Campus diversity initiative needs a fresh approach

Recently (as mentioned in my previous post) I attended the Race, Diversity and Campus Climate conference at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. This was an important conference. Not a fun topic but very, very important. I was discouraged to see how deeply racism and prejudice have taken root in our society including our educational institutions. There is nothing particularly unusual about the University of Illinois campus climate concerning race and diversity — I think we are, presently, an average public midwestern university. However we have the potential to become great. The only way to become great in this respect is to develop a fresh, innovative approach.

We need to focus less on trying to persuade people with the ethical argument that creating an inclusive environment is “the right/moral  thing to do”. We (those who already believe diversity/inclusivity is a very good thing) aren’t very good at using this; unfortunately we often we resort to guilt tripping and attacking people who aren’t quickly sold on the idea that an inclusive, diverse environment is desirable and basically beneficial to everyone.

Instead we need to focus on the strategies of social entrepreneurs. To get people to engage in the diversity/inclusivity initiative, we need to sell them on the opportunities it creates. We also need to form a grander vision of what inclusivity and diversity means in the larger context of the human race on earth. What we do in individual communities and college campuses affects the whole. The seeds planted here (on this campus or any other campus) propogate throughout society. Plant the right seeds and society benefits as a whole.

Social entrepreneurship

Lisette Piedra, assistant professor of School of Social Work, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, researches social entrepreneurship. Here are a few notes I took from her presentation today at the “Race, Diversity and Campus Climate” conference.

Social entrepreneurship is a new term, still being defined. Entrepreneurs “always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity” writes Peter Drucker. They seek opportunities to create value; they see possibilities rather than the problems created by change.

The university environment represents a strong break from the environment in which many students have been raised. Remember these are young adults with limited life experiences. Plato wrote that education is the process of teaching our students to desire the right things. 

As educators, we often want students to adopt our way of thinking. But our way of thinking has been shaped by our experiences. We can’t skip steps and expect students to adopt our way of thinking without having had enough life experience of their own.

Encourage diversity by “selling” the idea and showing that awareness of diversity helps one be more effective in life and in business.

My summary: Dr. Piedra presents a refreshing approach to changing the campus climate. I really enjoyed her tone as well as the content of her research and recommendations.

Never give up! Never give in!

In his “Never Give In” speech in 1941, Winston Churchill stated,

Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never–in nothing, great or small, large or petty–never give in, except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.

If there’s one thing I hope to pass on to my children, it is the quality of persistence. There are other qualities that I hope to pass on as well, including love, compassion, kindness, and the many virtuous qualities embodied and demonstrated by the great spiritual and political leaders in recent and distant history. Jesus, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln, and Mother Theresa come to mind as some of the great people who walked this planet and demonstrated basic human goodness, as well as greatness and Divine power. And if I’m successful in this life, I’ll demonstrate some of their qualities in the way I live this life, and my kids will pick up on that, remember it, and live their lives differently. But if there is one single quality I think kids and all young people need first more than anything else, it is that quality of persistence. And the quality of persistence is what allows us to never give up. It is about discipline.

It has been said by Paramhansa Yogananda that “A saint is a sinner that never gave up.” On the spiritual path one needs to develop and demonstrate great persistence and a firm resolve. There are so many obstacles that rise before us in life especially when we are trying to break out of the mold and rise to a more noble, good, just, ethical, and compassionate way of living. Often when we’re in a hurry or feeling threatened by a situation, it is easier to take the path of least resistance which means cutting corners and taking the easy way out. I try to view challenges, all difficult things in life, as lessons and opportunities to grow. Hard times don’t make it easy to see things this way at first. But after periods of reflection and genral downtime, I’ve always come around to discovering a great lesson and teaching hidden within the difficult experience I was moving through. Once I see that lesson, things begin to improve and pretty soon I am glad for the experience because without it, how would I have learned what I just learned?

Recently I had to take a vehicle into the auto shop. It was making one of those funny noises and I suspected something was wrong with the front suspension. An hour after I dropped it off with the mechanic, he calls me back. “You sitting down?” he said. “Yeah” I mumbled. And of course I know he’s getting me ready for some bad news and a big expense. He broke it all down and said it would be around $860 parts and labor to fix it. Now normally I just tell him to go ahead and fix it but we’ve never had a bill that big. I stopped by the auto shop, got the estimate, paid a diagnostic fee of $36 bucks, and drove one block down to an auto parts shop. I asked them what it would cost to order these two struts, and a sway bar link kit. To my surprise, they had everything I needed and I saved $341. All for one hour’s work. I guess this is why auto mechanics in general get such a bad reputation, because, hmm… some of them really deserve it?

Of course I won’t be going back to that mechanic anymore. The auto parts guy that helped me also told me about his preferred mechanic up the road who does good work for a very fair price. And he installs the parts you bring in without a fuss.

After this, I said to myself, Dang that felt good. And treated myself to an iced tea to celebrate. How many times have I saved $341 dollars with just an hour’s work? Like, never! But my bigger point is, challenges can be either good or bad depending on how you interpret or perceive them. See only bad, and you get bad results. See the good (the lesson, the teaching, the opportunity) and you get good results. You may not always get a good material result. I did get a good material result this time. It may be that you lose out in the material or financial sense, but always if you look for and find the good in a situation, you will get something good psychologically and spiritually. And that is pretty great.

So I have to say that I’m glad this mechanic overcharged me. I really am, and this is no exaggeration. Here’s why. I’m going to tell so many people about this I figure I’ll easily save a good dozen people from making the same mistake. Heck, maybe more than a dozen. But if I’d never gone through this, I wouldn’t be able to relate the story to others with any kind of enthusiasm. It would’ve been someone else’s story and that’s not nearly as fun as sharing your own experience with someone. So challenges are a good thing. And that is why we should always welcome adversity when it comes.

Without the quality of persistence, these are all just a set of nice ideas and they form a good philosophy to talk with a friend at the cafe on a Saturday morning over coffee. But with persistence, discipline, and will power, these are guiding principles: and truly, then, all challenges — and I mean all challenges — become teachings, lessons and opportunities to grow.

Years ago, a teacher of mine showed me the truth of this teaching and it has never failed me. If you pass on one thing to your kids and other young people you know, show them the truth of this: that with persistence and a habit of finding the good in all things, they will go far in life. Not only will they enjoy life more, they’ll undoubtedly help others too by example. And what is the best way to teach our children and other young people? It is by example as well.

Leading Ahead of the Curves – EDUCAUSE Midwest Conference Closing Keynote by Brad Wheeler

Brad Wheeler is vice president for IT and CIO, dean, and professor at Indiana University. Here are some notes I took during his talk.

Brad’s message today: let’s see how we (in higher ed information technology) can “be the miracle” that brings everything together.

Curves. Technical possibility: we’re moving at endless possibility. But CIOs need to look at technical maturity more than technical possibility. 

Social desirability – “gotta have it.” And they want it this afternoon. We have to time our development and delivery of new services to be in sync with real needs. Adopting something too early or too late has consequences.

Economic feasibility – costs go down over time.

Good question posed by Brad: can our actions substantively affect the shape of the curves or do we just adapt as they are revealed? Brad suggests that be leading ahead of the curves, we can shape these curves.

Curve benders – examples. The future is open – the 21st century is about “open”. Open resources. Charles M. Vest, President Emeritus at MIT, said “we are seeing the early emergence of a meta-university – a transcendent, accessible, empowering, dynamic, communally constructed framework of open materials and platforms on which much of higher education worldwide can be constructed or enhanced.” 

Gateway to IU’s open content: open.iu.edu 

In search of certitude. Curve bender #2. Projecting our expertise to our community via a commercial alliance. Brad’s example was that of needing to find a certain quote. He made some progress on his own then involved a librarian on campus. Quote found! Now he asked if the chacha.com search engine could find this. He tried it and found it. The search result was imperfect but good enough. It showed that a search engine could almost replicate the work of a professionally trained librarian.

They set up search.iu.edu to allow campus to easily access the knowledge bases of the support center, the library, and other organizations on campus. Created this in partnership with chacha.com search engine. You can search with the help of a librarian and chat with a librarian in your search screen.

Search pyramid. Machine based algorithmic approach is generally good enough – 50-60% of needs are satisfied. But moving to a higher level of certitude takes more human analysis. So the next level up on the pyramid is “gems”. Guided search is the top level of the search. See the next edition of EDUCAUSE Review to read more about this.

“When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.” –Kevin Kelly (2008).  Kelly identified eight generatives: immediacy, personalization, interpretation, authenticity, embodiment, patronage, findability.

Curve bender example #3. Classic models of software production: the cathedral and the bazaar. See Eric Raymond’s excellent book on this. Brad suggests there is a hole in the middle between cathedral and the bazaar – that whole can be called “community source” – a hybrid model. The pub in between the cathedral and the bazaar where people sit down, have a drink, talk things over and think about how to get things done. Sakai, kuali foundation, and Moodle are good examples of communities coming together to get things done.

Addressing the monopolization of software vending to higher ed that occurs over time — community source software solutions appear very promising. Consider the example of emergency notification systems. Now there are maybe five big vendors. In five years, that will probably boil down to two main vendors who dominate this market. Higher ed is hard to sell to. We don’t have tons of money. Replacement cycles are long.

What have we learned in higher ed IT? Distributed knowledge in the community that has efficient/effective ways of communicating solves many problems.

Curve bender example #4. A work in progress. It’s time for us to ask how do we wish to buy software, and communicate clearly with commercial sector that wants to do business with us. Apple iTunes example – IU ended up in a year long campus by campus fussing match with Apple. Examples of cost per seat fees and when they’re appropriate.

Enterprise Architecture in Academic Environments – EDUCAUSE Midwest conference

Here are some notes from Jim Phelps’ talk on Enterprise Architecture. He’s the IT architect at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.

“… this is the room where the future pours into the past via the pinch of now.” – Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man. Jim says this captures the feeling he has of being an architect.

Requirements management: takeaway point is that this starts at the business level and progressively moves down into to technical implementation details.

What is core? The core set of business processes and data has to be the focus. Very critical that this be established and this focus be held throughout the journey.

Hooks to use can include budget. A unified financial budget allows Stanford University to influence the enterprise through controlling funding. If a department on campus wants to run its own mail server, the CFO can choose not to fund it because it fails to align with the architectural plan.

University of Washington has a very distributed, Zen-like approach to their architecture. Campus culture makes this approach appropriate for them. The architects use an enabling/advising approach but do not impose control on departments.

When do you engage? At inception? Things go smoother down the road if you start with architecture at the front.

Methods of engagement can include pleading, recommending, requirements, project review, and project gate.

ITANA.org is a peer group of IT/EA architects in academia. Get in touch with them and collaborate. Share artifacts from your architectural work.

Project management in higher ed – discussion at EDUCAUSE Midwest RC 2008

This week I’m at the 2008 EDUCAUSE Midwest Regional Conference in Chicago. Sitting in a project management discussion group now with 50+ people. This is being facilitated by Christin Mayer (University of Missouri) and Brian York (Purdue). How to bring project management best practices into IT services in higher ed? Some key points.

1.  The value of focus. Bringing a list of 60+ projects moving at slow or irregular paces down to 17 projects that are moving steadily.
2. What constitutes a project? One measure is the number of person-hours. For example your organization can decide if the work entail over 80 person-hours of effort, it constitutes a project. Or you can look at the number of divisions or departments involved in getting something done. If it crosses over X number of departments/divisions, for example, your organization can as a standard practice call that a project, which means running it according to the org’s project management framework/practices.
3. Defining a complex project versus a simple project. For something simple, handle it with lightweight project management practices. 
4. Setting up gates for something to pass through in order for it to become a project — have people create a proposal. Include scope in the proposal.  Identify the benefits. Identify likely costs. These are gates that might be appropriate for larger projects.
5. Starting a project management office (PMO) on your campus. Doing so involves an education effort. Take a step back and say: here’s what we do as project managers; here’s the value we provide; here’s what project management can do, and we’d like to do this for you. You also need support from high up in the administration. If the provost and vice presidents are behind the PMO, you have leverage.
6. What are people using for tools to support project management practices? MS Project. 3 Olive. Spreadsheets. Clarity – one participant regards this as a very powerful tool. Primavera. Numara Footprints.
7. How to get people to track their time? You have to sell the value of time tracking to the employees who’ll be doing it. Show me where your time is going show I can show the administration. One participant uses Project Workbench application in his department. Time tracking is difficult to implement in higher ed — some participants in our discussion got tremendous pushback when attempting to implement time tracking practices in their organizations. Some employees perceive time tracking as “just another annoying thing we’ve now gotta do.” Some employees may skew their time estimates in an attempt to protect themselves.
8. How to handle project delays? If a project is delayed for over 30 days beyond the established timeline, you can have a standard practice of bringing the project up for review before a governance board, requiring the project stakeholders to defend the project. If they can’t defend or justify it, the project gets canceled; then the funds for that project go back into the pool.
9. The issue of distributed PMO versus centralized PMO on campus. Looks like each campus needs to find what works best for them. No one right way to establish a PMO.

The unfulfilled promises of Hugo Chavez

Most people who follow the news on Latin America, myself included, tend to think Hugo Chávez has done much good for the poor. Unfortunately, this is not true.  ”Neither official statistics nor independent estimates show any evidence that Chávez has reoriented state priorities to benefit the poor,” writes Francisco Rodriguez, Chief Economist of the Venezuelan National Assembly 2000-2004. Read his article and learn what’s really going in.

Tobacco in Asia: addiction spreads faster than information

In an article on the battle to curb smoking worldwide, The Economist reports that “the number of smokers in China, India and other developing countries is continuing to grow, as addiction spreads faster than information.”

But we have good news from New York City: health commissioner Tom Frieden reports that the mayor’s anti-smoking efforts “reduced smoking among the adults in New York by 20% and among teenagers in public schools by 50%.”

How can we stop the pro-smoking trends in Asia? In the article (linked above) the WHO recommends six things we should be doing globally to curb tobacco use.

One thing that surprised me about this article: the WHO insists most smokers don’t understand the full negative effects of smoking.

This is sad — the tobacco companies are winning a race to get young people addicted to their products before governments can reach them with information they need. I agree with the WHO that people essentially need to be bombarded with anti-smoking information in order to “get it” and grasp how harmful smoking is. This needs to happen before addiction sets in which means the anti-smoking campaigns need to target our youth around the world, especially in poor countries.

Six myths of creativity

Take a look at this excellent FastCompany article on creativity. Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School heads the Entrepreneurial Management Unit there. She studies creativity. The FastCompany article describes how she researched this:

[Amabile] collected nearly 12,000 daily journal entries from 238 people working on creative projects in seven companies in the consumer products, high-tech, and chemical industries. She didn’t tell the study participants that she was focusing on creativity. She simply asked them, in a daily email, about their work and their work environment as they experienced it that day. She then coded the emails for creativity by looking for moments when people struggled with a problem or came up with a new idea.

 What are the six myths? 

1. Creativity Comes From Creative Types
2. Money Is a Creativity Motivator
3. Time Pressure Fuels Creativity
4. Fear Forces Breakthroughs
5. Competition Beats Collaboration
6. A Streamlined Organization Is a Creative Organization

Myers-Briggs and the Presidential Candidates

The NPR blog has an article about the personalities of Obama, Clinton, and McCain, from the lens of the Myers-Briggs personality inventory. Quick summary: Clinton is a “supervisor”, McCain is a “promoter” and Obama is a “champion.” All are extroverts. Emily Yoffe at Slate expands on on her findings. She did the same test back in 2000 to assess the  personalities of Gore and Bush.