculty in their self-directed pursuits to effectively utilize technology, as driven by deliberate pedagogical purpose.
• Student engagement is variable and inconsistent. Dawg-gone students. They keep wanting to graduate on time. Just when you train ’em up, they’re gone. Or: you go from one year of extremely high and talented engagement with student representatives on committees, to the next year when your students are MIA from each and every technology committee meeting. This is – and will remain – a perennial problem. Your only defense is to identify, and then develop, engaged student leaders for roles in technology steering committees. Once selected, you have to engage them not only during committee meeting times, but in a prolonged and cyclical process of discussion and positive reinforcement. They need to understand their importance – and stake – in the process. To be effective, you as a technology leader have to put in the time to help them recognize how their input and work matters.
• Little opportunity for institutional conversations regarding technology. Honestly, we’re all focused on our jobs – or graduating – and most likely aren’t sitting around and thinking about the “big picture.” Especially, “big picture technology thinking.” And yet, how will faculty and students understand institutional effects of technology decision making, if there are never opportunities or outlets to hold those discussions? I’ve used two approaches that have yielded good results in the past: periodic surveys of students and faculty regarding attitudes and experiences with technology on campus; and, many, many conversations held directly with faculty department heads (usually, over lunch or coffee) to talk about how their technology needs were – or weren’t – being met, and sharing ideas on technology strategy as it related to budget, student experience, and teaching outcomes. You have to make time, and intentionally pursue opportunities for these conversations to happen. Otherwise, neither side of the dialog (admin and faculty) will be even relatively close to being informed about the real efficacy of technology on your campus.
• Institutional / strategic priorities often don’t translate into immediate action. By their very nature, strategic initiatives are long-lived in scope and execution. Needless to say – so I’ll say it – It is exceedingly difficult to maintain focus and continuity, when projects span multiple funding years, experience drastic changes in leadership, or undergo non-trivial changes to scope over the life of a project. Enthusiasm and buy in can leech away, just when it is need needed the most. Poor decisions creep in, when tactical expediency overrides the overarching institutional strategy that you’ve thoughtfully put into place. Worse than that, a pattern of this type of disintermediation sabotages future efforts at getting institutional buy in for long range objectives. Keeping the main thing, the main thing, is a lot harder than it looks.
• Governance is simply under-exercised and under-developed. This, I believe, is the number one challenge – and the number one reason – faculty exercise little voice in setting institutional technology priorities. Faculty workloads – advising, teaching, and committee work – naturally have an impact on levels of governance and committee participation. It is vitally important that faculty get – and remain – engaged at the institutional level, on matters involving technology, if a semblance of shared governance is to be maintained – and believed. Trust – and distrust – contributes or detracts from enthusiastic (or at least, willing) participation. The fact remains – faculty wield a tremendous amount of power and responsibility in helping set institutional priorities – not just technological ones – that go unactualized, unacted upon; faculty inaction effectively abdicates responsibility in their role in the outcomes. I say this not as an indictment, but rather as a recognition of a serious obstacle to effective governance.

In short, it’s complicated.

But not really.

The key to addressing inchoate student and faculty agency, is to promote, support, and maintain high levels of engagement at all stages of the institutional technology decision cycle.

Ultimately, without prolonged and intentional engagement and exercise of shared governance by students and faculty, lasting and sustainable technology delivery will be seen as dictatorial, rather than collaborative and collegial – which will lead only to further disengagement.

What do you think? Do these observations reflect what is happening at your institution?

Conway Geek Breakfast

November’s Conway Geek Breakfast comes early this month… it’s this Thursday, 11/20, at Bob’s Grill in Conway.

Want to know what’s trending in Tech… catch up on what happened this weekend at Conway Comic-Con… or simply show off your latest bright and shiny tech object? Then come on down!

At Liberal-Arts Colleges, Debate About Online Courses Is Really About Outsourcing – Wired Campus – Blogs – The Chronicle of Higher Education

At Liberal-Arts Colleges, Debate About Online Courses Is Really About Outsourcing – Wired Campus – Blogs – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

I would say that this article’s title should probably more properly have been “At Liberal-Arts Colleges, Debate About Online Courses Is Really About The Fear Of Outsourcing.”

Pedagogy should always drive the “wheres and whys” of how and when technology is used in higher ed. And that is especially true for liberal arts colleges.

I am happy to see Hendrix College and Rollins College (as well as former Hendrix Colleague and now ACS Director of Blended Learning, Amanda Hagood) get a well-deserved nod, for an excellent class, with strong outcomes – and raves from both students and faculty.

And, for the record, these classes are much more than a professor appearing on a projection screen. The TART 120 class between Hendrix and Rollins is an engaging, interactive course where the professor, Eric Zivot, is present and active ten minutes before and after “class time.” I would place Eric’s engagement with his students at Hendrix – while he is quite literally a 1,000 miles away – on par with (and even better than, in a few cases, truthfully) in situ faculty.

Disappointed in the story’s “angle” – but grateful for the mention and recognition for a well-designed, and well-executed, immersive telepresence course.

You Are What You Speak

Every time we open our mouths, or put pen to paper, we reveal something about our true selves – intentionally, or not.

Even with full reflection of our biases, it’s nigh impossible to totally escape our ingrained idioms, our life-long learned mannerisms… our voice. It is the rare author who can write “anonymously”, without someone who knows them recognizing the patterns that identify an author, as readily as if their names were etched in stone within the text.

Native speakers can cull out the non-native speakers by recognizing non-native modes of speech; you’re one queso grande away from being exposed.

The actual words we choose conspire to betray our motives. We can choose to say “someone is trying to proselytize us to their position”, or we can say that “we are evangelizing others to our cause”; one word has a somewhat positive connotation, while the other has a slightly negative one. Both words denote a conversion in viewpoint or belief, but have different subterranean subtexts based upon whether you’re the one doing the converting… or the one being wooed for conversion.

Within our professional lives, we develop entire vocabularies of specialty-speak, meant to separate the initiates from the acolytes, and the profane.

Are you in the club? What’s the password?

We use our words as weapons, whether we brandish them in all out frontal attack, or with practiced and nuanced dog-whistle passive aggression.

We “code switch” to gain authenticity.

We couch words to soften meaning.

We string meaningless words together to obfuscate.

We inspire, by turning our speech into action.

How will you speak today?

Words matter. Make your words matter.

Witness History: Orion Test Launch

Early this morning, I received notification that I was selected to attend one of the NASA Social meetups (scheduled for December 3, 2014), prior to the test flight of their Orion Spacecraft.

Excited?

You betcha!

I was also one of the 100 (or so) lucky folks to attend the very first NASA Tweetup, for the STS-129 launch, way back in November of 2009.

And, living in the wilds of Arkansas these past four years, I’m having some serious space-coast withdrawals.

A very special thank you to the social media folks at NASA for this fantastic opportunity.

Now – where’s the best place to stay in Houston near JSC?

Native vs. HTML5 apps: Which is right for your organization?

Native vs. HTML5 apps: Which is right for your organization?.