A few of my Frye colleagues got press at their institutions. Both Mike and Jody are people I really connected with. Mike’s photo is right-on.
Friday was short day, at least the programmed part. Today was all about policy issues which on the surface might seem dry but the speakers made it anything but! First Steven Worona gave us the big picture of privacy and security. He reminded me a lot of Noel Petit in his general manner. He drove home that you can’t have privacy without security and that you have to balance things. His main example was that we want everyone to know who the candidates are getting money from but we don’t want anyone to know who we are giving money to — you can’t have it both ways. He ended with “privacy is a basic human need.” We also looked at 2 scenarios. The first made me wonder if we have a policy on talking to law enforcement — that mysterious “general counsel” came up again. Another example about anonymous online chat counseling (something that we’re pondering) made me wonder what we would do if a student submitted a suicidal chat.
Next up was Tracy Mitrano who dove into questions and outlined the key factors/tensions at play here — law, social norms, technology, and market. We talked a bit about e-discovery and copyright — especially section 110. Chris from Stanford shared her q&a about this. Holly from USC shared a link to The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy which in turn links to Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video which gives some examples that I find useful. She ended with suggesting that institutions have an institutional policy process to guide creation of policies — at it’s simplest has 3 steps:
Ok, it’s a 4-step process.
This all ended just after 12 noon. That was end of the scheduled day. Then I met up with Fred from Loyla Chicago and Stacey from U Kentucky and Win from SUNY Albany and we headed to the Georgia Tech Info Commons. I snapped a few photos here and so did Win. They had some nice computing spaces, a nice practice space, and a nice cafe. We had lunch on the way back at the flying biscuit. Good food. I think the afternoon was the best time I’ve had with a bunch of librarians (they’re all in libraries).
I didn’t think yesterday could be topped. I was wrong.
The day started out with our peers sharing about 360 degree leadership — how you can lead from anywhere in the organization. That got my interest for something to help develop my team members. Then we heard from CFO Peggy Plympton from Lehigh University. Wow, she was a riot. She was so funny and so wise. After lunch we heard from Carie Windham Page from ELI talk about our students. Carie wrote the “student perspective” in the 2005 Educating the NetGen book. She had some activities for us that got us out of our chairs — always good. Then we heard from Michael Schoenfeld, Vice President for Public Affairs and Government Relations at Duke, on communications.
Then after diner a group met informally to talk about work/life balance. It was convened by Jim from UW Madison who is becoming our “guru.” He took a group to Sanskrit chanting last night and today before lunch we spent 5 minutes listening to the same chanting and clearing our minds.
My key take-aways today are
Wow, we had a knockout roster of speakers today. My head is still reeling from all the information and wisdom they brought. They were
They all had either amazing stories or amazing information. Dr Hitt and Dr Tatum presented amazing pictures of what it means to be a president. Dr Hartle was so knowledgeable about higher ed on a national scale and brought the big picture of higher ed. Wow. I didn’t write much down as the ppt slides will bring it all together. There was a recent article on USA Today about graduation rates and explained that the graduation rates do not include transfers or students who took longer than 6 years. So if you did 2 years at one school and then transfer to another school you’re a drop-out, not a graduate. There are a lot of students who aren’t being counted — Obama would be one of those since he transferred schools. Dr Katehi shared her career story (so did Dr Tatum, both wonderful stories) and what it means to be a provost.
Today will be hard to top.
Before dinner I met with my group to talk about our brief Learning Commons sharing Friday morning (groups are sharing a topic of interest every morning). I’ll share some pictures of ours and talk about the project. I met with Fred from Loyla Chicago and Stacey from U Kentucky. Stacey is going to Georgia Tech friday to see their Learning Commons and Fred and I are coming along. I’ll shoot some pictures while we’re there.
The day opened with a great chat with Mike from Whitman. We talked Sakai/moodle and instructional technology and more. And there were waffles at breakfast.
Today in the morning we got the faculty perspective. One thing I want to follow-up on is looking for this article, “No Time to Think” by David Levy. There is a youtube talk version. We also had an exercise looking at some faculty-focused scenarios which all let me to wonder what policies we have in place for intellectual property and if we have a general counsel. I’m sure we do have a general counsel but so many other institutions sound like they consult theirs all the time.
The afternoon kicked off hearing about a new initiative between Columbia and Cornell libraries called 2cool. It’s about creating a separate organization to run the two libraries and pool resources and realize savings. Very interesting. We also hear about the Hathi Trust which aims to become the digital book repository for libraries. We were also fortunate to hear from Deanna Marcum at the Library of Congress (formerly of CLIR). She shared some amazing leadership experiences and gave us much to think about. We finished up with an exercise in a campus crisis. It made me think, “do we have a campus crisis management plan?” We have a plan if the server room burns down but what if a student is shot on campus (one school in my group just experienced that and was able to execute their plan successfully). Something else I’ll have to look into when I’m back.