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Managing universities is not for the faint-hearted

The next few posts will be my impressions of the Tertiary Education Management Conference (TEMC) held in Melbourne 3-6 October 2010. The conference was hosted by two professional organisations, the Association for Tertiary Education Management (ATEM) and the Tertiary Education Facilities Management Association (TEFMA).

University of Melbourne Vice-Chancellor Glyn Davis opened the conference. He spoke for 15 minutes and for the next three days other presenters kept quoting his remarks.

Glyn mentioned:

  • Clark Kerr, a long-serving President of the University of California, who was criticised by Ronald Reagan as a ‘dangerous liberal’ for his stance on free speech and political protesst. Kerr wrote memoirs about his time at UC and a survey of the higher education and research landscape called “The Uses of the University.” Managing universities “is not for the fainthearted.”
  • Geoff Garrett and Graeme Davies’ book “Herding Cats: being advice to aspiring academic and research leaders.”
  • Deregulation of student numbers; some Australian universities increased their student numbers by one-third this year.
  • Crown Casino is largest employer in Melbourne, universities are second and third largest
  • Education is the largest export industry in Victoria.
  • Only 23 per cent of Melbourne University’s income is sourced directly from the federal government: in Europe, Melbourne’s funding balance would see it classified as a private institution.

Categories: higher ed, strategy.

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Asking the right questions

Questions like “Who is our customer? What is our market? What problem does our product solve for the customer?” are useless for creating a successful business.

Rather, those are the questions you answer in hindsight, once the business is running and you need to demonstrate success. Those are the questions Poirot asks rhetorically in the drawing-room as he explains how the crime was committed.

When forming a business strategy and a plan, you need to ask different kinds of questions: the kinds of questions Poirot asks in order to solve the case, questions about why and how and what’s missing from our understanding of the situation. Venkat at Trailmeme explains:

“…Real questions, useful questions, questions with promising attacks, are always motivated by the specific situation at hand.  They are often about situational anomalies and unusual patterns in data that you cannot explain based on your current mental model of the situation… Real questions frame things in a way that creates a restless tension, by highlighting  the potentially important stuff that you don’t know. You cannot frame a painting without knowing its dimensions. You cannot frame a problem without knowing something about it. Frames must contain situational information.”

Categories: strategy.

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Creative disruption in the classroom

Australian futurist Mark Pesce is known for his ability to tell compelling stories about the future of technology and how we use it.

In a recent blog post he explores the combined potential of a national schools curriculum and the advent ofthe iPad.

Through the National Curriculum, he says, “every educator and every student throughout the nation can be drawing from and contributing to a ‘common wealth’ of shared materials, whether they be podcasts of lectures, educational chatrooms, lesson plans, and on and on and on.  As the years go by, this wealth of material will grow as more teachers and more students add their own contributions to it.  The National Curriculum isn’t a mandate, per se; it’s better to think of it as an empty Wikipedia.  All the article headings are there, all the taxonomy, all the cross references, but none of the content.  The next decade will see us all build up that base of content, so that by 2020, a decade’s worth of work will have resulted in something truly outstanding to offer both educators and students in their pursuit of curriculum goals.”

To achieve this potential, we need to change how we think about teaching, about students, about the education process itself. We must recognise teachers and students as creators of value.

“Educators spend endless hours working on lesson plans and instructional designs – they should be encouraged to share this work.  Many of them are too modest or too scared to trumpet their own hard yards – but it is something that educators and students across the nation can benefit from.  Students, as they pass through the curriculum, create their own learning materials, which must be preserved, where appropriate, for future years.

“We should do this.  We need to do this.  Right now we’re dropping the best of what we have on the floor as teachers retire or move on in their careers.  This is gold that we’re letting slip through our fingers. We live in an age where we only lose something when we neglect to capture it. We can let ourselves off easy here, because we haven’t had a framework to capture and share this pedagogy.  But now we have the means to capture, a platform for sharing – the Ultranet, and a tool which brings access to everyone – the iPad.  We’ve never had these stars aligned in such a way before.  Only just now – in 2010 – is it possible to dream such big dreams.  It won’t even cost much money.  Yes, the state and federal governments will be investing in iPads and superfast broadband connections for the schools, but everything else comes from a change in our behavior, from a new sense of the full value of our activities.  We need to look at ourselves not merely as the dispensers of education to receptive students, but as engaged participant-creators working to build a lasting body of knowledge.” [Pesce's emphasis]

Categories: cluetrain, higher ed, KM, training, user experience.

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Getting the message out

Richard Garber tells the story of the Four-Minute Men, a network of ordinary, respectable men charged with winning support for the US Government’s involvement in World War I:

“Well-known speakers are too accustomed to longer speeches, with room for anecdotes and the introduction, and should be avoided for this service in favor of young lawyers and business men who will present messages within the four-minute limit…”

The volunteers attended cinema screenings and spoke during the interval while the projectionist changed reels. It took, on average, four minutes to change a film reel: hence the time limit for speeches on topics such as the Red Cross, food conservation, “Why We Are Fighting”, the importance of speed…

The entire program cost US$102,000. They certainly got value for money:

“During the war there were about 75,000 Four Minute Men, who gave an estimated 755,000 speeches to a total audience of 314 million people. The average audience was 416 people. On the average everyone in the US got to hear 3 speeches.”

Garber summarises tips for public speaking that were published in a newsletter for these volunteers. The tips are as relevant to today’s Powerpoint presentation as they were to last century’s propagandists.

Categories: communication.

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How to get your paper published

begin again in earnest - photo br flickr.com user found_drama, Rob Friesel, CC-licensed

begin again in earnest - photo br flickr.com user found_drama, Rob Friesel, CC-licensed

Dipping your toe into academic publishing can be a daunting experience. Rob Weir offers some practical tips for researchers who want to publish without perishing.

Many of Weir’s tips are the stuff of common sense: have something substantial to say; pay attention to grammar and punctuation; write clearly; avoid waffling.

Another useful tip: beware the curse of knowledge. Understanding too much about your subject can sometimes get in the way of good communication. It’s less likely to happen when you are writing for a peer-reviewed journal in your academic field; writing an opinion piece for a daily newspaper requires more care for clarity and explanation.

Categories: communication, writing.

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