New Higher Ed Faculty Poll on Top Teaching Challenges Today

I created a new poll looking at what higher education faculty consider their greatest teaching challenge. This poll was created at LinkedIN. Past this URL [ http://polls.linkedin.com/p/42140/hkxvi] in your web browser to voice your opinion and see poll results. Please express your opinion and track the poll results. Jack

Eliminate Degrees: Replace with a Lifelong Performance Portfolio

Reading a book (Marketing Metaphoria by Gerald Zaltman) on metaphors, categories, and how people classify things, prompted me to think again about traditional divisions and structures in life that we take for granted such as the division between education and work.

How practical is it to keep thinking it terms of reserving 4-9 years of ones life for higher education and readying for the workforce? Does it still serve us to continue to divide learning into arbitrary categories for majors, degrees, and programs.

Could it be more practical and effective to integrate work and learning into a 50-year long-view process where work and learning are synonymous and integrated into the daily life. Why not have college at work where 1 to 2 hours a day are reserved for learning right from the workplace. Possibly instead of a degree one builds a Lifetime Learning Portfolio of books read, courses completed, internet posts, books authored, paintings completed, music composed or performed, speeches given, businesses or 501C3 nonprofits started.

The lifetime learning portfolio serves as continuously expandable "performance degree" no set divisions needed. Distance, e-learning is the key to this happening especially if we start the learning for performance and adding workforce skills from middle school on we just might become again a world leader in education.

See How Today's Students Will Find Out about Your College

While researching uses of Twitter and Twickie, I discovered a video clip informing me about Unigo.com. What is Unigo.com?

It's one of worlds largest resources of college information, a web 2.0 college review site where students take video of their campuses and post reviews and information of interest to other students.

During the video the CEO of Unigo.com describes the unique generation of the site's business plan, structure, and services and details on the site was launched. It's worth watching. This sites startup activies could serve as a model for many colleges who are looking for ways to connect their students to their alumni.

The clip is part of a blog site,: http://scobleizer.com/. The college reference site is: http://unigo.com

Also, NY Times Magazine article on Unigo: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/magazine/21unigo-t.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=unigo&st=cse

A couple of recent books that have come across my desk struck me as possibly well worth a read for ideas in promoting, marketing and educating in the web 2.0 world. I find all three informative, engaging, and provide some breakthrough learning moments. Daniel Pink's book is a gold mine of information for those who want to understand the future of work and therefore education.

Metaphoria by Gerald Zaltman
Groundswell by Josh Fernoff
A Whole New Mind, by Daniel Pink

Please join our Teaching For Success Learning Community and Wiki at http://teachingforsuccess.wetpaint.com

Updates are being posted regularly on http://teachingforsuccess.com regarding our new TFS High Impact Teaching Idea E-zine and TFS membership.

Wiki WetPaint Experiment

Wiki-Ideaity
Success!! Within hours of creating our first experimental Wiki site for Teaching For Success, actually teachingforsuccess.wetpaint.com, we had eight members!

Energized I devoted a morning work to adding more structure, some etiquette suggestions, created new topic pages, formulated some hopefully intriguing and engaging questions for discussion.

I finding working with WetPaint is relatively easy with good formatting and editing tools. If you have created a website, you'll find WetPaint satisfyingly easy to work with. The biggest question as I work with a Wiki for the first time is how could this tool be used to augment a class either traditional or an e-learning course?

Hopefully, some of the TFS Wiki members, or perhaps you would post some comments and/or let us know of your experiences with Wikis and teaching and learning.

Another exciting day of discovery learning at Teaching For Success Ciao, Jack
PS Need a new way to sign off on e-mails, text messages, blogs, etc. Click Here for a Cool List of Goodbye words and phrases.

Had the Feeling?

Have you every had the feeling that you're suddenly on a new track, an exciting path that makes more sense than staying in the old ruts.

It's been a year at Teaching For Success of struggling to refind a footing, a new perch to look at faculty development and teaching improvement.

The new Teaching For Success sported a powerful metaphor for teaching improvement: a journey, expedition, trip concept that gives TFS a structure of three easy pieces to High Impact Teaching and Learning:

• Adventure Prep
• Expedition Outfitting
• Trek Improvement

This new "adventure" is wonderfully energizing just like going a real trip. We love the planning, the choosing of exotic and familiar "teaching improvement" destinations. Adding an interactive idea work and application section to each issue reaches out to engage the reader and offer more benefit for a few minutes spent on thinking through the ideas and creating notes and plans for improvement withing the issues confines.

I just finished virtually attending the first online national conference on e-learning and Web 2.0 technologies ever presented by the American Society of Training and Development (ASTD). This 3-day event entirely online was as involving as attending a physical conference. This amazing learning experience gave me a drink from a firehose of infomation. It will take many weeks to process it all. But I'm not waiting.

I'm immediately transporting TFS into the Web 2.0 world with a presence in Facebook, Linkedin, Blogspot, Wiki, and others. I joined the E-learning Guild and just finished reading "A Whole New Mind" by Daniel Pink. Wow! terrific book that pulls some several powerful thems applicable to teaching and learning together. It's a thoughtful, gestalt experience.

The future is about colloaboration, sharing, interjecting, building and creating new things and concepts. BUT it's also about fun, enjoyment, sense of accomplishment and finding meaning in life and work.

All for now, Jack

Making the Leap

Inspired by attending the TechKnowledge 2009 Virtual Conference I have started a blog for my experiences with working to create resources to help faculty understand some of the new tools and concepts in teaching in higher education today.

I know a boring starting post, but they will get better.

More soon, Jack