Laddering Student Engagement
In Swift Kick’s Dance Floor Theory leadership training, we teach students to recognize and be aware of the gradient of engagement on their campus. We teach them to understand the system and its parts so they can improve it. The simple comparison is a dance floor, where level 5 dancers are often in the middle […]
Conference on the First Year Experience and the Genius of our Community
We often feel really dumb in our work when we repeat the same silly mistakes. This time we wasted four days of work thinking we could come up with the answer on our own instead of asking for advice from the rich pool of knowledge around us. Last week we reached out to our community […]
Working Out in the Open and Eating our own Dog Food
In an earlier post, Tom mentioned that one of our goals for 2008 was to work out in the open. We often recommend this in Dance Floor Theory™ leadership sessions – telling students to hold their meetings in the commons every once in a while, with a flip board showing what they are doing. It […]
Urban Planning and Facebook
Jane Jacobs wrote a wonderful book about urban planning titled The Death and Life of Great American Cities. In the book, she explains how cities were ruined by poor urban planning and offer suggestions on ways to improve the development. One suggestion is to design streets and neighborhoods to allow for more eyes on the […]
Our First NACA Flashmob [VIDEO]
For the past 6 months, Kevin and I talked about the idea of pulling off a Flashmob at NACA or APCA. Up to this point, it was just talking, but we changed that at a recent NACA West conference. It started with finding the technology. The company we found allows a person to text “swiftkick” […]
To Show Ourselves or Not?
It’s great fun to grow through ideas. There are a number of decisions we are looking at. They seem important now . . . as we design the blog pages / html pages / touch points: 1) Does the swift kick logo mess up the “community” ? Should SK be an active/ present facilitator, or […]