Let’s Make Education Feel More Like Cocaine
Think of your college’s orientation process.
Ask a few students how they felt during the orientation days, when they went through them.
Then spend two minutes with this slide deck, with your orientation and intake process in mind.
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 […]
Please Stop Buying and Building Walled Gardens For Higher Ed
There was an article a few days ago in the Chronicle with the headline “Colleges Create Facebook-Style Social Networks to Reach Alumni.” The first paragraph claims “hundreds of college alumni associations have begun to offer their own online social networks . . ” To me, this seems like a very sad waste of time and […]
The Randomness of How Students Currently Meet at College
While keeping tabs on some student blogs in my RSS feed, I came across a video** about some students who met in college and started a band. What caught my eye was when one of the band members talked about how they initially met: VIDEO FILE NO LONGER AVAILABLE I think most people would agree […]
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 […]
First Year Students as a New Thought – The Learning Institutional “Brain”
Because we speak quite a bit at Swift Kick, and because we work on the new stuff, where abstraction is common, “vision” is everywhere, and hard experience is limited, we love the analogy. We love to ground the new in the schema of the old. This is just what effective teachers do all the time. […]
Trying to Avoid the Advertising on the Horizon
Catching up on my feeds from the weekend, I came across Danah Boyd’s posting about youth, advertising, and social responsibility. by strangeinterlude The short of it is this: marketing necessarily creates ideals, these ideals put substantial pressure on our youth, and the “kids”, in turn, take it out on each other. In her blog, Danah […]
Judging Student Literacy
It’s blog entries like Noichole Pinkard’s** that keep my excitement flowing about the potential future of education. Here’s my favorite line: I conjecture that by 2018, a student will routinely be judged not only by her ability to write a 5-paragraph essay but her ability to represent her ideas via a 5 minute podcast, 2 […]
Why Walled Gardens are Wrong for College Social Networking
In the Secrets Behind Myspace and Facebook lecture we do a quick introduction to digital identity: It was easy when your digital identity was primarily how you represented yourself in chat rooms, to pretend to be anyone you wanted to be. Your digital identity did not have to overlap with your real identity. Now, with […]
Towards A Red Rover Theoretical Foundation
As part of the MacArthur DML application. We are working on framing a historical context in which to place Red Rover. I talked before about the need for a “cogent theoretical framework” for the application itself, this work is getting us closer to it. Because MacArthur wants everything quick and to the point, our framework […]