alumni futures

5 Long-Term "Ideas That Matter" for Education

A.C. Grayling with beverage,
by bowbrick via Flickr

[Updated 5 June 2011: A.C. Grayling involved in establishing new College of the Humanities in London.]

The English philosopher A.C. Grayling seems to produce a book or two every year, about things I can't comprehend. For example, is philosophical realism more epistemological than metaphysical, as a construct for understanding the relationship between one's mind and the world? Uh, let me get back to you on that, Dr. Grayling.

But every once in a while, Grayling produces something that many people can understand. In his 2010 book, Ideas That Matter: The Concepts That Shape the 21st Century, Grayling has compiled "a personal dictionary of ideas" that he finds worth examining, and suggests themes that will dominate political, economic and intellectual debate in the coming decades.

Last year, The American Scholar featured a dozen critical themes proposed by Grayling (not all of which are in his book), and among them I found five themes with direct, and potentially monumental, implications for higher education. Note: One of Grayling's constructs is education itself, which he covers in about nine pages, but it seemed a bit too meta to state here that education has long term implications for education.

I've listed the other five below with my own brief comment on their relevance. This is obviously a too-brief treatment of critical topics, but I'm curious how others see these topics in the context of higher education in the coming decades.

1. The Internet
Grayling calls the web "the largest graffiti-scrawled toilet wall in the universe," but its potential to transform education is vast. In fact, it has already done so. One remarkable thing about digital and electronic developments is that they are so new, in historical terms. We're at the absolute beginning of digital technology's influence over education (and everything else). Not all technical achievements are desirable, obviously, but they can open the door to more effective ways of doing things we've long tried to do (such as educating each other and ourselves).

2. China
Grayling's prescription for dealing with China's lack of democratic instruments and questionable human rights record is weak: "the rest of the world should continue encouraging it to practice good statehood." OK, sure. But consider China's economic and population growth, the public Westernization of certain aspects of its society, and its increasing (but so far, tenuous) links with Western institutions. These mean that many or most global education brands will try to place China securely in the forefront of their international strategy. 

[Many global education brands will try to place China in the forefront of their international strategy.]

3. Migration
Grayling focuses on the social outcomes of large-scale African and Middle Eastern migration to Europe. The international flow of students is recasting institutional definitions of what it means to be a "global" university. In fact, nobody yet knows what it means, and the moment that someone figures it out, the definition will change. Either way, increased international student mobility has implications for marketing and recruiting, fundraising and alumni relations, and competition across national borders and regions.

4. E-publishing
Grayling points out that print news media are "struggling to survive" as the written word shifts to digital form. He doesn't say why we need printed media – did people say that the horse-drawn wagon was "struggling to survive" 90 years ago? Or was it obviously obsolete?

[Did people say that the horse-drawn wagon was "struggling to survive" 90 years ago? Or was it obviously obsolete?]

Either way, digital storage and transmission of information (and its accessibility and portability) are wreaking havoc on traditional models of educational publishing and, yes, on retailing too. Campus bookstores house fewer and fewer printed books, and more and more gadgets for reading the books in their new incarnation: the digital volume. 

5. Retromania
On the heels of describing the downfall of printed news, Grayling points out that "the fashion for all things retro is already growing, and that is not a bad trend." Is "not bad" the same thing as "good"? Grayling doesn't say. But one thing seems likely: the past will be romanticized by anyone suffering from "retromania," just as people seem to think that "information overload" is a product of the digital age (it isn't). Who knows, maybe printed books will come back into style briefly, as an affectation of youth – like the cigar, the martini, the ironic fedora, and swing dancing. 

Are Grayling's trends important to education?

What aspects of their importance have I neglected?

Leave a comment.

(And for more of Grayling's opinions about education and how the Internet affects it, see his book Thinking of Answers: Questions in the Philosophy of Everyday Life. See links below.)

Related articles

• Ideas That Matter by A.C. Grayling (books.google.com)
• English Universities After the "Browne Report" (alumnifutures.com)
• Thinking of Answers: Questions in the Philosophy of Everyday Life (books.google.com)
• Educational Marketing, Authenticity, and Web 2.0 (alumnifutures.com) 

10 Challenges of Social Technology: Familiar Obstacles

Prolific web strategist and social tech blogger Jeremiah Owyang once again summarized the online community manager's world in a simple table (or "matrix," as he calls his ubiquitous charts). This one is called Challenges of the Social Technology Industry, July 2010 Edition. He calls the matrix an "opportunity list" for those of us using social technology to improve our business. 

Look at the full matrix and at least read through the challenges Jeremiah identifies. I've listed them below (with my own comments on how they might apply in educational advancement). 

Print out the chart, and highlight the challenges that you face. 

Then work with your organization's leadership, staff and volunteers, and draft a plan to address who in your organization will lead the effort of solving these challenges – assuming you don't already have a roadmap.
 
 

10 Challenges of the Social Technology Industry 
(via @jowyang); comments from @alumnifutures (Andy Shaindlin):

1. Noise overwhelms signal:
   Filter alums' tweets, blog posts and status updates so that quality and relevance prevail. Limit your organizations's output to conversational, relevant posts, with lots of question and a few fun polls.
   
   
2. Amateurism threatens expertise:
   Invest in training dedicated staff whose job description includes social media monitoring. Reach out to alumni, students or donors who have created their own social network groups in your institution's name, and partner with them to increase quality of group activity.
    
3. Power shift to participants:
   Don't talk all the time. Remember what a community manager looks like: small mouth, big eyes, big ears. Online communities are listening stations for organizations.
    
4. Fast moving industry creates confusion:
   Once you assign responsibility for social media management in your organization, schedule an update and reassess your progress within 60 days. The space is moving that fast.
    
5. Risk of overhype:
   Don't sign up for every site or service that gets "hot." Watch trends, and try to anticipate, but remember: deploy social media tools to help you achieve your organization's pre-existing business goals. Merely seeming "up to date" doesn't help you.
     
6. Lack of qualified talent:
   Don't have an expert in house? Create one. Invest in training and professional education so you can promote from within, or hire someone who understand how students and alumni are using social technology (see #2 above).
    
7. Measurement elusive:
   It's possible to measure return on investment, return on attention, and lots of other payoffs from attending to social channels. Start with this article from the Journal of Interactive Advertising or this post on Mashable about "measuring social media health."
    
8. Disparate data and irregular standards:
   Don't worry so much about benchmarking against other institutions. Start measuring outcomes and impact and track changes internally over time. Your data, benchmarks and standards will differ from your institutional competitors'.
    
9. Culture shift creates an internal rift inside institutions:
   Institutional leaders are concerned about being criticized by bloggers, tweeters and Facebookers. Social media-crazed staff members worry about falling behind the social media curve. Seek a compromise (and give your boss a copy of Open Leadership by Charlene Li).
    
10. Privacy woes scare companies and consumers:
    Advancement shops are pretty good at protecting the privacy of the donor database. This is no different. Learn what information is private and what is public in the platforms your organization uses, and respect absolutely the privacy and shared data of your stakeholders. Their loyalty will remain intact.

Related posts from Alumni Futures:

What Does a Community Manager Look Like?

The Alumni Organization Social Network Matrix: 18 Use Cases

Photo credit: Obstacle road sign via Creative Commons from Guillaume Lemoine

All The People You Know Who Know People

The mania over social networking is really a mania over the online component. Social networks have been in place for millennia. And reminders of this pop up in unexpected places all the time. Like in Truman Capote's classic novella, Breakfast at Tiffany's. 

The earnest, plodding young narrator follows all the rules for getting his writing published. He mails each manuscript off and passively waits for rejection letters by return post. But he gets a casual dose of common sense networking from his neighbor, Holly Golightly, who says that she can help him land a Hollywood script deal:

"I'm going to help you," she said. "I can, too. Think of all the people I know who know people." 

There's the strength of weak ties, clearly articulated in a fictional conversation, 15 years before Granovetter published it as a scholarly finding.

And there's something else here. Holly and her author-neighbor are not connected by a common alma mater or some other granfalloon. They're connected by something that Holly herself determines is relevant:

"I'm going to help you, because you look like my brother Fred. Only smaller."

This can serve as a cautionary reminder about how little it often takes for groups to form, with or without your alma mater as a focal point. And now that forming groups is so easy, looking like brother Fred is sometimes much more important than sharing a school connection. 

That should be a wake-up call to alumni organizations, which no longer (necessarily) play a central role in connecting people to one another and helping them organize around their interests.

Separating Personal and Professional Networks Online

[Updated 27 February, 2011: A new service aims to help you "connect, integrate and manage your social identities": http://www.whoopaa.com]

[Updated 5 January, 2011: Multiple identities on the social web, from All Things Digital.]

[Updated 17 November, 2010: CASE Currents profile of how different alumni professionals treat the question of separate social network profiles. CASE member log in required.]

I recently read (and enjoyed) the novella The Death of Ivan Ilych. For all his misfortune, Tolstoy's suffering magistrate had it better than we do in at least one respect. He could keep his "professional life discrete from his actual life" (and I like Tolstoy's dichotomy of "professional" and "actual" lives). For regular users of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, separating personal and professional networks can be a desirable, but elusive goal. 

Here's how Tolstoy described it:

Ivan Ilych had practiced this skill for keeping his professional life discrete from his actual life for a long time, and had developed it to such a degree that he sometimes, like a virtuoso, would blend his personal and professional attitudes together, as though for fun. He allowed himself to do so because he felt sure he'd be able to disentangle them when he needed to...

There are some insightful higher education professionals whose regular tweets and blog posts inform and inspire me – but who often deliver scene-by-scene online critiques of their favorite television shows. Other colleagues have added me as a Facebook friend – although I am already connected to them on LinkedIn, and don't think of them as "friends" (even by Facebook standards). This isn't a big deal, but unlike Ivan Ilych, I don't feel like I can "disentangle" these connections as easily as I would like to. 

And so these interactions slip and slide among online communities, blurring the personal and the professional, the Friend and the Fan. Eventually – soon, maybe – tools will evolve to help me put the right information in the right place, easily accessible in the right way. Of course, with periodic pruning of our networks, we can make a little headway ourselves. 

How? 

• By deleting LinkedIn connections whose work we don't know first-hand, or can't otherwise vouch for;
• by unfriending (or hiding updates from) the over-zealous Facebooker who reached out to everyone from Mrs. Leonard's 4th grade homeroom class; and
• by unfollowing Twitter contacts who have mistaken your professional profile for a restaurant review repository.

Of course, many people prefer to mix professional and personal connections and content in online communities. I do link to Alumni Futures from my Facebook profile, and sometimes even tweet about a baseball game (but LinkedIn is for professional use only). Overall, though, I prefer my work and personal profiles online to be more separate than connected. 

Until I can easily assign my contacts to what I consider the "right" place in either network (or in both), I'll just have to live vicariously through the Ivan Ilyches of the Internet age, who can patiently and readily disentangle the two.

Related articles

• Manage your separate work and social network accounts with Whoopaa (thenextweb.com)

Final Thoughts from CASE Summit 2009

This week I joined in a planning discussion for the 2010 CASE Summit for Advancement Leaders. Our planning committee discussed a number of themes, issues and possible speakers to make the conference relevant and useful to our profession. Preparing for that discussion I reviewed my notes from last summer's conference, some of which I blogged previously. 

As I expected, there were a few more worthwhile ideas that I had jotted down last July, almost all of them comments from Tim O'Reilly. Here they are in bullet point form:

• Tim O'Reilly, in the discussion about what role institutions can play in their constituents' lives, said: "If the job is relevant [to students, alumni and donors], the institution will figure it out. It's not about 'how do we protect the old ways we used to do those jobs?'"  

Right on. This reminded me of Clay Shirky's comment in Here Comes Everybody, that professions must often redefine themselves. Most journalists, for example, didn't believe that user-generated content or Web 2.0 was a threat to their business model: "We're in the journalism business – bloggers aren't journalists!" Maybe, says Shirky, but the journalists defined their own profession inaccurately. They are in the communications business, and so are bloggers and anyone else "publishing" content online, no matter how informal or personal.

• O'Reilly again: Traditional higher education will suffer if it can't adapt to new attitudes toward learning, to new people doing things in new ways (his examples: the University of Phoenix and Canada's Athabasca University). "We may remember how things used to be and remember those who suffered. The parvenu companies that did something 'crazy' may end up as the leaders." 

• O'Reilly defined publishing as "spreading the ideas of innovators" (a not very subtle reference to the fact that he owns a publishing company). Universities should ask, "What do we really do? For whom do we do it? Can we do it better with the aid of new technology?" 

His point was that we should go back to first principles. Instead of automatically doing the same thing using new tools, we should first ask whether what we do should change, not just how we do it.

• Asked whether internet-based news was "dumbing us down," O'Reilly replied astutely that he's given 90-minute interviews to newspaper reporters who then quoted him in a single sentence that misrepresented his main point.   

• Finally, O'Reilly echoed something I mentioned here long ago: "The internet is just a user interface." I quoted Cem Sertoglu in January 2008 to the effect that the "internet is the dumbest network of all."

And in a typical instance of converging thought-patterns, Shirky again surfaces on this exact topic: 

...[T]he internet itself is just a vehicle for moving information back and forth – it's up to the computers sending and receiving information to make sense of it....The internet does not know what it is being used for.... [Here Comes Everybody, p. 157]

This provides us with the ability "to design and try new communications tools without having to ask anyone for permission." Like...the World Wide Web!

Final note: Despite a decidedly technical flavor to many of the sessions at 2009's Summit, there was no wireless access in any of the meeting rooms at the Hyatt hosting the conference in San Francisco. Not because CASE didn't request wifi for attendees; apparently Hyatt doesn't even have the ability to deliver internet access in its conference rooms. I find this mind-boggling. Last time I checked, the hotel's business offices had internet, as did the guest rooms. Let's hope the Marriott in New York gives us better online access next July.

HDR photo of Times Square from Nimo Photography via Creative Commons. That's the Hilton though – the CASE Summit will be at the Marriott.  

Your School: A Flatland for Students

You may be familiar with Flatland: A Romance in Many Dimensions by 19th century author Edwin Abbott. Flatland is a two-dimensional land populated by polygons, and the story satirizes Victorian England's hierarchical social structure. Of equal interest to many readers is the book's clear articulation of the mathematical ideas behind different dimensions.

The narrator, named A Square, sees A Sphere (a visitor from a three-dimensional place called Spaceland) move through Flatland. But A Square doesn't recognize the visitor as a sphere, because he has no knowledge of the three-dimensional world the sphere inhabits. From A Square's vantage point as a flat observer, the sphere passing through the plane he inhabits looks like a single point that grows into a line. It then shrinks to a point again before disappearing magically (click the illustration from the book to view full size). A three-dimensional object is unrecognizable, and is beyond comprehension to a two-dimensional being. But if he could be lifted up above the plane he inhabits, A Square would see the relationship between the sphere and the plane. 

I think that A Square's plight is analogous to that of many current undergraduate students when they interact with alumni. The students' perceptions are limited in time and space by the very nature of their experience; when an older, experienced alumnus passes through the student's world, context limits their ability to recognize the graduate for what he or she really is: a rich resource, a person with experience and insight that the student could use, if only the student could rise above the Flatland of the insulated student environment and gaze upon it from Spaceland.

Students who thrive in "real world" situations are those who rise up and seek a three-dimensional look at the world outside their campus. This isn't a criticism of students, nor is it applicable to all undergraduates. But as I chatted about Flatland with a colleague recently, it occurred to me that Edwin Abbott's ordering of the various dimensions could be compared to the relative amount of time students and alumni have spent in the wider world. Experience away from campus and from traditional student life expands the viewer's awareness of the world and provides depth that allows him to recognize and understand unfamiliar people and things.

Is this too much of a stretch? Does the analogy make sense?

Related: In July 2008 I asked "do science students really learn science" - or something more?


Illustration from chapter 16 of Flatland: A Romance in Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott. In the public domain. Find the book in a library near you using WorldCat.

Alumni Villains, Real and Imagined

Bear with me for a minute. This post will take us in a couple of different directions, one serious, one not so serious.

The serious part is an admonition:

Monitor your institutional brand online to the greatest extent possible.

In the past few months I have posted alumni-related comments from Twitter, and it would actually be easy to fill an entire blog with nothing but examples of people making comments about their alma mater or fellow alumni on Twitter.

I'm resisting that temptation, but I still have to share this one. I saw this on Twitter a few weeks ago and for some reason, saved it:

Later the same day I saw yet another tweet referencing high school alumni. It used the word "infamous" and here's what I saw when I clicked the embedded Wikipedia link:

Something tells me that Kevin, the "Youtube Comedy Star" listed here, may have had a hand in editing his high school's list of notable alumni. Nonetheless, it just illustrates that keeping an eye on institutional references is a good idea.

Meanwhile (here comes the less serious part), a blog called io9 follows all things science fiction-related. And a posting this weekend asked the important question, "What are the top schools when it comes to producing super-villains?"

...it's time for students to turn their thoughts back to school and classes. But what if your area of study is supervillainy? We look at the top schools for aspiring supervillains.

You may have your own schools to add to their list of 15 institutions of evil learning (which includes DC Comics' Legion Superhero Academy, whose grads created an alumni affinity group known as the Legion of Supervillains). But I laughed when I saw one commenter's almost-too-easy suggestions for expanding the list:

"Yale? Harvard?"

Clay Shirky on Groups, Media, Audiences and Organization

Here in Boston, where I'm speaking at the Whipple Hill User Conference, keynote speaker Clay Shirky made a splash Tuesday with his opening remarks. In a wide-ranging talk that incorporated many of his past threads, the internet observer made a few points worth thinking about.

Some will seem obvious, but Shirky's talent is for pointing out things that we should have realized or understood on our own – but, for whatever reason, did not realize or understand until we heard him explain them.

1. Online tools enable "changes in group action"

"Every url is now a latent community" says Shirky, "with additional potential value from organizing people to take action."

Large, traditional organizations once held an "information advantage." This old-fashioned advantage goes away when a single person shares information with a group that has a shared problem or concern re: that organization. 

His example: A bank reneges on a promotion and starts charging for something that was marketed as a "free service." A group of students shines a light on it with a call to action and mobilizes online. In the glare of publicity, and newly aware of the loss of its information monopoly, the bank reverts to its original deal.

2. The logic of media production has changed

Old model ("one to many"): You bought a TV and there was one more consumer, but the same number of producers. Making and transmitting television shows is expensive.

New model: You buy a computer and there is one more consumer. But there is also one more producer. The numbers of producers and consumers are in virtual equilibrium and are relatively equal. Almost anyone can publish commentary, video, photography, music...

Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, used blogging as an example too:

Old model: "Filter, then publish." A media outlet chose, sought, wrote, edited and published a story they thought people would find interesting. 

New model: "Publish, then filter." A teenager in Thailand publishes something she thinks is interesting, and lets the public filter it out; if they don't like it, they can stop reading her blog. Unlike old media, she doesn't need anyone to read it for it to stay in business. 

3. The logic of audiences has changed

Shirky told a story about fundraising organizations that immediately raised implications for volunteer development. The point? Simple:

"When any organization reaches a large group of people who don't work for it, the logic switches from controlling those people to convening them."

The organization must understand, and respect, people's reason for participating.

Finally, during Q & A, Shirky gave some pithy but quotable bits of advice:

When an organization commits to one big idea, it cannot afford to admit that it failed: 

"Find the person who has the vision – who knows the big change you need to make – then lock them out and bring them back when they have 100 small ideas...The effect of failure equals the likelihood of failing times the cost of failing. So we operate as if we have to avoid failing."

This appeals to me, but I wonder how it incorporates those of us managing large, long-standing activities that seem too big to abandon overnight, but too out of date to fix with "small ideas."

Finally, responding to a question about so-called "information overload," Shirky pointed out that we've always had a lot of info coming at us. We've just had good filters to help us avoid wasting time. We're not experiencing information overload, we're experiencing "filter failure."

"Dump a bookstore into the street and try to find the Auden. You won't find Auden, you'll find Chicken Soup for the Hoosier Soul. You can avoid that in the store because it's organized. Filters will become more social and will catch up with our need for organizing information."

Think about these ideas on information, organization, action and community and see if they apply to your institution or its audiences. Tell us if they do.

Photo of Clay Shirky's keynote by Travis Warren via Creative Commons 

Alumni Associations, Social Networks, and Granfalloons

A few weeks ago, a friend mentioned that Facebook seemed like "nothing more than a granfalloon." In his novel Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut coined the word granfalloon to describe "a seeming team that is meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done." His examples include: people from the state of Indiana ("Hoosiers"), "the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution...and any nation, anytime, anywhere."

In other words, when people believe that they're connected by some external purpose or reason, but are really thrown together mostly by coincidence, you have a granfalloon. In early 2007, Emily Yoffe wrote about this phenomenon: "...I will be interested" she wrote, "to see if Facebook and sites of its ilk end up being a granfalloon, or a revolution."

It turns out that they are both.

A year ago I wrote about the weakness of networks that don't have a logical glue to bind them. Why, for example, would you join a social network designed for customers of your phone company? You have something in common with them, but it isn't something that matters for a larger purpose. The so-called network is just a granfalloon.

One can also argue that an alumni association is nothing more than a granfalloon. (For the sake of job security, no alumni director should suggest this, but I'll risk it, to explore the question.) In fact, Vonnegut says exactly this about alumni connections; the following exchange occurs among three travelers in Cat's Cradle who meet on a commercial airliner (chapter 59):

His gaze lit on Newt again. "You go to college?"
"Cornell," said Newt.
"Cornell!" cried Crosby gladly. "My God, I went to Cornell."
"So did he." Newt nodded at me.
"Three Cornellians – all in the same plane!" said Crosby, and we had another granfalloon festival on our hands.

It's in schools' interest that alumni feel connected to the institution and to one another. Whether we are truly connected to people we don't know depends on whether we have a reason to interact in the first place. The same question underlies the online relationships that my friend suspects of granfalloonery. Are we really "friends" with people we didn't talk to in high school, just because we connect on Facebook twenty years later?

But once again, weak ties appear. Online networks reveal mutual connections and provide history and context for another's place in our lives. If we bother to learn where a non-friend friend lives, what she works on, and what she cares about, she might someday help us solve a problem that we don't even know we're going to have. Or she may just become a friend.

And no matter how or why you meet someone, in the end it's the connection that develops that can make knowing that person so surprisingly enriching, enjoyable, and worthwhile.

So I guess a granfalloon can be pretty important after all.

This posting is dedicated to the memory of my friend Clio Chafee.

Features or Benefits? What the Alumni Tribe Wants

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that alumni don't want the features of social networking sites – they want the benefits of connecting with other people.

This week I was going over the notes I took during the excellent annual meeting of the Canadian Council for the Advancement of Education (CCAE), last summer. One of the presenters was Stanford's Jerold Pearson, Director of Market Research for their alumni association. Jerold said the same thing, and gave a simple example to clarify the point.

When you're promoting your association's programs or services, focus on the benefits, not the features. In a car, "a powerful engine" is a feature. But "speed and acceleration" are the benefits. So, a LinkedIn alumni group is a feature, but jobs and information are the benefits.

It sounds simple when you hear it, but it's surprisingly easy to forget this difference.

And on a related note, this same topic surfaced this week as I read blogging star Seth Godin's posting on "tribe management," along with the slim book that amplifies his arguments. He says, in part,

...what people really want is the ability to connect to each other, not to companies. So the permission is used to build a tribe, to build people who want to hear from the company because it helps them connect, it helps them find each other, it gives them a story to tell and something to talk about.

Get it? In our version of Godin's scenario the institution – and its alumni association – are "the company."

And the alumni are the tribe.

...what people really want is the ability to connect to each other, not to companies. So the permission is used to build a tribe, to build people who want to hear from the company because it helps them connect, it helps them find each other, it gives them a story to tell and something to talk about.

Get it? In our version of Godin's scenario the institution – and its alumni association – are "the company."

And the alumni are the tribe.