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IAS > My Day > Categories

10/27/2009

Does Kentucky have what pundits call an "educational pipeline"?
Dr. Kirwan (President of the U. of Maryland System, and a distinguished alumnus of the University of KY) made a presentation before Kentucky’s legislative commission concerning the activities of The College Board Commission on Access, Admissions, and Success in Higher Education.  Here are his presentation slides (in .pdf format).  The urgency he brings to the conversation cannot be denied: if the US stays on its present course of declining numbers of college-going students who actually graduate, "our 40% degree rate will drop to 29% by the year 2025." 
 
Here some of my thoughts posturing now as a radical historian and educator.  Perhaps our educational systems (holding tight to post-WW2 iterations of academic programming) are obsolete?  Why should we expect our students to graduate when what we are expecting is for them to sit down, shut up, close your laptop/phone, and repeat-after-me?
 
While the US is, according to the latest international statistics (based on those who entered college in the early 2000s), "the only industrialized nation with a declining college completion rate," we also have created a completely unique system of postsecondary education - one that is well suited for embodying American democratic ideals.  Europeans have very few institutions of learning that provide access in ways that we do in the US.  Communist and post-colonial nations are not interested in true access for learning, instead they produce graduates that are highly trained for specific fields to meet desired economic trends... and maintenance of their autocracy. 
 
While Dr. Kirwin - and many people here in Kentucky - are interested in finding the broken parts of an "education pipeline," I propose that Kentucky is so far behind in an infrastructure of educational progression that we can't afford to play catch up games.  We need to try something completely different.  Our adult workforce includes nearly 1 million people who cannot read above the 4th grade level; our middle school dropouts get GED training in jail; our legislators maintain high schools so to keep their relatives in one of the very few wage-earning jobs in their districts instead of improving the quality of educators; despite all our best efforts since WW2 our college-going population contains the same amount of first-generation college-going students as in the 1960s.  We're at the bottom.  How can we revolutionize postsecondary education?
Posted at 9:23 AM by Hollingsworth, Randolph | Category: Oct 2009 | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

10/23/2009

Social media and the university admissions community
Chris Rice, UK's social technologies strategist, told me about Karlyn Morissette's blog posting on Hobsons' recent survey on admissions information:  http://doteduguru.com/id3839-the-credibility-of-college-info-from-social-network-sites-or-lack-thereof.html
 
I agree that social media is not a replacement for official websites or formal interviews with admissions staff.  However, the "trust factor" in branding of universities in general is not fully explored.  Just think how hard it must be to have really thoughtful, long-term conversations and dialog about postsecondary education with the general public in Kentucky. And what must it be like to have a meaningful dialog for more than just a few minutes (longer than it takes to fill out a quick survey) about a 16 or 17 year old's trust in anything at all.  Do admissions staff listen to these kinds of conversations regularly?  I suspect not.  However, there may be some late night conversations going on among groups of teenagers that could teach us educators a lot about what they think our institutions are or ought to be.  But we don't have access to those conversations as a rule.  But there could be some brief glimpses if we construct those conversations among these high school students' peers.  I imagine that many of us are just now starting to think about peer recruiters, peer admissions counselors, peer academic advisors... i.e., "side-facing marketing." I liked some of the comments appended to Morissette's blog posting:
 
"The most important step is to create communities around meaningful exchanges with others in ways that are relevant to the brand and to the genuine interests and needs of community members."  Notice, this person is talking about "community members" ... not a dialectic pair of university staff talking about their own community to high schoolers (and trying to convince them they want to join a new/different/better community).
 
and
 
"Social websites by their very nature do not provide factual information. It is sort of like asking your neighbor for a restaurant recommendation. Ultimately, I think social websites serve the function of sending students in a direction -to get more information rather than provide it."
 
Ah, now this is why we're experimenting with the Big Blue Network in the Office of Undergraduate Education.
Posted at 8:34 AM by Hollingsworth, Randolph | Category: Oct 2009 | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

10/22/2009

Impressive milestone by Second Life shows complexities and importance in the growth of virtual worlds in general
Check out Brian Solis' posting in the FutureWorks blog, PR 2.0, on the amazing milestone reached by Linden Labs this month. 
 
Second Life residents have transacted the equivalent of more than $1 billion  with each other while spending more than one billion hours in Second Life.  More highlights from the report from Linden Labs:
  • Second Life (SL) Residents spend an average of about 100 minutes inworld per visit.
  • SL residents create more than 250,000 new virtual goods every day – from clothing to vehicles to buildings to automatic language translators, and more.
  • More than 18 billion minutes of voice chat have been used in Second Life since voice was introduced in 2007; and, Approximately 1,250 text-based messages are sent every second in Second Life, and more than 600 million words are typed on an average dayThe total land area of Second Life is now equivalent to approximately two billion square meters – roughly the size of the state of Rhode Island. 
  • As the creator and original seller of all virtual land in Second Life, Linden Lab is not only the provider of the world's largest platform for user-generated virtual goods, but also a leading virtual goods vendor itself.

See more at the SL press release at http://lindenlab.com/pressroom/releases/22_09_09

Posted at 1:21 PM by Hollingsworth, Randolph | Category: Oct 2009 | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

10/2/2009

Despite fears and jeers - BBN is working!
The Big Blue Network project at UK took off in May in a large lumbering flight with hundreds then thousands of students by August.  We started with a high goal of opt-in from our student leaders and incoming freshmen... 75%... and Chris Rice kept it going and achieved that goal!  We're in a glide momentum right now, but I hope to keep up Chris's spirits and start the wings flapping soon so to gain altitude!
 
So, yes, I think this guy is right - Michael Idinopulos - he says, go broad and deep - the best way to launch a social networking experiment is to just jump in and do it:
 
Take "a launch approach that simultaneously achieves seemingly conflicting objectives:
  • Launch quickly and cheaply, without investing a ton of time or money in training and content creation.
  • Achieve scale by inviting lots of people.
  • Minimize risk by making participation opt-in rather than mandatory
  • Generate active participation through interactive launch events that don't require a lot of training or engagement from the new user.
  • Deliver deep value by following up with local champions who want to invest time and effort in more robust, group-specific forms of collaboration.

 

Posted at 2:58 PM by Hollingsworth, Randolph | Category: Oct 2009 | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)