Joe Sabado – Higher Education & Technology Leadership

This is a post on mind mapping, a technique used to visually organize ideas, tasks and any set of related information.  This is a concept popularized by Tony Buzan, who is also the founder of the World Memory Championship and a memory champion himself. I will share a couple of ways I use this technique, some applications I use, and how I am able to work on my ideas from my mobile devices, laptops, and desktops at work and at home. It really is such a simple concept and only requires couple of applications to use.  Even just a notepad will do.

Every person has their own learning styles and preferences.  For me,  one of the more effective ways I learn is when information is presented in diagrams, pictures.  I am constantly thinking about personal and professional goals, ideas like what would make a great student information system and how to improve business processes.  I read a lot so I use mind map to compile notes from books, web pages and blogs, such as my research on instructional design. I also do presentations on social media, professional development and digital reputation from time to time. In preparing for presentations, I go through a process of brainstorming including  what content to include and how to organize them into themes. Mobile computing, cloud services and common industry formats  have really made it easier for anyone to work on the ideas anytime, anywhere. Here are a some tools  I use:

iThoughts on iphone and iPad.  I found this application to be the easiest to use in terms of the user interface and functionality.  One of the features I really like is the cloud integration with itunes, Box and Dropbox services.  This is very useful when I work on my ideas on multiple devices. Another useful feature is the ability to export/import diagrams using various industry formats like OPML, CSV, html and Freemind’s format.

Evernote.  While I do most of my mind mapping on my computers, I still use paper from time to time. When ideas strike me and I only have my notepad, I write my thoughts immediately. I then take a picture of my notes and upload them to evernote into notebooks I organize by themes/ideas.

Freemind.This a free software that runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Dropbox.  As I previously mentioned, this is where I upload/download and share the mind map documents I generate from iThoughts and Freemind.

Notepad. It’s not digital, but still effective.

As you can see, there is not too much when it comes to mind mapping, but it is a technique that is very powerful and effective when it comes to generating and documenting ideas. Happy mind mapping!

image credit: http://www.mindtools.com

I was at a  meeting with the Deans and the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs (VCSA)  at my university a few weeks ago. At that meeting, we talked  about the role of  social media in how we communicate with our students. One of the Deans  noted that, in addition,  we can also use data to communicate the value of our work to the campus. She  specifically spoke about the use of assessment to demonstrate the student service units’ contributions to student learning and success. It was at that moment when I realized the need for student affairs leaders to be “multilingual” in order to be effective in building relationships and in collaborating with the campus  community. I’m not talking about multilingual just in the sense of having the capability to speak multiple languages but rather, the ability to communicate in ways that resonate with who we work with.

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My wife and I visited Rome and Florence last September.  It was our first trip to Europe. To prepare for our trip, we downloaded iphone apps to learn Italian. We also went to several travel sites to read reviews, watched videos and tried to learn as much about the history of Italy and the sites we planned to visit. I got the impression from reading the reviews of other travelers that Rome was a very dangerous city for travelers. So, I read many articles on how to protect my wife and me from being pick-pocketed. After the anxiety of not knowing Italian and having no clue of what to expect from the locals before our trip, I have to say it was one of the most memorable experience of our lives. The places we visited were even more magnificent than any of the pictures and videos I saw on the internet. The locals were friendly and with some common sense, we were not pick-pocketed. One of the most memorable and unexpected surprise for me was meeting several Filipino-Italians. They were not mentioned in any of the travel sites and the books I had read in preparation for our trip. They are working class Filipinos who formed their community in Rome. One dinner, my wife and I spent several minutes talking with a Filipina mother who had not gone back to the Philippines in more than 20 years. There was sadness in her eyes as she told her story about not having seen her kids in those many years.  She supports her family by sending money back home.

What I learned from that experience is that no amount of reading could have prepared me for the actual experience. To truly learn about the culture, the people and the place, I had to be there myself.

How does my Italy vacation experience relate to my work as a student affairs professional? It is important to read about student affairs theories, higher education general trends and issues, and studies about the populations we serve to get some perspective on how to approach our work.  However, I think it is as important is to spend time, immerse ourselves with the students and customers we serve where they are.  Literature is not enough to provide us with accurate picture of the individual experience of our students. This is particularly more significant for those like me, a mid-level manager and technologist, who may not have the opportunity to have consistent daily interactions with our students and customers.

I try to gain as much perspective about student affairs and higher education from reading books, learning from colleagues I meet via social media and blogs I come across about our work. I read Pew Research Studies and ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology in addition to other studies to get some sense of what our students are generally into nowadays. However, just like the websites and reviews I read to prepare my wife and me for our trip; these studies do not provide the individual stories and experiences. Only through my interactions with students do I get the real sense of the unique lives, the aspirations and struggles,  of the students I serve.

Last quarter, I was a teaching assistant for a First Year Experience (FYE) Intro to University course to freshman international students. Most of the students were Chinese.  I had read admissions applications of international students and that was the extent of my limited knowledge of the population and specifically Chinese students prior to this course.  I had several students visit me for my weekly office hours throughout the quarter. I loved our conversations. Some students shared their difficulties adjusting to the American culture, the language, and the demands of the university and as the quarter progressed, I observed their comfort levels increase.  There was one particular student who visited me in my office several times during the quarter. We really had engaging conversations from his views on American and Chinese politics, literature, and philosophy. Before he left for China, he visited me to say goodbye (he was only here for a quarter as an EAP student) and with him were two books on Buddhism. He asked me to pick one to keep.  We spent several minutes talking about the topics we discussed all quarter and going over his first short story he wrote in English.  Somehow, I think we will cross path again.

One lesson I have learned in my career is that our motivations and perspectives as service providers and student affairs professionals may not even align with our students.  When we stop seeking the perspectives of our students, spending time with them, talking with them about their needs and wants, there is the danger of going down the road of satisfying our needs as oppose to theirs. For example, one general measure of student success for universities is the retention rate. These are generally measured by graduation rates. But this measure of student success is from the institution’s perspective.  If a student leaves our institution without graduating but instead transfers to another institution and completes their degree (or other objectives), would that be considered a student failure?

There are many lessons to be learned from literature. The general theory and studies provide general perspective on how to approach our work in student affairs.  Personally, the greatest lessons about the value of my profession have come from the students I have had the privilege of working with throughout my career.

Social media in higher education can and should be used beyond marketing and communication purposes. Higher ed institutions are using social media in various ways.  Scholars such as Dr. Rey Junco has done research on the relationship of twitter and facebook and student engagement in the classroom. Purdue University is a leader in using social media and mobile to enhance student learning and connection in and outside the classroom.   In the course of doing personal research on various aspects of social media and technology use for student learning and development, the more questions come to mind.  As someone who is involved in promoting social media at my university, I often wonder what my other colleagues beyond my organization of student affairs are doing with social media. What topics are being discussed, what are the opportunities and issues? Who at my university are experimenting with social media in ways never done before?  How do we learn and integrate what others outside our university have done? These questions led me to the question of what if we have a group/a forum to at our university to discuss and explore the impact and significance of social media?

The idea of a university wide forum to discuss social media is nothing new. A social media council at Boston College was recently created “to promote collaboration, share best practices and set a strategic direction for strengthening the University’s overall social media presence”.  Beyond efforts towards marketing and communication, I think institutions should also look at the impact and opportunities of social media and technology in how we function as learning institutions. Here are some topics to discuss:

• How do we use social media as part of our business?
• How do we use social media for student engagement for improved retention?
• How are  web 2.0 and social media shaping pedagogy and learning theories including connectivism?
•  How can we utilize social media for alternative professional development?
• How do we handle issues including copyrights, plagiarism, ethics?
• Digital Identity – what does it mean?
• How do we use social media for lifetime engagement and advancement?
• How does social media and technology fit into student development theories and how do we apply them in practice?

I would like to form a group for my university to have these conversations. If you have ideas or have experience you can add to help me start and make this a productive group, I would love to hear them. What other topics would you discuss?

My wife and I were having dinner with a teenage daughter of a friend recently. She mentioned that she has been trying to convince her parents to buy her an iphone so she can do some school work.  In the past, I would have dismissed the  idea that an iphone or any mobile device could be used for nothing more than texting and wasting time. However, given my personal experience the last couple of years using my iphone, ipad and just recently my chromebook,  I see the value of using mobile devices for learning. Here are some applications and ways I use my mobile devices (and you could, too) for professional development.

Social media mobile apps. I have several social media apps on my iphone including: facebook, twitter, pinterest, foursquare, google+, tweetcaster, yammer, skype, linkedin and a few others. While I do have these installed, I mainly use facebook and twitter. Personally, twitter has become my “go-to” network for learning and connecting with others.

Social bookmarking.  Diigo, a social bookmarking site provides a bookmarklet you can use to bookmark pages you find on the web. This bookmarklet provides tagging functionality to organize bookmarks.  In my case, I use a combination of diigo.com and rss to curate some content on to this blog under the resources section. This is done with minimal manual process. For a fee, my twitter favorites are copied to diigo.com daily. Here are my bookmarks.

Kindle app. I use this app to read digital books I buy and download from Amazon. For some reason, the Amazon mobile app does not have the functionality to buy kindle books so I use their mobile website. I also use the kindle app to read pdfs. I find the highlight and sharing functionality really useful.

Podcasts/Videos. The TED videos are perfect examples of how I maximize my time during the workday to learn. The videos are short (approx max of 20 mins) and so I sometime listen to them when walking from/to different locations on campus for meetings.

 Goodreads. This is a site used by readers to catalog and share the books they read.  The value of the site for me is that I can share what I read and I can also view what other folks in my profession (student affairs) are reading.  This gives me some ideas on what books I should be reading. Here is my list of books.

 G-Whizz! (Google Apps browser). This app provides access to Google+, gmail, google drive and other google apps. I use this app primarily as my RSS reader. I use Google Alerts to monitor keywords like “student affairs”, “social business”  and I have set it up for these notifications to be pushed to my gmail account.

 Blogging. With my new chromebook, I have been able to blog from a device other than my laptop at home, which I use as my desktop machine.  Maybe it’s just personal preference, but even with a keyboard, I didn’t feel comfortable using my ipad to log in to wordpress (software I use for this blog site) administrative interface.

Slideshare.  This is a good site to view presentations, including ones that have been converted from powerpoint formats. It is also a good site to share your personal presentations. Here are some of mine.

Cloud Storage.  There are several cloud storage options including Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft Skydrive. I mostly use dropbox because of its automatic synching capability. I only store documents and presentations that I consider public. These include presentations I am working on and any pdf files and other presentations I find when doing research.

Mindmapping. I use a mindmapping app called iThoughtsHD on my ipad to organize my presentations and to brainstorm ideas.  I find the mindmapping process really productive when I’m just casually watching tv or when inspirations about new ideas enter my mind.

Virtual Conferencing.  I have used Skype on my iphone for informational interviews. I have also used Adobe Connect for a virtual meeting.  Google+ mobile for Hangouts is another app to consider.

What other uses for professional development have you found for your mobile devices?