What If We DO Succeed in Increasing Student Engagement?
Over the weekend, I was talking with a group of students and advisors from Kutztown University about student engagement. In Swift Kick, we use dance floors to describe how student leaders are the ones in the center of the dance (fully engaged), and the rest of the student body (60-84% according to NSSE) are against […]
7 Steps to Awesome: The Tech of a Leadership Conference
I promised the good student affairs folk of the Penn State system that I would write up a draft outline of a tech plan for a state wide student leadership event. I delayed a bit, so that we could finish up this new sachat platform – I think it’s an important example of the goal. […]
Private Communities and Engagement – The 90-9-1 Rule
Online community ninja, Jakob Nielsen, is one of the original brains behind the 90-9-1 rule. Stated simply, the rule goes… In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action. Wikipedia is a classic example. 99% of […]
Webinar – Leveraging Social Media for Student Engagement
This Wednesday, Dec 16th, from 3:00-4:15pm EST, we’re partnering with The Student Affairs Blog to host our third webinar in an ongoing effort to provide value to the community on relevant topics. WEBINAR OVERVIEWTitle: Leveraging Social Media for Student Engagement Date: Wednesday, Dec 16th 2009 Time: 3-4:15pm EST Abstract: Most research concludes that at least […]
Making Them WANT To Do It (Apathy vs Engagement)
If you have ever attended a conference with us, you know we enjoy mixing stuff up through the use of Flashmobs and Blender Events, both of which stem from our Dance Floor Theory Leadership Training. The goals are to: Have Fun Increase Engagement Build Relationships Create Pattern Interrupts Induce Positive Confusion (one reason why) While […]
The Value of Leveraging Network Nodes In The College Community
Last spring, I was traveling on a public bus from Laguardia Airport in New York to my hotel on the north side of Manhattan. When I got on the bus at the airport, the bus driver was in a heated argument with someone complaining about being charged twice for the ride. The bus driver was […]
School Website Design is Part of the Student Engagement Problem
In the first version of Red Rover’s navigation bar, we included a ‘Live Help’ button (pictured below) that generated 5-8 sessions with students per day. As more students joined Red Rover, we realized the ‘Help’ section needed to include more options other than just ‘Live Help’. So we created a new ‘Help’ section (pictured below) […]
How to Make Student Engagement Contagious
In 1969, famed psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a social experiment looking at the contagiousness of engagement. Wired magazine’s Jonah Lehrer accurately summarizes the experiment: In this study, Milgram had “confederates” stop on a busy city street and look upwards at the sky. He demonstrated that when one person was looking up, 40 percent of passerby […]
Speaker, Edtech and Peanut Butter – The Case for Reengineering Student Activities
In college, I tried to start an Entrepreneur Club but never got past the paperwork. The Student Activities office manager handed me three pages of clearly defined step-by-step guidelines she created on how to start a new group. It was evident she had spent a long time creating the document and was proud of the […]
Embracing Hierarchy in Groups to Increase Engagement in Education
Two overlapping foundational concepts for this post: 1) Hierarchy Matters In his best lecture submission to “Big Ideas,” Mark Fournier opens by stating he will convince the audience that hierarchy formation in humans is natural, predictable, and consequential: “It is natural in that hierarchies will form wherever people congregate. It is predictable in that where […]