Friday Five: Good reads for #highered

Some recent-ish posts from the higher ed blogging community that I’ve enjoyed reading and thought were worth sharing:

  1. Pay more attention to the attention price you pay. This post by Karine Joly hits home on several levels and is well worth reading by anyone who is struggling with cognitive overload.
  2. Why are we still writing press releases? Tim Nekritz takes on the time-honored tradition of pelting media outlets with “news” they don’t care about and asks if there’s a better way.
  3. Startup U? That’s the question posed by Kyle James, in infographic form, on .eduGuru. Most thought-provoking to me is the idea that “universities that prepare students for a creative economy prioritize the same three things that drive successful startup cultures.”
  4. Why repositioning your brand is like pushing water uphill. Deb Maue of mStoner discusses the challenges of rebranding. “[W]hether you’re a shampoo or a college, brand repositioning is extremely difficult. Why? Because you’re not starting with a blank slate.” Her advice is for universities to “stop wishing they were someone else and embrace what they are.”
  5. How to spot good social media marketing research, by Chris Syme, provides some great tips and resources for finding good social media research products or embarking on your own research project.

Have a good weekend.

Disconnecting … and reconnecting

As I plan to overindulge in food and holiday cheer this long Thanksgiving weekend, I also plan to curtail my digital gluttony by unplugging from the online world for a bit. I hope this plan helps to slow things down and bring a bit more focus to my life and my thinking.

This idea came to me after I read Kneale Mann’s recent post about Warren Buffet, The Disconnected Leader. At first, the title threw me. What leader wants to be disconnected? We need to be in touch, engaged, on top of things.

Yes, that’s all true. But we need to be in touch, engaged and on top of the right things. The things that matter.

I’ve been a bit out of touch with some of those things lately. I hope to reconnect with some of them over the Thanksgiving break. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with this thought from Mann’s blog post:

Imagine we woke up tomorrow and there was no Internet, the smartphone had not been invented and there is no email. We have all those things but one idea we could try is to type less, turn off our toys more, and speak directly with humans rather than devices or channels. 

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.