Here’s something for my fellow bloggers to think about:
Ahmad Abu Khair, a 33-year-old Syrian who has been blogging about the revolutionary events unfolding in the Middle East, was reportedly arrested on Sunday, according to the Los Angeles Times‘ technology blog.
Although according to the Times “the charges against Khair hadn’t yet been made public,” it’s reasonable to assume that Khair’s arrest was connected to his posts in support of the uprisings in the region.
Reading about Khair’s arrest last night, I thought about the freedom to blog that I take for granted. How easy it is for me to post on so many topics, so many of them trivial when compared to what others are posting in other, less open parts of the world.
I also wondered: If the words I typed on the screen posed a threat to the government and put me in danger of arrest, jail or worse, would I still blog?
Photo by Melanie Cook, http://www.flickr.com/photos/wiccked/133164205/I first started thinking seriously about open systems back in 2002, after I heard a conference speaker talk about the advantages of open-source software development versus a proprietary, closed approach. Taking an open approach in a business that has traditionally been a closed system, this speaker said, would be to our advantage in the future.
The speaker wasn’t a educational technologist or a marketing expert, and the conference wasn’t about computing, the Internet or higher ed marketing and PR. It was a ministry conference, and the speaker was theologian Leonard Sweet.
The fact that a higher ed PR/marketing guy like me got psyched about open-system theory from a theologian while sitting in on a ministry conference underscores my thoughts about the virtues of openness and, by extension, about connectivity, creativity and the genesis of good ideas. (I’m also a youth minister on the side, and that’s actually why I attended the 2002 event. But I also picked up some ideas of value to my day job and other pursuits.)
We never know when or where we’re going to find our inspiration or our next great idea, so we should try to stay open to as many possible channels as we can. Even more, I think we ought to actively seek out diverse viewpoints and perspectives in order to improve and innovate in our own narrow niche of higher ed marketing. We ought to look beyond our areas of expertise and our communities of practice in higher ed for inspiration from other disciplines — even if they seem far-fetched or irrelevant to our own.
But I’m troubled by what I see as a trend among many of us in the higher ed marketing field. We seem to prefer our closed systems, even in the wide-open ecosystem of the Internet. We tend to focus on our narrow areas of expertise — higher ed marketing and PR, for instance, or higher ed web, graphic design or whatever our field happens to be.
Inadvertently (or maybe intentionally for some?), we sometimes wall ourselves off from resources that could benefit our institutions, our faculty and staff, our marketing programs and ultimately, our students.
We do so at our peril.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for communities of practice, and I see the value in focus. I often seek guidance from experts in higher ed, and the very title of this blog — higher ed marketing — tends to pigeonhole me into a particular niche that I try hard not to stray from, much.
But I also look for inspiration and guidance from people and resources beyond the narrow straits of higher ed marketing and PR. I try to connect with a variety of viewpoints in my online interactions.
As you can see from my blogroll, I attempt to connect with a lot of people in the higher ed world and beyond. My blogroll includes links to some very good marketing, PR, news and tech sites outside of higher ed. (Admittedly, I don’t read all of those sites on a regular basis, although I should. I also list them in hopes that you might serendipitously discover a great read outside of your own field.)
The same goes for my RSS feed and my 1,200-plus Twitter connections, which includes musicians, branding and marketing people in and out of higher ed, techies, entrepreneurs, writers (fiction and non-fiction), artists, theologians (@lensweet is there) and sundry other categories of people. Also, some of my favorite higher ed tweeps post about life beyond college and university life. Some of these things are of mutual interest: music, baseball and bacon. Some post about topics that aren’t really in my wheelhouse — like NASCAR, fashion and child-rearing — but sometimes I learn from those posts, too.
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What really rebooted my thinking about open systems recently was Steven Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (affiliate link). I really enjoyed Johnson’s book, so much so that I included it in my list of five good reads for 2010. As I wrote in that post, I find Johnson to be “[a] master of the art of lateral and cross-disciplinary thinking” who “brilliantly threads together ideas and patterns from a variety of fields.” In other words, he has a knack for examining a lot of discrete fields and disciplines — evolutionary biology, urban planning, computer science, entrepreneurship and astronomy, to name just a few — and uncovering the patterns and commonalities in them that offer clues to what enables the creation of good ideas.
Johnson talks about seven fertile “environments” that are needed to grow good ideas. Each of these seven areas — the adjacent possible, liquid networks, the slow hunch, serendipity, error, exaptation and platforms — interconnect and overlap to form an ecosystem of sorts in which good ideas may thrive.
But at the core of each of these areas, I believe, is a reliance more on openness than on closed or walled-off systems. Openness is where good ideas can take root and grow.
Regarding liquid networks, for example, the question arises: Does the web hinder serendipitous discovery or foster it?
We can point out how the web can easily reinforce narrow thinking. It’s easy to find like-minded people online who share your perspectives, and if you choose to interact only with those who reinforce your perspectives and biases, you’re less likely to run across any new ways of thinking that will spur you to think differently about a situation or a problem. That’s the closed-system approach to using the web.
But if you view the web as an open system, you’ll find that the Internet does in fact foster serendipitous discovery. Recent favorites I’ve saved from my Twitter stream reinforce this. Without Twitter, I doubt I’d have found out these gems:
As Johnson points out, “… the web is an unrivaled medium for serendipity if you are actively seeking it out” (p. 121).
Granted, we all use filters to screen out noise. But are we in the higher ed marketing and PR field — or any other field — in danger of filtering out too much? Again, Johnson points out that along with serendipity, error and noise play a vital part in discovering good ideas. “[G]ood ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error” (p. 142).
Finally, maybe opening up your filters just a bit will help you with your career path, creativity or quest for entrepreneurial independence. Johnson cites a study of Stanford University grad students from the late 1990s that seems to support this idea. “Diverse, horizontal social networks … were three times more innovative than uniform, vertical networks. In groups united by shared values and long-term familiarity, conformity and convention tended to dampen any potential creative sparks” (p. 166).
In recent weeks, we’ve witnessed the power of open networks in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East. Revolution 2.0, as it’s being called, is helping to topple regimes that were presumed secure.
Opening your network a little bit more might not lead to a revolutionary idea, but it might. And how will you know until you try?
So go ahead. Add some more diverse perspectives to your Twitter feed. Open up that blogroll beyond the usual higher ed suspects. Listen to some different music. Watch a silent movie. Read outside of your discipline. Maybe you’ll gain a new perspective.
If this post has inspired you to open your networks a bit more, please let me know how it goes.
Richard Marsh was randomly selected from the crowd at an Indiana Ice home game last Saturday. His challenge: to hit a hockey puck, which is about three inches wide, the length of the rink and into a target slightly larger than three inches wide. AllState Insurance, the promotion’s sponsors, pledged to donate $50,000 to St. Vincent’s Cardiovascular of Indiana and the American Heart Association in the extremely unlikely event that someone would make the shot. But Marsh did, the crowd went wild, and then a third-party insurance company covering the event fulfilled the prevailing sense that insurance companies are mostly awful by refusing to pay the charity bill — because Marsh wasn’t standing behind the far goal line.
The “you’re in good hands” insurance company ought to be put in the penalty box for that one. Thanks to David Meerman Scott (@dmscott) for pointing this out as a “Real Time Marketing study in a negative way.”)
An in-house promotional stunt at Dell campus in Round Rock, Texas completely backfired yesterday as cops responded to numerous 911 calls reporting that a masked gunman was inside the computer giant’s offices. Clad completely in black, the biker-looking bloke was carrying two metallic objects and telling people on the campus’s sales floor to “go to the lobby.”
Well, it turns out that a sales manager set up the stunt as an internal promotional event to celebrate the release of the new Dell Streak tablet, and the “gunman” wasn’t actually carrying any weapons at all, just simply urging folks to head to the lobby for the Streak unveiling. Too bad police didn’t find the funny in it all as they arrested the masked man, Bryan Chester, and his supervisor, Daniel Rawson, and both face misdemeanor charges of interfering with public duties and deadly conduct. We concur with a tipster who says that sometimes, corporate folks should just leave it to the professionals.
President Obama shared his budget proposal on Monday, and on the surface it appears to be higher ed-friendly. But scratch below the surface and you’ll find some troubling news.
On the financial aid front, the president’s budget preserves the Pell Grant program. That’s the good news, at least in the way reports like this one from the Washington Post put it. (The lede: “President Obama wants a significant jump in education funding to pay for Pell grants for needy college students while also financing his reform agenda for elementary and secondary schools.”)
But keeping the Pell Grant program intact comes at a cost. First of all, the proposal is a freeze of the program. No plans to increase funding. Moreover, as The Chronicle of Higher Education reports, “To maintain a maximum Pell award of $5,550, the president’s fiscal 2012 budget would eliminate the in-school interest subsidy on loans to graduate students and end a policy that allows students to receive two Pell Grants in a single year.”
Why should students gets two Pell Grants in a year anyway? One reason has to do with the way students learn these days. Many aren’t following the traditional September-to-May schedule, as New York Times business columnist David Leonhardt points out in his analysis of Obama’s budget plan pertaining to Pell Grant aid. (Leonhardt’s suggestion that Pell Grants be “tied to academic progress,” rather than the calendar, seems to make sense.)
So, if a freeze of the Pell Grant program is considered good news for higher education, or the best news we can muster, then we’re in for more interesting times. Access and affordability continue to be at risk. (Also coming in to play in the coming months will be the House Republicans’ plan to cut Pell funding by 15 percent.)
Funding for scientific research, so critical to U.S. research universities and our ability to compete globally, seems to have fared well in Obama’s budget, with increases designated for energy research, information technology, and STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education. Even so, the exercise of divvying up and distributing the funds will be like trying to spread a teaspoon of butter over a hundred slices of bread. The increases, relative to R&D expenditures of other fast-developing nations in terms of percentage of GDP, will likely be paltry. (I haven’t taken the time to do an analysis on this. I’m just making an educated guess.)
Inside Higher Ed reports that the National Science Foundation and new initiatives to train more teachers in STEM fields are the biggest winners in the Obama budget, while the Department of Defense and Department of Agriculture would both see funding cuts under this scenario.
Here again, defense and agriculture have traditionally received strong support from congress, so it will be interesting to see how their budgets look at the end of the process.
Graduate and vocational education both take a hit in the proposed budget, as does support for the arts and humanities. For details of Obama’s budget for higher education and science, see this chart.
Building a budget is always a game of trade-offs. Unfortunately, education, when up against “non-discretionary” spending like defense and Social Security, doesn’t stand much of a chance. Until those non-discretionary accounts are taken into account, and until our tax structure is corrected to give the vanishing middle class a better chance (even Forbes points that Obama’s proposed tax plan would increase taxes back to the level of the Reagan years), any improvements in the educational agenda for the U.S. will be slight and incremental at best.
As Forbes also points out (without ever mentioning education), “The upcoming debate over that small chunk of non-defense domestic spending that is subject to annual congressional review is healthy and important — and it will get very nasty. But compared to burgeoning entitlements on one hand and tax revenues that remain near historic lows on the other, the fight over 12 percent of the budget is a fiscal sideshow.”
How sad that the nation’s education agenda is seen as merely a tiny act in a fiscal sideshow.
It was an honor to serve as one of the judges this year for Educational Marketing Group‘s International Brand Master competition. Each year, EMG sponsors the event to showcase the talents of some of your higher ed colleagues who are doing great things to help their institutions build their brands. I had the honor of being chosen as the 2009 brand master.
I and my esteemed colleagues on the judges’ panel (including fellow higher ed bloggers Mallory Wood and Travis Brock) have done our part, winnowing the field of very strong contenders to the three finalists. Now it’s your turn.
Vote on your choice for EMG’s 2010 International Brand Master. You may vote more than once, but only one vote per day. (You may also vote by Twitter if you wish.)
But vote soon. The contest ends at midnight Eastern Time on Friday, Feb. 18.
