Teaching The Google Effect and Digital Identities
Have you ever Googled yourself? What did you find? What didn’t you find? This morning Will Richardson wrote about several conversations he’s had with principals and administrations regarding if and how they use Google when hiring new employees: “When you have some applicants lined up for a teaching vacancy, do you “Google” them? Seems a […]
How to Bankrupt a Startup – A Funny Take From SXSW
No one starts a business with the goal to go bankrupt, but yet somehow 9 out of 10 businesses fail within the first 3 years. Many startups outsource financial aspects of the business to companies like Early Growth, which provide 409a valuations and help with equity management and taxes as well as other things. Obviously, […]
Thoughts on Thoughts on Thoughts
Our ideas come from a collection of conversations, books, articles, blogs, and videos among many other sources. We are active participants in what is coined the Read/Write Web in which someone takes a little content to produce a little content. We are both consumers and produces at the same time. It’s very gratifying to receive […]
College Speaker of The Year – 2008
Each year student activities departments from around the country vote for their favorite speaker of the year. Last week, in Atlanta, we were honored as the 2008 College Speaker of the Year. To add to the honor, it’s our second year in a row winning the award. Last year we spoke at 60 schools, went […]
How We See Ourselves
Swift Kick is a laboratory. While there are many layers of experiments underneath (business structure, marketing, virtual company, transparency, etc.) our primary value to education is in the ability to visualize, put together, and sustain experiments in the fields of student engagement and education technology. To be clear, we are not the researchers. We cannot […]
Abilene Christian University’s mLearning (Mobile Learning) Initiative
Oklahoma Christian University partnered with Apple Computers to offer every 1st year student attending an orientation the option of a new Apple MacBook, iPhone, or iPod Touch! While it sounds unique, it’s not the first time as Abilene Christian University (ACU) were the pioneers in offering** a free iPhone or iPod Touch as a bonus […]
The Traveling Logistics of a Speaker – 53 Hours Later
We semi joke that speakers don’t get paid to speak, but rather to show up on time as that is the hardest part of the job. To show you what I mean, here’s what the last 53 hours of my life looked like: Feb 26th 5:00 pm – drive 1 hour to Lake Forest 6:30 […]
Speaking is Just One Piece
Even though right now, the majority of our income is from our trainings for schools, we’ve always believed that speaking was only a piece of the bigger goal of solving student apathy. We speak, but we aren’t speakers. In fact, we think there are speakers out there like, Dave Coleman, who are hands down better […]
Reviewing our 2007 Goals – Looking Forward to 2008
At the beginning of 2007, we created company goals for the coming year. In 2005 and 2006 we did a similar exercise. This last year we wanted to create more specific, measurable goals that we could follow up on. At our company retreat last month, we reviewed the 07 goals. Below is a list of […]
Turned Down by the MacArthur DML Competition – Staying Sustainable
The Conference on the First-Year Experience was a fantastic event for us because Red Rover** was very popular. The attendees were a mix of student advisors, deans, faculty, and librarians. Each group had a slightly different curiosity for Red Rover, but they all had one question in common and it was probably the most popular […]