ACE's National Competitiveness Strategy

If you’ve followed this Blog, you know that we’ve been talking about the rising education imperative all along. There is a rising tide of discontent about our place in a highly connected world increasingly driven by an economy directly tied to education.

The American Council on Education (ACE) is on a campaign to increase awareness about this education imperative and has launched a incredibly useful site called SolutionsForOurFuture.org. A recent article from that site’s newsletter is a must read. It’s called: Towards A National Competitiveness Strategy: Congress Turns To Higher Education.

Here’s a quick excerpt from the beginning:

The nation’s capital is abuzz with talk about the state of American competitiveness. From the groundbreaking National Academies of Sciences report “Rising Above the Gathering Storm” to journalist Tom Friedman’s best-seller “The World Is Flat,” a chorus of corporate chieftains, world-class scientists and public intellectuals is sounding the alarm that America’s future prosperity is at risk and that American preeminence in the 21st century cannot be taken for granted.

Check out the article. But more importantly, check out the site. The resources are outstanding, the policy briefs are useful, and the links to take action are compelling. ACE is doing great job of trying to mount a National Campaign for Higher Education. We need to support them!

Connecting with the Connected . . . Not So Easy

Today’s students are quickly becoming hyper-connected, media inundated, network informed, cynics. As a result, they just don’t trust our standard press releases, brochures, catalogues, commercials, or standard website rhetoric. The folks at ClueTrain have been saying this for some time. Just look at MySpace, FaceBook, Massive Multi-Player Online Games, Wikipedia, or www.ratemyprofessor.com to see the how students are leveraging vast global social networks to share, compare, and search for the real story.

Reaching these students in this postmodern world with outreach and recruiting messages is more difficult than ever. That’s why it’s not surprising to see colleges turn to more creative viral marketing strategies. Just check out SchoolDaze from Kettering University. This first foray into an alternative outreach strategy has been forwarded around student communities like wildfire. It’s been so popular, Kettering created episode II to respond to “fan mail” flooding in. It’s not quite the standard campus tour, is it?

This just gets you thinking: how are we connecting with connected students? More importantly, is what we’re doing working? How do we know? What do they know about us that we don’t? You’d be surprised.

Sometimes You Have to Slow Down

Things are moving fast. Life, work, and all the rest. E-mails are pouring in, cell phone buzzing non stop, and meetings, meetings, and more meetings. At times like this, I think of Sandy Shugart’s Brick Work poem. It makes you pause.

But something closer to home woke me up to slowing down this time. I was riding our Honda ATV through the Western North Carolina Mountains near our little farm. Joining me on the ride this morning is my 8-year-old daughter Alex. We’re buzzing through the Blue Ridge when suddenly she starts waving her hand up and down. I slow down and ask her “what’s up?”

She tells me, “Daddy, sometimes you have to slow down to see the butterflies.” My little Buddha. I slow the ATV down and sure enough, as we creep along the path, black, gold, yellow, and white butterflies come fluttering from the flowers and bushes all around. It’s like they came out of hiding. She waves her hand again, so I put my ear closer in and she tells me, “If you stop you can hear the birds sing.”

We come to a stop and I cut the engine off. Here we sit, on this crisp morning in the Blue Ridge, butterflies all around, being serenaded by bird song. She’s right. Sometimes you just have to slow down.

Rookie Courage

If you read some of the current literature on brain research and learning, a major maxim jumps out: be a rookie every year. From Ian Robertson’s Mind Sculpture to James Zull’s The Art of Changing the Brain to Eric Jensen’s Brain-Based Learning to Daniel Amen’s Making a Good Brain Great, we find that the brain has somewhat of a use it or lose it protocol. And you are best served by not only deepening your current learning, but by stimulating fresh neural-synaptic pathways through explorations of the new and novel. Learning a new language, new technology, knitting, or horseback riding, it really doesn’t matter. Just learn something new.

We’ve known the value of learning renewal for some time. Remember Merlin’s admonition to the Once and Future King:

“The best thing for being sad . . . is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn."

Still, it takes a lot of courage to admit you don’t know what you’re doing. The best of teachers understand the raw courage of this moment for their students. In The Courage to Teach, Parker Palmer argues that this realization is essential in breaking the cycle of fear—the fear of both the teacher and student that the other will find out that they don’t really know everything.

Rookie courage is sometimes quite difficult for veterans in particular. Their expertise weighs on their minds; their pride in past accomplishments restrains them from embracing a learning experience which might make them look like a duck out of water. However, the best of veterans know that living out loud with this experience—right in front of your students—may be the most important gift. It teaches students about the importance of rookie courage, and the fact that they need to develop it as a skill for lifelong learning.

The great news is that our modern technology changes so rapidly we continuously have opportunities to be a rookie. From trying out online learning to experimenting with Podcasting, there is an endless array of moments for us to keep our own brains fresh with new learning and to engage our students as well. Yes, we may look foolish at times, as we fumble with new hardware, software, and systems. But we’ll not only survive, we’ll thrive because of it.

We all just have to have a little Rookie Courage.

Don’t Stop Believing

For all the talk and awe surrounding our creative, fast-moving, constantly connected, ever-innovative world, there are some dangerous challenges. The most pernicious problem may be the belittling and marginalization of belief. The postmodern world trains rising students not to believe that an organization will provide a career. “You will change jobs 7-15 times!” we tell them. We train consumers not to trust press releases, advertisements, and the basic claims of our businesses—just check out the well known Cluetrain Manifesto for some of the most profound and startling claims surrounding this perspective. From parishioners to the body politic, we are disillusioning the masses en masse.

The academic in me says there is real value in belief bashing. The Eric Hoffer’s of the world have shown the terror of True Believers. The extremes of belief are dangerous to be sure—particularly in promoting the loss of self. Still, there is something divisive and destructive happening as we are today pushed to the other extreme; because, at our core, we are desperate to believe. Just look at how the US population turned to faith after 9/11, how family reconnect during the terminal illness of a parent, or how quickly we rush to the banner of a new politician that holds even the sliver of a promise of being real. While we need to be personally fulfilled, we remain a believing bunch.

If you want to make a difference in a student’s life, drive a movement, transform your business, or change the world in this turbulent time, here’s a thought: don’t stop believing. As leaders in our schools, colleges, corporations, or counties, we can thoughtfully embrace belief without cynicism and achieve amazing results. We really are Better Together. And we owe it to ourselves, and those who join us in working toward a collective mission, to at least try.

Here are four pillars to consider for harnessing the power of belief:

1. Be worthy of it. Don’t even think about going after what’s possible with belief if you’re not willing to be authentic and real. Remember the classic line from King Arthur, “you are the land, and the land is you.” When you’re in a healthy, authentic place, there is transference to your organization. Don’t think this is trivial. In my experience, it is the root challenge in most organizations.

2. Encourage it. You may find that there are so many caustic, cynical people in most modern organizations that it feels more hip to be flip, to deride those who dare to care about making a difference. Have the courage to fight this feeling. As long as you authentically believe, encourage others to as well. The result will be more than worthwhile for you and for the people in your organization starving for something worthy of their extra effort.

3. Create a safe place for it. The minute you and others begin believing, the attacks will start. Be careful. Often, the people who come at you are folks who’ve been burned by belief in the past; and they will play out their psycho-drama on you and others with vitriol you cannot imagine. Verbal aggression, cultural bullying, and much, much more may come your way. Confront it; stand up for those who are going the extra mile without fail. In particular, protect the absent in meetings and side conversations—this is where much of the cultural belief bashing takes place.

4. Be real with it. Don’t skimp on this one. If you’re not a tough-minded realist about what’s working and what’s not, belief will backfire. The cynics will have a field day. Unfortunately, some people think that just because they care, because they believe, because they try hard, what they are doing is valuable. Nope. If you really believe in making a difference, check—and check often—if your strategies are working. Whether your desired outcome is learning, profit, or efficiency, make sure you are tireless is testing your assumptions. In addition, do not hesitate to take action, confront negative behavior, separate poor performers and cultural-poison spreaders from the love of the institution, and follow through on your promises, or else. Your credibility is everything.

These are just a few thoughts for fellow architects—leaders—who dare to care enough. Let me know if you have other “pillars” I need to add to this building.

Phoenix Flight

I’m sitting in 16C, unsettled, flying to Phoenix after attending the World Congress on Information Technology (WCIT) in Austin, TX. WCIT brought together government, technology, healthcare, and education leaders in a discussion around innovations and issues in information and communications technology worldwide. The event was an interesting exploration of challenges on the road ahead and the unique swath of global programs and practices being engaged to make a difference and make money. Moreover, the WCIT collective agenda of digital access, 21st century medicine, and privacy framed some compelling international dialogues. In the end, one cannot attend this kind of event without being taken aback by how far our world has come in the use of information technology in such a short time. It’s stunning.

But it’s not the bits and bytes blazing by that are bothering me on this plane ride. It’s hearing about how Korea has made high-bandwidth computing available to ALL citizens; how China is committing to wiring its rural communities; how the Indian government is strategically investing in its education system to turn out elite engineers equipped for this new world. And these are just a few of the examples from the keynote stage in Austin. I’ve heard these before; but hearing them altogether once again got me thinking. Where are the American examples of coordinated national responses to our changing world?

It hit me like a punch in the chest—the embarrassment that is. Particularly after Brazil just announced its energy independence, while we can only offer political pandering in the face of our national energy crisis. It seems that we are paralyzed in our industrial revolution paradigm; we seem stuck in a painful “aren’t we wonderful” mindset. Meanwhile, countries around the world are happily using our current self-congratulatory largess to outfit themselves to pass us by.

Don’t get me wrong; there are amazing technology and education programs taking shape across the US. But, where is our national coordinated educational response to the needs of our connected world? Who is in charge of visioning a national response to creating a technology infrastructure that allows citizens to connect, companies to compete, and our country to once again stand out as a world leader, not just a world dominator? No, we just let the companies fight it out for market share, while rural and inner-city school children suffer in collapsing schools. Test them more, that’s our answer to our utterly embarrassing educational outcomes. Let the market sort it out, that’s our national technology plan.

While other countries are designing compelling national strategies to take on the opportunities of our globally connected knowledge economy, our response is to focus more on old bureaucracies like the US Departments of Labor, Transportation, Energy, and Agriculture. Agriculture! You can’t help but notice, the players at our national table gained their seats as responses to the agricultural and industrial revolutions; and they are not likely equipped to—or interested in—outfitting us for the information revolution. Its no wonder the Department of Homeland Security is replete with behind-the-times technology.

Maybe I’m just a little overtired from all this travel. But I can’t help but think, we’ve got to catalyze this conversation soon if we plan to rise in concert with the Phoenix-like countries all around us. Otherwise, we’ll just be focused on our landing.

Portions

I’m just returning from Paris after attending the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) annual International Conference. It was a good event that once again reinforced just how seriously leaders from around the world are taking education these days. Political, corporate, and educational leaders sang a similar song—colleges, communities, and countries must educate well or die on the vine.

On a different—but related—note, whenever I travel to Paris, I’m struck by the size of the portions. They’re tiny. Every coffee cup and wine glass seems like it comes from my 7-year-old’s Barbie set. Of course, the problem is mine. America’s portions are ridiculously big—not to mention incredibly wasteful. It’s hard to deny that, on the whole, we are a country of food excess (see Super-Size Me). And, more often than not, we take it for granted.

Our K-Ph.D. education system is another good example. While other countries scramble to give access to education at least a portion of their population and parents in other parts of the world only dream of giving their children the ability to read and write, some in our country blithely neglect our treasure. In relation to the rest of the world, our education portions are huge. Moreover, we just assume it was always that way. We forget that universal high schools, community colleges, and Pell Grants only came about in the last 100 years. In addition, we have to admit, we’re a little wasteful. We throw curricula, interventions and technology at students without always doing the hard work of assessing impact. We can tell great inspirational stories about the outcomes, but rarely do we develop the culture of evidence necessary to really know if we’re making a difference.

Still, just like the food situation, I’m not unhappy with the US education excess. It’s better to be battling problems of excess, rather than crises of shortage. My Grandparents stories about the Great Depression make that very clear. However, wrestle with our comparative education excess we must. Because anyone with excess has a moral imperative to ask harder questions about what you do with what is provided. We also need to discuss the fact that, just like with food, the unevenness of our education excess is galling. From K-12 school district funding to higher-education endowment distribution, one doesn’t have to look very far to see that those who need it the least, get it the most—money to support their learning.

Hard truth: excess can lead to unevenness, lack of focus, and the devaluing of the goodness at hand. Do we have a portion problem in US education?

Pavlovian Problems

Ding. I turn to the computer screen and look as today’s 113th little announcement box for e-mail emerges. Ring. While I’m still on the other line, I scan my Blackberry screen to see whose calling. Ping. A pre-selected sonar sound announces an incoming instant message. Fling. I hurl myself from the open balcony.

OK, the last one’s a joke. But after a day full of these Pavlovian prompts pushing persistent partial attention, anyone can get pretty close to making the leap. There are some simple things, however, we can do to take on these Pavlovian problems. I’ll offer just three of them here that can help make a dent in our Crazy Busy lifestyles. They take a little time, and sometimes even some tech support. But they are worthwhile to ensure that we are using technology, not being used by it.

First, turn off the automatic download function in your e-mail program. Whether it’s Outlook or Netscape, you can stop the preconfigured “check the server for e-mail every two minutes” function. By doing this, e-mail only comes in when you hit send/receive. You take the control back. Why do this? Imagine if 15 years ago the mail clerk jetted by your office or cube every two minutes with new memos, letters, and junk mail and yelled “Mail!” as he threw them in your inbox. Even without the ubiquitous Viagra ads, it still might be a little distracting, no? The constant ding of your e-mail is the modern virtual equivalent. Some have related to me that the e-mail chime problem is so bad that they feel their workday is nothing more than responding to e-mails—no time for reflection, planning, execution, or interaction. Talk about being reactive instead of proactive! Worse yet, I’ve seen more than one person’s e-mail announcements go off during major presentations in front of hundreds of folks. It’s just that pernicious, persistent, and deeply problematic. Take the controls back.

Second, all-in-one devices are wonderful. Blackberry’s, Treos, and web phones make mobility and ease of connection a reality. I’m all for them. With my Blackberry, I can knock out little office emergencies quickly, clean out the inbox before I ever sit down back at my desk, access my full contact list whenever and wherever, and hop online for quick Google lookups as necessary. At their best, there are a thousand reasons whey these devices are useful and just plain lifesaving. At their worst, however, they can become painful Pavlovian pals. How many of us see our colleagues ding, ring, and ping their way through their meetings, lunches, and conversations. It’s almost an epidemic.

This is where profile management comes in. It takes some work, but dive into the profiles on your device and ensure that you choose the least distracting notifications (if any at all)—don’t take the defaults. For example, the Blackberry’s default has you buzzing and ringing and beeping with every task, e-mail, and phone call. It’s impossible to go 3 minutes without some sound or blinker going off. Stop it. Change the settings to fit your tastes, and remember, the person or people in front of you deserve your attention. The task at hand is best done without a divided mind. We need to get off the "Crackberry pipe." Remember, off buttons can be amazing things. Not taking a call may say more to the person you’re with than you may ever know.

Third, wireless technology is freeing, but it’s becoming a meeting and class killer. Trying to teach a class or hold a meeting with keyboards clamoring is stunningly distracting. I’ve been in meetings where the leader is checking their laptop while running the discussion! If that doesn’t say something about the value of the meeting, I don’t know what does. Worse yet, if the folks at the table haven’t muted their sound, you get this wonderful concert of dings and pings all throughout the dialogue. And every once and awhile someone turns their machine on, off, or reboots and you get that marvelous Microsoft minute that brings the meeting to a halt as the Windows theme song serenades you all.

Think long and hard about bringing your laptop to a meeting. If you must, mute it well before the meeting begins. And don’t kid yourself; if you try to steal a minute for a quick check of the e-mail or to scan a website, someone notices. It sends a loud cultural message about your commitment to the group. If the meeting is that bad, then you may want to lead a larger conversation about why are you having the meeting in the first place.

Well, these are just a few observations and ideas drawn from colleagues around the country as they have taken on these challenges. Make no mistake about it, we’re all figuring this out as we go along. So sharing some best practices is probably a good thing (e.g., visit the TLTGroup’s Overloadatorium). It can be our own little massive multiplayer online support group. And it may just help us solve some of these Pavlovian problems before they take too big a bite out of our lives.

If We Build It, They Will Come—Maybe

Dr. Steven Johnson, one of the most innovative college leaders in the country, co-presents a workshop with me called On the Horizon and In Your Face 2.0: Key Issues in Information Technology for Education Leaders. In this 2.0 version of the workshop, we again look at major trends “in our face” and “on the horizon” and explore ways in which educators can adapt, leverage, and engage these happenings.

One of the trends in this version of the workshop we call the “Technology Building.” This idea sprung from a conversation about how to help more seasoned board, faculty, and staff members understand how vital technology is, how much a part of the infrastructure it must be for education institutions to be credible in the today’s world. An early problem was that the early rhetoric around technology tended to be full of hyperbolic fury about how fundamentally different IT is, how transformative it will be, and how we need to think differently to really understand its impact. At some level, this is nonsense. In many ways, technology infrastructure is very similar to something legislators, board members, faculty, and staff are used to: buildings.

When we build buildings, we usually operate off of a campus master plan. We have a facilities committee that meets regularly to update the plan. We benchmark other facilities, develop capital budgets, build in operational funding strategies, and plan for deferred maintenance. We know how to do these things because for hundreds of years, we’ve had to. It’s the cost of doing business. It’s expected to have “curb appeal.”

In today education world, we also need “tech appeal,” however. And the building metaphor is exactly the strategy we suggest that leaders begin adopting when advocating for technology infrastructure—from computers to new simulation labs for healthcare. Instead of doing what Casey Green from the Campus Computing Survey calls the traditional “dust bowl financing”—buying software, computers, servers, network hardware with year-end money that has to spent or lost—we should be more strategic. Casey’s survey shows that at the higher education level colleges are getting better and better and preparing and leading from a technology plan. If we review these plans, they are much like our facilities plan; capital, operational, maintenance strategies all linked to institutional mission—if they’re good that is. Steve Gilbert from the Teaching Learning and Technology Group advocates driving this plan based on conversations first about quality teaching and learning, and then asking “Oh by the way, what technology will we need to do this?” Technology should not drive the learning agenda anymore than finance should.

Learning-centered technology planning makes all the sense in the world. But there is still a challenge; many institutions across K-Ph.D. are still running parallel planning tracks. Facilities master planning happens, technology master planning happens, and maybe in a final strategic planning document prepared for accreditation or budget allocations they actually share the same stage. But what would happen if we build these plans together.

Most modern businesses are a complex set of infrastructures—at the most simple, Web, phone, and face-to-face. In the modern world of customer relationship management, they are taking hard looks at the blends of these worlds. Our students—not to mention our legislators, board members, faculty and staff—are swimming in this world. They shop for airline tickets online, but still call the travel agent to book the tickets. They shop for cars online, but still go to the dealership to test drive and make the deal. We drive doctors crazy; we go to WebMD and self diagnose and then come to our appointments with the printouts. Put simply, while sometimes it’s or—web, phone, or face to face—more often it’s and. Because of this, companies are leveraging extensive data mining and predictive analytics to do activity-based costing and customer analytics to determine the best version of and.

Shouldn’t we begin to think about more deeply and strategically blending our infrastructure planning? What if instead of doing two planning cycles, technology becomes a fixed component of the standing facilities master planning process? Or what if—wait for it—facilities became a fixed component of the technology planning? What if we committed to never do these in isolation again—it’s not only an artificial division of our modern infrastructure in education, its just inefficient. As a result, many college leaders end up in episodic interventions because the work of either the CIO or CFO so impacts the other area that the two end up having to get at the same table to hash things out. Let’s just end run this whole scenario; let’s hash it out up front! Let’s just do infrastructure master planning.

There are real issues to be worked out in this strategy. Facility and technology planning horizons tend to be different, skills sets of those involved more specialized, and budget allocations may come from different sources. Still, at some point we need to blend these efforts, or just resign ourselves to the constant push and pull of competing vital infrastructures.

If we build it, they will come—maybe. Today’s modern education infrastructure needs to be a thoughtful blend of online, over the phone, and face to face infrastructures. If we neglect this blend and just hope it works out, students may make another choice. Worse yet, we’ll be less capable of teaching and reaching with the best tool set available. However, with the right planning, we can be well positioned to meet the needs of those students in our face, and on the horizon. It’s a master plan worth working toward.

We're in This Together

Earlier this month, Erskine Bowles, the former chief of staff to President Clinton and newly appointed University of North Carolina System President, delivered his inaugural address. I encourage you to read the speech and notice something breathtaking. The speech is not just about how great the university system is in North Carolina—and I happen to think it’s outstanding—and where it’s going. The speech is much more about a simpler and harder hitting truth.

Unlike many system leaders who see it as their place in life to challenge, deride, or excoriate other education sectors in the fight for their piece of the legislative appropriation pie, Bowles reaches out to the K-12 schools in the state and says, “How can we help.” He pays tribute to the NC community college system—representing some 58 institutions—and talks about the importance of supporting and connecting to their work. And it’s not just lip service. He makes the larger case to the public that to successfully compete in the modern global economy, a state must bring its full complement of educational resources to bear; all sectors have to work in concert, support each other, and play to their unique strengths. It’s not about which system is better, more important, or more deserving; it’s about what is possible if they work together.

Watch for great things from the partnership of Erskine Bowles, Martin Lancaster, the North Carolina Community College System president, and June Atkinson, the North Carolina Superintendent of Public Instruction. They are three leaders that are ready and willing to work together. Better yet, they clearly understand that as the world becomes flatter and more driven by creativity and innovation, folks across the K-20 spectrum are served well by remembering the simple truth: we’re in this together!

E-Mail Serenity Prayer

God
grant me the Serenity
to accept the e-mails
I cannot get to,
the Time to answer
the ones I should,
and the Wisdom
to know the difference

Arming our Students for Success with Games

OK, I’ll admit it: I love to play video games. There is little doubt that one wonderful part of my being a parent is drawing at the kitchen table with my daughter and playing catch in the yard with my youngest son. But I also love battling it out on Shrek2 with my other son. Actually, all four of us regularly jump on the X-box and work collaboratively to get from one level of a game to the next. Now mind you, we also hike in the woods, play with the goats on our little farm, and do creative story telling—so we’re not techno freaks or anything. But the video games are just plain fun for us. Not to mention, it gives me a great venue to teach them about working together, winning gracefully, leveraging strategy, and the power of persistence.

They’re also useful for learning other things. For example, before Richard scrambled around the field in his first soccer game, we bought an FIFA-World Cup Soccer video game. He learned all the rules, strategy, and scoring weeks before he ever touched the field. In the end, it didn’t lessen his love of kicking and scoring on the field at all, it just put some learning of what he called “the boring stuff” (i.e., the rules) into another context. Not to mention, he saw some pretty impressive models of quality soccer playing on the screen. We’ve since used the same strategy with baseball and tennis. In addition, all of my kids use video games to learn language and math skills on sites like DisneyBlast and PBSKids.org. It’s just an everyday part of their routine; to them, it’s as novel as a toaster.

This experience really came to the fore recently when my brother joined the National Guard. And after seeing America’s Army, and learning about the success of this huge online gaming site in preparing new recruits for boot camp, this learning strategy hit home. New recruits that play America’s Army enter basic training already understanding chain of command, battlefield strategy, and base protocols. It doesn’t help them shoot straight or calm the pounding heart in conflict situations, but a good deal of learning can be displaced long before they hit their barracks. Take the time to check it out to see the impressive breadth and depth of this online resource.

Gaming is here to stay. And when you compare the learning our kids will do in school vs. in games remember the often stated maxim: the worst thing you can say about homework is that it’s too hard; the worst thing you can say about a game is that it’s too easy. It’s great that the Army uses these tools to train soldiers, but shouldn’t we be looking to develop something similar to arm our kids for schools and universities. Couldn’t we work together to develop interactive games and online communities for school readiness, college orientations, and even virtual co-opts? The answer is a resounding YES. I just hope it’s a regular part of our children’s learning soon, because playing video games is fun. And when learning is play, it’s the best of all worlds.

Questions about a Quality City Life

According to the most recent Quality of Life survey by Mercer Human Resource, our major cities are falling behind—yet again. Pollution, traffic, crime, population density, and access to quality education are all dragging our ratings down. Honolulu and San Francisco are our highest rated cities, and they don’t even crack the top 25. Bagdad, not surprisingly, is the lowest rated city for the second survey in a row.

Mercer conducts and distributes this survey as part of an effort to inform international companies as they make choices about where to locate headquarter and design compensation packages for expatriates. Again, as the world become “Flat”—as Thomas Friedman argues—or as the international creative competition ensues—as Richard Florida argues—we had better start paying attention to the data. Others certainly are.

We can argue about the structure of the survey or the weighting Mercer gives to different elements; however, the fact remains that international conversations are not swaying positively in our favor. We look more insular, anti-education, regressive, and protectionist than ever. Yes, our large cities may not be the most accurate reflection of how “most” in the US live. However, they are our largest brand to an increasingly connected and competitive world. While they may be a convenient target for dogmatic diatribes, we may be shooting ourselves in the foot as we demonize these urban centers.

So, the question remains: How do we create a quality city life? What should be doing to improve our approach to education, environment, and safety? I read with interest what NY is investing in their massive reforms of their city schools. Is this the right kind of model? How will this relate to and improve rural and suburban funding, connections, and community building as well? For other ideas, check out the One Cleveland Initiative, which was introduced to me by the always impressive Lev Gonick—CIO of Case Western Reserve University. This may be another powerful option, a creative way leverage technology, community building, and collaboration to improve our cities. Their work to address poverty and improve quality of life has been impressive. Are there other areas where we can use the information already at our fingertips in our cities to make a difference?

I’m not sure of the answers here; but as champions of quality learning, leadership, creativity, and health, I know we better start asking the questions.

Let's Get it On!

Let's end online segregation. Let's continue to bring online tools—from e-mail to websites to mobile phones to ipods—fully into the mainstream and stop thinking of them as “new” or “innovative.” It’s time we simply welcome them into the family of options for teaching and reaching students in the modern era.

Yes, online education used to be considered innovative. Along with e-mail, the idea of getting online to retrieve resources was a first step to a teaching-with-technology craze in the 1990s. It was followed by the idea of taking an entire course online. This was a traumatic step for some, and the quality police came raging. While they rarely held in-class courses to the same standards that they expected online courses to match, they were quick to pronounce online-course taking DOA because of the lack of academic rigor.

Once online educators jumped the course hurdle, they looked to online degrees. Places like University of Phoenix (which, contrary to most people’s preconceptions, is still a predominantly on-ground university), Rio Salado College, and Western Governors University stepped into the breach and proved it could happen—with quality and accreditation. Creative projects like the Florida Virtual School pushed the envelope and helped bring online education into High Schools. You should really take the time to attend the Virtual School Symposium put on by the North American Council of Online Learning if you want to see just how much online action is emerging in public schools.

Still, most of this work remained segregated. In many educators’ minds, there was the online world and then there was the “real” education world. The online courses had to be specially marked in the catalog, if they were allowed in at all. Often, the online program resided in the continuing education department. Tenure-track faculty that dared to support this work had their promotions held up (see the early material from Randy Bass and the Crossroads Project) and administrators searched to find a “lower friction” location for this innovative learning model.

Then came the rise of hybrids, or blended learning. Truthfully, it wasn’t really we educators that pushed this envelope, it was the students. First, studies began to show that “distance” education—which many folks positioned online education as—actually was predominantly serving students within 30 miles of the campus. Online education, it seems, was much more about students being able to take a course at more convenient times, places, and paces. Second, students began doing both traditional and online education at the same time. It became commonplace to find that most students taking online courses were taking two or more traditional courses. At one point, the largest cohort of students in Michigan Virtual University was made up of students living in the University of Michigan dorms!

The next natural step has now been taken. University of Phoenix launched its FlexNet service last year, which quickly became its fastest growing segment. FlexNet is basically a blend of online and in-class instruction. Community Colleges and Universities are launching their hybrid programs, or at least putting their toe in the water. The Florida Virtual School is showing that hybrid resources for High School Students are powerful tools to keep engagement with a new generation of students that fully expect online tools to be comfortably woven into their learning experiences. You see, the rising student block doesn’t get all the fuss.

We’re finally here. We’re at a place were we can begin fully integrating online tools into how we teach and reach students—mainstream them, if you will. And as you know, I will never say that online education and outreach tools are “better” than face-to-face methods. In my college days, I sat through too many lectures where I wanted to stab my eyes out with my pencil, and since have seen class PowerPoint presentations that had neither power nor a point, and online course mazes that lead to nowhere (particularly learning). I don’t have any illusions about one method being better than another. It’s all about how the tools are used—and usually it’s the teacher and reacher that have greatest impact in the direction the tools take and the difference they make.

To really make move online into the mainstream, however, we have to continue pushing through the sticking points and keep a dialog going. We have to have thoughtful conversations about when online tools are appropriate, when face to face interaction is essential, and when moderated and mobile tools might help. The list of topics is long. But the conversation is vital if integration is to reach it potential.

This is one of the reasons I’m such a fan of NACOL (mentioned earlier) for the K-12 level, and the Sloan-C consortium at the higher education level. Sloan-C was founded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to help drive what their Program Director Frank Mayadas calls “Asynchronous Learning.” Frank and Burkes Oakley (you have to check out his work at University of Illinois) are two of the leading idea champions behind Sloan-C, and have been at the forefront of this movement to the mainstream from the beginning. Sloan-C has a great catalog of online degrees and resources, a rowdy listserv, and great conferences. Both NACOL and Sloan-C both help create communities of practice and share solid resources for interested educators. Check them out if you want to end the online segregation at your institution. Check them out if you want to get the conversation off the on-line vs. on-ground debate. When it comes to the kinds of conversations we should be focusing on, I say, "let's get it on!" On whatever works to improve and expand learning.

Poverty Perspective

Jeffery Sachs is the Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, and a special advisor to the UN. He’s also the author of the powerful book, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time, and the economist guru behind much of the singer Bono’s work in the developing world. In fact, Bono wrote the forward for The End of Poverty. I’ve been diving into the book as I prepare for some meetings in Europe in the coming month and am taken with its breadth and boldness.

Many of the points that Sachs make come from data you may have seen in other places. The way he makes the case, however, is unique. While the data may be bleak, he is not a defeatist. With over a billion of the 6 billion people on this planet living in extreme poverty—literally a cultural or conditional hiccup away from disaster—it is not surprising that more than 20,000 people a day die of completely preventable diseases (e.g., malaria, aids, dysentery). Most of this poverty is found in parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America—however, there are pockets elsewhere around the world as well. He does a good job of pointing out that the growing divide between have and have not is immoral, unnecessary, and really unique to the last 220 years. Before then, most people on this planet lived at or around the same standard of living. The industrial revolution, geography, and a host of other factors began the poverty split in earnest. Extreme poverty, you see, is not explained away by the convenient “pull yourself up by your bootstrap” rhetoric—you need boots for that. The challenges have more to do with infrastructure (political, physical, and cultural), health systems, and education. This “holy trinity” of development is a starting point for understanding the plight of those trapped in extreme poverty.

The good news is that the knowledge revolution we are living through today holds the promise of helping address many of these issues and turn the situation around. However, we have to do the hard work of educating people about a situation that many would rather forget or ignore. We also have to resist the temptation to explain it away because we don’t want to back the hard work necessary to bring world economic bodies and developed nations together in a strategic way. Yes, we have to care enough to work together with other nations to make a dent in this problem. And yes, there is “tough love” for the countries in distress. However, we have to be careful in the latter approach. As I like to say, throwing a drowning man a self-help book means he soon won’t have a self to help. Most of men, women, and children in extreme poverty are drowning in it.

Sachs outlines the exciting truth that we have the tools at our disposal to end extreme poverty in our generation. Not surprisingly, education will be essential on many fronts. We need to educate our students and communities and leaders about the real challenges of poverty to help generate the support necessary to make a difference. We need to educate a new breed of economists and development specialists with true “clinical development” skills to address the key issues that drive extreme poverty. Finally, we need to help stand up educational systems for these areas to create a new community of learners supporting their countries joining a community of nations as happy and healthy partners.

Take the time to pick up the book and learn more about the topic. The read definitely helps put poverty in perspective.

The Power to Know You’re Making a Difference

Learn or die. The need for insight in education is almost that stark. Whether you’re talking about countries, counties, cities or citizens, whether you’re reading Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, Richard Florida’s The Flight of the Creative Class or the Education Commission of the States’ report Keeping America’s Promise, the conclusion is clear: Without education, the prospects are bleak. Freidman argues that without education and imagination, a country cannot compete in a globally woven world. Florida argues that communities that fail to support education — or worse yet, mute education expansion — are ensuring their fast decline. The authors of Keeping America’s Promise point to harsh statistics showing that without achieving at least “some” higher education, a person is destined for a very different future, one with far less security, far less opportunity and far less promise.

Thankfully, the converse also is true: Education is a powerful pathway to possibility for individuals, organizations and communities. In many ways, it is the modern difference-maker. Education opens doors to economic opportunity, individual empowerment and creative expression in a way no other force can.

It is not surprising, then, that the power to know we are making a difference in education has become a necessity for schools, colleges, universities, communities, states, provinces and nations. Nor is it surprising that the search to make better decisions, leverage better strategies and design better systems in education is the highest of priorities in academia today. To achieve these ends, to gain the power to know we’re making a difference, we need to begin to embrace insight initiatives. Insight initiatives in this context can be thought of as explorations of information from the past (hindsight) combined with looks to the future (foresight) that come together in a moment of insight to power decisions that make a positive difference. In the corporate world, some would use the term business intelligence to describe this work, or they might call it “competing on analytics.” These initiatives leverage technology, planning, research, strategy and host of other key elements.

If you're interested in these issues, here's a link to a free White Paper based on my speech to the Higher Learning Commission's 111th annual conference earlier this month; it's called The Power to Know You’re Making a Difference: Embracing Insight Initiatives in Education. What I offer in the paper is a broad exploration of the embrace of insight initiatives across multiple sectors: business, government, healthcare and education. It also explores the technological infrastructure necessary to make these insight efforts work. Finally, we dive deeper into the key issues that arise as a result of these initiatives and surface a powerful role for education, not only in leveraging insight but also in living free in the modern world.

Most likely, you agree that education is a modern imperative; and that this imperative is driving the embrace of insight initiatives in education. And you’ll see in the paper, we are not alone. The corporate, government and healthcare sectors also are taking on this sort of work, for a host of different reasons. So it’s time for us to use the CASE method—Copy And Steal Everything. Let’s see if we can learn from other sectors, learn from each other and learn from our own work in an effort to bring more meaningful, deep learning to our students. By working together, we can know that we’re making a difference — and know that we’re helping students embrace their exciting futures.

A Higher Learning

On Sunday I had the great pleasure of keynoting the Higher Learning Commission's 111th Annual Conference in Chicago. What a powerful event with more than 3,700 leaders from across the North Central Accreditation region. When I reflect on the evening, I have to once again note how impressed I am by folks like Steven Crow, Executive Director of the Commission. Even in the face of the open, broadside attacks on accreditation—the core purpose of his organization—he challenged these higher education leaders to listen to the criticisms, be thoughtful in analyzing the issues, and to come together to respond. He could have launched into a dogmatic diatribe, but he’s not an education reactionary that bristles and bites at any challenge of the education community. He’s quality leader of a powerful education body that is committed to driving positive change. He and the insightful leaders he catalyzes will continue to make a difference in education because they don’t simply defend the status quo; they work together to thoughtfully champion quality learning.

I’ll be posting a bit from my speech and the resulting white paper a little later today. In the meantime, I just wanted to pass on a little of Steven Crow’s Higher Learning!

Crazy Busy

It’s over before you know it: childhood, young love, the kids’ early years, life in general. We’re just moving too fast: the Internet, cell phones, blackberries, instant messages, TiVo. We’re hearing these comments more and more, from elders, peers, and sometimes even from children. Yes, even the Herculean speed-demon kids are saying, “Whoa! I don’t want to rush from thing to thing today, I just want to play.” We’ve moved from a world that “creeps in this petty pace” to what too often feels like an existence percolating with panicky persistent partial attention.

The Harvard Medical School psychiatrist and leader of the Hallowell Center, Edward Hallowell, has long been one of my favorite authors and speakers on this subject. His books on Connections and Human Moments are fantastic journeys into this timely topic. In his speeches, he points out the irony of the information age: that we have more connection capacity than ever before, more technology to reach out and touch someone than you can imagine, but the most common reason for visiting a psychologist or psychiatrist tends to be depression related to feelings of loneliness, disconnection, and lack of inclusion. We are knee deep in water, dying of thirst it seems.

A friend just sent me the link to Hallowell's newly released book, CrazyBusy - Overstretched, Overbooked and About to Snap! Strategies for Coping in a World Gone ADD, which promises to be another of his thoughtful explorations on these issues. Upon hearing about this book, however, Steven Johnson, president of Sinclair Community College, joked, “Sounds like a great book, I just don’t have time to read it!”

What I look forward to in Hallowell’s Crazy Busy is that he’s not one of these, “let’s throw the technology out and go back to a ‘better time’ folks.” He’s much more thoughtful, practical, and human. It’s clear to me that the key issue isn’t how we throw technology away, but how we make sure that we are using it, not being used by it. We should not be responding like Pavlovian dogs to the e-mail chime or taking a cell phone call from a public restroom. But we should be thoughtfully integrating these powerful new tools into our own framework for quality interactions and meaningful relationships.

For example, anyone who teaches and leverages e-mail to connect with students knows that the challenge is that they sometimes think you’re always on. They’ll wonder why you haven’t responded to their 3:00 a.m. e-mail by the next morning. I, for one, think it’s a GREAT thing to help set the expectation about when you’re likely to be online and not likely to be anywhere near a computer. We’re all living through this adjustment period of the rapid adoption of Internet technologies and your boundaries are a good model. However, teachers who use e-mail with their students have likely also found that some students, usually the ones who never talk in class, suddenly open up and share online. This new form interaction gives them time to collect their thoughts, reflect, and interact at their pace—something that fast-paced, in-class interactions do not. To return to a ‘better time’ when e-mail, threaded discussions, or e-portfolios didn’t exist, would, in many ways, re-marginalize these students.

Yes, it’s time to slow down, look around, and take control of the technology to serve our ends. We can use the cell-phone off buttons a little more, turn off monitors or close laptop lids when people walk in our office, turn off the automatic e-mail check function in Outlook, and turn off the ‘white noise’ television. But polemic attacks on tools that literally save lives (e.g., stranded on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere and using the cell to call for help) or change lives for the better (e.g., a working mother who could never have gone back to school if not for online learning) aren’t the dialogue to be had. It’s about balance, mindfulness, and intention.

So, in a truly balanced move, I’m going to sign off here so I can order Crazy Busy online and read it this weekend. You see, I’m traveling, and way to busy to get to a book store in the next two days. :)

Education in the Ether

Just in the last few weeks, Thomas Friedman, the Pulitzer-prize winning columnist for the NY Times and author of the best-selling The World is Flat (which is an absolute must read for anyone interested in learning, leadership, economic development, and global affairs) has been ringing the education bell. First he noted the key role that education is playing in the future plans and rapidly expanding economies of India and China. The article was titled Worried About India' s and China' s Booms? So Are They. The main point: we’re worried about them, they’re worried about education—much more than we seem to be. In particular, they are interested in expanding their educational systems to allow for more creative thinking, innovation, and broader literacy skills. Then yesterday, he released a columned entitled Facts and Folly, noting that the Bush administration’s consistent belief that we will “always be a rich country” is belied by the fact that our educational system is in disarray, full of underpaid and overstretched teachers. He noted the work of the Teaching Commission, an organization that has sounded the clarion call for more and more qualified teachers. Without the foundation of a quality education system—highly motivated, innovative, quality teachers—we are not likely to remain the richest of countries.

This comes on the heels of a panel I had the pleasure of moderating at the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation at NC State University. The Friday Institute hosts a quarterly Friday Forum that brings key thought leaders in to meet with educators, community members, and corporate leaders. This event featured Richard Florida, the award-winning author, economist, and idea champion behind The Rise of the Creative Class and The Flight of the Creative Class. Richard gave a spirited talk about how we’ve come through the industrial economy into a creative economy—where everyone reaching their creative potential is key in economic development. In short, communities that inspire, welcome, and catalyze creativity through things like quality, innovative education will continue to thrive. Those that neglect creativity and education, do so at their own peril. After his talk, we convened a panel with Richard, Dr. Jim Goodnight, CEO and founder of SAS, and co-author with Richard of the article Managing for Creativity in HBR, and June Atkinson, Superintendent of Public Instruction for the State of North Carolina. The panel pounced on Richard’s ideas and really challenged education leaders to drive change in how we teach, reach, and engage our students. June in particular was right there with Florida and Goodnight advocating for change, innovation, and focus—focus on the need for and needs of education in the modern economy. She wasn’t defensive at all, as some educators become during these dialogues. She was laser focused on how we drive change.

It just strikes me that when award winning columnists for the NY Times and leading economists are jumping into the education debate, and practicing educators sing in harmony, we should take note. Education is in the ether; more so because in the creative/knowledge economy we can no longer suffer a sloppy Darwinian education system. We MUST do better. And that imperative will keep education and creativity, and the leadership necessary to power education and creativity, on the front page.

Moving from Blame to Wonder

If you’re interested in college access and success, take the time to visit a new site that just launched called EconomicDiversity.org. It’s an interesting look at the stratification of higher education that is occurring based on income. As college becomes increasingly expensive, with tuition increasing much faster than the rate of inflation, this is going to be a necessary conversation for policy makers, institutional leaders, community members, and parents. The institutional profile section is quite good, and the comparison tools allow you to do some benchmarking. Kudos to the Hewlett Foundation for once again driving the dialogue in education.

EconomicDiversity.og reminds me of others like EdWatch Online and CollegeResults.org, which were launched by the Education Trust. EdWatch allows you to dive deep into public data about public schools. College Results allows you to break down public data about colleges, in particular their success with women and minorities. Then you can rate them against a peer group of institutions that fit their same profile. The Gates Foundation Transforming High Schools site has an interactive state by state profile of college readiness. Click on their interactive map on their front page and look up your own state’s performance.

One of my favorite “put the data out there” sites is the Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE). These data aren’t drawn from public data sets, but from actual institutional student engagement surveys that the institutions have allowed to be made public in an effort to create benchmarks, catalyze conversations about student engagement, and to learn from models of successful student outreach. Kay McClenney and her team at the University of Texas at Autsin have done an amazing job of pulling this national community of practice together.

The long and the short of these services and sites is that there are more data available for education dialogues than ever before. This is a VERY good thing. Facing the brutal facts and celebrating the successes are both made easier by opening data to exploration. The challenge is that often these data don’t tell the whole story—there are real qualitative contingencies that just don’t show up in the neat charts and graphs. Moreover, some of these public datasets have REAL problems with missing data and other inconsistencies. Still, contingencies and conditions notwithstanding, without this first step – putting it out there--we’ll never begin to address what Steve Gilbert from the TLT Group calls “Dangerous Discussions.” I just hope we take a deep breath and as Steve Mittlestet, President of Richland College—a college that recently became the first educational institution to win the Malcolm Baldridge Quality Award—argues, “we turn to wonder, not blame.” Steve and his team argue that wonder makes you dive deep into root causes and solutions; blame gets you on the defensive immediately. We need wonder these days, coupled with doing the hard work of asking next-level questions and piloting solutions. The blame game just isn’t getting us anywhere.

Learning at Poway and the Extreme Kindness Tour

I had the pleasure of sitting in on some education sessions at the SAS Users Group International meeting in San Francisco over the last few days. SUGI is a coming together of more than 4,000 advanced analytic minds from all sorts of industries, from Amazon.com to the World Wildlife Fund. The folks in this presentation, however, were laser focused on education. John Collins is the Deputy Superintendent from Poway Unified School District, just outside of San Diego. He and his colleague Ray Wilson did an amazing job of talking about how they have worked to bring a culture of evidence to the learning process of their school district. The best thing about their presentation was the “reality therapy” about how the technology may be powerful, the dashboards may be dazzling, but it’s working to create a culture where everyone actually USES the information you put at their fingertips to change how they teach and reach students. For example, they made the case that standardized test scores are sometimes so general as to be useless beyond the broad tracking of kids. Poway tries to bring much more powerful diagnostics right to teachers—daily!—so that when they work with kids they know more about specific challenges and possible strategies to help. Most interesting, however, is the way they have used data to link learning to the budget. Their comment was “the way to get budget in this district is to document that what you are doing, or want to do, will somehow improve learning.” It’s not just about headcount and “fair” allocations; it’s about what will impact the kids. Great stuff from Poway!

SUGI also featured the Extreme Kindness tour. These four guys have worked with Fortune 500 companies, local communities, and non profits with the goal of educating, inspiring, and motivating. I had the good fortune to talk with them for a bit before their presentation—which is a hilarious and humanistic ride on a kindness express. They are the real deal. They are fully engaged in what their doing and loving every minute of it. They certainly make you want to wake up and take on your challenges. The most interesting thing was watching them relate to conference attendees who are mostly IT folks—i.e., a whole lot of introverts. It was almost like watching and extroverted aunt hug an introverted nephew. Still all seemed to have a good time, and connected well with the message. Check out their manifesto, and choose your act of kindness!

The Courage to Learn

A few years ago, I wrote an open letter to adult learners called The Courage to Learn. This simple little article spurred more interesting conversations with people all around the world than any previous work I’d produced. It’s been reprinted in a number of places, leading to even more interesting interactions. The conversations with students of all ages and stages, taking on their various challenges, and the leaders and teachers trying to reach them, were engaging, inspiring, and fun. At other times they were deep dives into very serious and difficlut issues. These are the kinds of dialogues I hope to catalyze here: real conversations about the good, the bad, and the day to day of learning, leadership, creativity, and health. In addition, I hope we can turn this into a resource-sharing vehicle for those of us keenly interested in how we can make a difference with our work in these arenas. Here's to the road ahead!