Wednesday, Day 3
Wow, we had a knockout roster of speakers today. My head is still reeling from all the information and wisdom they brought. They were
- John Hitt, president of the University of Central Florida
- Beverly Daniel Tatum, president of Spelman College.
- Terry Hartle from the American Council on Education.
- Linda Katehi, outgoing provost at the U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and soon to be Chancellor at UC Davis.
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.
Tuesday, Day 2
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.
Monday, Day 1 (full day that is)
Breakfast started out fun today. I got to chat with Sandra from Manchester at our breakfast table about Manchester and Ireland. She had met Tony Wilson whom she described as quite a figure in the city. We also talked about Ireland as her husband is Irish and they go there often. I got to remember my travels there. And it makes me want to return and to visit the UK too.
Today we focused what it means to be a leader coming up with various definitions of leaders. We touched on the contrast between managers (doing things right) vs leaders (doing the right things) and how you need to be a good manager before being a good leader. Diana also shared some of her perspectives one of which lead me to think hard about developing a better scrutiny filter. She talked about being relentlessly realistic about projects, people, why we do things, how we do things, how much we do, doing things better, and if we should do things. These all make up a scrutiny filter for me.
We also touched on John Maeda’s recent Nercomp conference. He contrasted the traditional leadership model with a creative leadership model. These slides show it concisely. This really resonated with me. I can see, in contrast to other organizations, that Augsburg is more creative than traditional. But what was more interesting was though I am drawn to the creative behaviors I feel the internal tension questioning “but that’s not what a leader does.” I can hear the traditional, societal, model of a leader ingrained in me. Much to reflect on from today.
Made it to Atlanta
I made it to Atlanta, or Hotlanta as it were. I think it was 90 degrees today and humid. The plane ride was mostly uneventful though it took an hour to get the baggage claim. The plane had to be towed to the terminal for some reason so we sat on the tarmac for a while. I made it with barely 30 minutes before the opening session.
I’m encouraged by their focus on reflection. Each day will end with some reflection time. They even provided a little notebook meant to be a journal. Diana Oblinger, yes the Educause president, lead the opening session. She mentioned 4 key ideas to help us frame our time here:
- lifelong learning — we will always need to be learning, we can’t know everything
- how to think about things — leaders need to know how to frame (or re-frame) issues, build judgement skills, know what you believe in. We need to make time to think about things as opposed to doing things.
- interact — with each other and the speakers.
- reflect — spend time processing and reflecting
We paired off and interviewed someone else and introduced them. Always a good exercise. There are a lot of library folks and some people from far-off places like Australia or Manchester (yay!).
Visited with a nice group at dinner — learned about how different libraries are at big universities — digitization huge. Also got a good tip on reading the Register for a UK perspective on IT (more weary of google). I’ll put it in my Netvibes feed and see how I like it. I recently added the Chronicle’s Wired Campus Blog and am enjoying that.