Posted by Whitney on Jan 14, 2010 in
Uncategorized I sit on the Technology Committee for our local School District. We are so very lucky to have a set of tech guys who understand that the world is changing rapidly, and their job is not only to keep the computers and tech infrastructure running, but their job is to see into the future and plan out what the kids in school today will need to know in five to six years when they graduate from school, as well as those poised to graduate this year. They have a conveyor belt of students that need to be prepared for an ever changing workplace, and these folks need to bring kids, faculty and parents- thousands of people along, hopefully willingly, for the ride.
It’s a big task, and one that’s made more difficult when budgets are tighter than ever. While there’s a comfort in doing what’s always been done- making the easy, default decision, these folks are actively looking at and starting to use ebooks in the classroom. They’re realizing that even if the books need to be updated more frequently, it’s cheaper and easier and better than ordering new textbooks once a decade. (Storage is way easier, too, and it avoids any of that “I lost my book” syndrome forever.) It means that kids can have access to books as long as they have internet access, and it means making sure that can happen for all kids, not just some of the kids in the District.
This may mean things like moving aggressively on a 1 laptop per student policy(1:1 laptop) in an unfriendly budget cycle, but it also may mean that this is the time to make those tough choices. It may be time to transition to a system that’s cost-effective long term, saving money on everything from paper to toner to money spent on updating textbooks that are out of date faster and faster than ever before; it may mean making sure local libraries and even the school computer labs function more like community centers or labs in colleges and maintain extended hours. It’s going to take a whole community effort to make something like this happen, and I think it’s going to end up being more important to our children’s futures than lights at the stadium or other priorities.
I was excited and proud that so many of my freshman son’s classes were using multimedia resources this year. The kids are creating podcasts, using wikis, making websites- light years beyond what was happening even two or three years ago. But many parents are still trying to figure out their first ipod, and still think wiki is something you get at a Hawaiian restaurant, so it’s becoming clear this education effort will be truly an education of the entire village.
While I’m starting to come up with my plan on how we can accomplish this, I’d love your suggestions as well. How would you take your local school district- not just the elementary school, but the middle school and high school, and the parents as well- and bring them up to internet and tech speed in the shortest period of time? How do you change hearts and minds and make people less afraid? How do you make people vote with their feet and their wallets and make a six year gradual transition/evolutionary process instead a two to three year revolution, preparing our kids now for what their future holds?
I know we can do it- and at the heart of it, I think it’s more of a marketing problem than anything else- we need to convince people this is not only important, but vital to our future. What would you do?
Tags: 1:1 laptop program, change, computers, education, KCSD
Posted by Whitney on Apr 3, 2009 in
Uncategorized As someone with two kids with ADHD, attention is a big deal to us. I’ve made it my job to understand how attention works, how to get it, how to focus it, and how sustain it, because this information is vital to helping my kids learn how to learn most effectively.
Turns out, this has a shiny, interesting byproduct- the shift in the advertising and the PR markets is becoming all about how to get and sustain attention. Whether you are talking about parenting, education, presentations, marketing- aspects of all of these endeavors involves, at its heart, attention.
Every human is equipped with a brain that has been customized by biology and experience over time. We now know that brains are always changing, forming new connections, pruning out old ones, even after you are an adult. People’s faces can be encoded on one neuron in your brain.* For everything you read, everything you see, everything you learn, your brain is changed by this process and customized for your needs.
Attention is the system that gets you to focus and possibly encode new information. Our brains are constantly looking for new information and running complex algorithms to determine whether that thing moving in your peripheral vision is harmless, or a danger. That’s part of our simplest flight or fight mechanism, and we can’t turn that off.
However, for people with ADHD, that system runs on high alert most times. Every new and novel stimulus, from the kid dropping a pencil next to you to the teacher writing on the board, to thinking about what’s for lunch are competing for brain space and attention concurrently. With ADHD, people have more trouble than most in directing their attention to a particular stimuls and tuning out all the others. I often describe it as trying to watch TV with someone who loves to channel surf. Just when you are getting into a show, someone comes along and changes the channel, and you don’t have the remote. Very annoying.
You get lots of little pieces of information this way, but integrating it into a coherent whole can be difficult. When you attention keeps switching to pay attention up to each novel piece of information, you can lose a grip on the story line, and having to refocus can take time. Medication for ADHD essentially gives people back the remote control, and their brains become a bit better at prioritizing what needs immediate attention and what can wait in line.
Attention essentially lets us decide what piece of information we can work on in our “working memory”- basically your mind’s lab bench. You can work on problems, write, solve math problems- but sooner or later, that project is going to need to be put away or stored, so you can move on to the next thing. Some things get trashed, others get put away for short term or long term storage- and the more interesting things are, the more other pieces of information or relevant connections you can make to the new information, the more “copies” are put away in different folders in your brain. Each time you think about your mom’s cookies for example, you not only can get to this memory from thinking about your mom, seeing a picture, but even seeing a silimar cookie or smelling cookies in the oven can bring this full memory back in all of its sensory glory. This memory has many connections, so you can retrive it from many different storage places, so to speak.
Attention is something we all want. Emotionally, it validates us as people. It allows us to make deeper and more meaningful connections. But if you overload the attention service, things become chaotic- the lab bench has too much stuff going on, and your brain can go so far as to boil over – many temper tantrums in adults and kids are caused by attention buffers beging overloaded and going into meltdown, or in entreme cases, people simply go to sleep to knock out the background noise, explaining why babies often simply go to sleep even in noisy shopping malls- their attention system gets overloaded, they get cranky, and respond by shutting off and sleeping.
If you really want to get ahead in the world of marketing, in the world of PR, presentation, education- whatever, really- it wouldn’t hurt to start by understanding how you can get and then focus the inborn attention mechanism we all have. Then you can start to figure out how to sustain it, encode information into memory, and make it useful and relevant for your audience.
John Medina has a great book out about the Brain that I really think everyone should read- it’s called Brain Rules, and I have links to it below. You could do worse than to learn how to use and manipulate the one tool every human has with them every day.
*See Brain Rules, by John Medina, for more in depth discussion about the brain and science- I’m really enjoying the Audible version. His website is incredibly helpful as well.
Tags: ADHD, analogies, attention, brain rules, education, focus, John medina, marketing, PR
Posted by Whitney on Jan 9, 2009 in
Uncategorized For a few years, I’ve been part of an Alumni interview committee for my undergraduate university. The kids often seem like they have built an impressive resume and seem much more qualified than I think I was at that age. It always made me wonder- did I just get lucky to get into my school? Are college admissions as much about external factors like tuition costs, where you live and where you went to high school, factored into the kids applying in your year, or is there a more objective measure of “worthiness” that stays relatively constant over time?
A recent article in the New York Times discusses the drop by as much as 30% in applications to private colleges and universities, and my friend, Christopher S. Penn, over at the Financial Aid Podcast, has been talking openly for some time about how the credit crisis has eviscerated the amount of money available for students in the form of student loans. The New York Times also reported recently that some traditional “commuter schools” and community colleges were building dorms just like 4 year schools.
This made me start thinking about whether supply and demand, as they teach it in economics, applies to Higher Ed, and if so, is there a lag?
I do think your chances on getting into a school depends a lot on who else is applying. Number one, the number of applicants in the pool affects your chances of admission purely as a percentile before they even look at your application. If they have 1000 spots, and there are 10,000 applicants, you have, on average, a 1 in 10 shot at getting in, 10%. If there are 30,000 applicants, your chance drops down from 1 in 10 to 1 in 30. You now have to be in the top 3% of qualified applicants instead of the top 10% to get admitted. That’s now at least two standard deviations above the mean or average applicant. So it makes sense, that clearly on a numbers game, not even discussing quality factors, that as the applicant pool shrinks, you have a better chance of getting in, than in years when the applicant pool was bigger.
Secondarily, if application fees themselves are high and money is tight, people will apply to fewer schools than in other years. This will shrink the application pool. If tuition at the school is high, and money from parents or loans is less available, people will have a tendancy to only apply to schools they think they have the best chance of getting admitted to, and those they will actually be able to afford to attend. This will further shrink the application pool based on economics alone, before we get to factors regarding quality of education and quality of the applicant pool. Other students may consider doing the two year/four year shuffle- spend two years at a lower cost community college, and try to transfer to a four year school later, to save money on the whole cost of education. This means there’s a further cut of kids that might otherwise be in the application pool at a four year school for freshman year.
I would guess then that Adam Smith is probably right on the money- the old supply and demand curves probably do apply, at least to the application pool, in any given college admissions cycle. In a year like this one, you may then have a slightly better chance at getting admitted to your “dream school”, assuming you will be able to pay for it if you are admitted.
The quality or perceived quality of an education at an Ivy-league or other high-cost first or second tier school probably hasn’t changed. Professors will keep their jobs and keep teaching. The education delivered will remain relatively constant, presumably. However, the strength and paper qualifications of the students may decrease a bit, while prestige of the school remains the same. After all, we determine the quality of a school by its alumni in part, its reputation and research, and many other collective factors. Even if a college has a slightly lower standard of admission for a year or two, the overall quality of the school and education will remain fairly constant and dependable.
So it’s my best guess that it may be slightly easier for the next few years, as tuition money is tight, and applications low, to get into a slightly more competitive school than ever before. Whether Universities will start looking at drastic measures like lowering tuition, fees or application costs in order to preserve the quality of the applicant pool and balance the pressures of supply and demand are less certain. Given what schools are charging and their past performance, I think it’s going to take some time before they start considering these sort of options to balance supply and demand. In the meantime- if you have always dreamed of the Harvard acceptance, you may have a better shot this year than ever before.
Tags: college admissions, economics, education, finance, financial aid, supply and demand
Posted by Whitney on Dec 16, 2008 in
Uncategorized I don’t know about you, but as I get older, there’s more stuff, every year, on my list of things I wish I knew more about. Sometimes, it’s a course I wish I had taken in school, or some area I just wish I understood better, because the holes in my knowledge base bother me. So I thought I would do a quick blog post about the ten things I wish I knew more about, with the subtle wish people would point me in directions so I can fill my knowledge base, or at least meet more people who were willing to teach me more about these things.
Top Ten Things I Wish I Knew More About:
1. Coding. I wish I knew more about this, rather than only understanding some basic HTML. I posted this to twitter earlier this fall, and some people directed me to this site which gives you a great 15 minute tutoring in Ruby. This was awesome and fun. But what are the next steps? I want to know more about this so when I am thinking about my website or helping other people think about theirs, I have a better sense of what’s possible- I want to “get it” and not be frustrated. I want to “talk with the developers” like Dr. Doolittle spoke with the animals (you can tell I’m a Mom who has kids who think these sorts of old Disney movies are cool) and not feel hopelessly ignorant and shallow.
2. Xcode and Cocoa- I attended a great session at Barcamp Philly about piecing together easy iphone apps, and I wish I knew more about Cocoa and how to do this. The session was pretty quickly way over my head, and I had to leave before my brain exploded. I felt dumb, so I want to fill this gap as well.
3. Investments and Financial Analysis-I’m very conservative financially, and generally hate debt. I have a very simple and clean balance sheet, and I am not a beginner in finance, but I wish my eyes didn’t glaze over so quickly when I read a company’s annual report and had a better sense of what metrics were most important.
4. Shorting Stocks: I get buying and selling stocks. I don’t get why shorting stocks- essentially borrowing shares at one price and then actually buying them at a lower price and then pocketing the difference works, and why this kind of floating craps game is legal, because it seems really ethically weird to me. I need to know more about this.
5. Educational Pedagogy: With my podcast, I talk frequently to educators, and sometimes, I feel I don’t fully understand their mindset. Sometimes it seems rigid and sometimes totally out of step with basic social and developmental psychology. I wish I understood more about what pedagogy really was, and whether the questions I have about our education system are crazy, simply because I don’t have a masters in education and haven’t had the “proper” training.
6. Mirror Neurons: This whole concept of the mirror neuron system fascinates me. It’s a set of “wires” in the brain that allow us not only to anticipate the near future, but it allows our brains to mimic the actions we see other people doing, without actually doing them ourselves. It’s also closely tied into the limbic system. I think mirror neurons have a lot to teach us about marketing (You need to read Martin Lindstrom’s book Buyology, if you haven’t already) as well as autism- There’s some speculation that the mirror neuron system may be malfunctioning in kids with autism spectrum disorders, and I would be interested to see whether or not the problem may not be with the system as much as the interconnections with other areas in the brain.
7. Social Anthropology- It’s interesting, but I think the next decade is going to be about the mixing of verticals. Much like red wine can be more interesting when it’s a blend, say a cabernet-merlot, rather than one or the other, I think the overlap of fields like sociology and anthropology will lead to more and more insights about people and why we function in groups the way we do. I only took 2 sociology courses and one anthropology course while in college, and I wish I took more. Anyone have any good books on the topic i should read?
8. Statistics- I can read and parse most statistics, having taken a grad level course in this while in school. However, statistics for the web and statistics for the sciences are not exactly the same thing. I want to know more both about how I should be looking at my web stats to predict how to alter the site or produce content to meet needs, as well as how to relate the world of online stats to the world of science stats, so as these fields begin to interplay more and more, everyone is speaking the same, not a divergent language. I am reading Web Analytics in an Hour a Day, but I’m hoping to have a better sense by this time next year what those numbers really communicate to us in a larger picture.
9. How to teach writing and grammar to kids who struggle: I have kids who have both poor handwriting and poor composition skills. Schools, on the whole, don’t teach writing as a basic skill- they have students write across the curriculum, but without any basic instruction on what really constitutes a great sentence versus a poor one; how to listen to your inner voice, and then craft that for the reader. This is important because more and more communication will continue to happen through the web, and since most of it is text-based, people’s first impression of you will come through the written word, not through voice or an in person meeting. Being able to write well will become an increasingly critical skill to have, and we have to make sure all kids have a good grasp on how to communicate their valuable ideas to others.
10. Time Management and Organization- As someone with ADHD, this is something I struggle with. I can do organization when it is absolutely necessary, but I have a harder time staying organized all the time, not just in fits and starts. I’ve tried tons of systems, but part of ADHD is also using your environment as part of your working memory, so I have tons of post-its and lists that keep me on track. I’d like it if I felt more together daily, rather than together biweekly, after I do a purge. (It’s better than when it used to be a quarterly or biannual purge…) I am always looking for the magic solution, so if you have any that really work for you, please share. Right now, I depend heavily on the alarm feature on the iphone, but I also need systems or tips that would help keep 10 & 13 year old boys more organized, so they do not inherit my personal demons.
There’s tons more I am interested in- things that I find fascinating, but this covers a bunch of the stuff I consider holes in my knowledge, and things I want to learn more about. I would love it if you could share resources, or post the 10 things you wish you knew more about on your blogs, so we can all start to help each other out and fill each others gaps.
Tags: cocoa, coding, education, finance, gaps, investing, ruby, social anthropology, statistics and analytics, stocks, ten things I wish I knew more about, top ten, writing
Posted by Whitney on Nov 29, 2008 in
Uncategorized 
Chris Brogan had an interesting post up today about “Cafe-shaped conversations” that got me thinking. The big versus the small, the mass versus the individual touch- this is a classic dichotomy we all struggle with in our lives. Are we part of a group (safety in numbers) or are we individuals, acknowledged for what makes us special and unique? And if you are trying to sell stuff to LOTS of people, how do you deal with this fundamental seesaw of mass versus customization?
In a typical day, in a typical store, my choices seem infinite. There may be plenty of options, but sometimes, none of them fit what I need, want, or imagine in my mind. Because there are so many choices, rather than just one carton of one flavor of orange juice, you can spend ridiculous amounts of time trying to figure out the price/quality/flavor differential for everything you buy- and that’s just the grocery store.
If you walk into a clothing store, or a “junior department store” like TJ Maxx or Marshall’s, the selections and choices are many, often jarring to the senses, and leave me with more questions about what I truly want, and whether any of this is truly worth while, than an ease of making a selection and beating tracks. The mere fact that the choice and selection is so wide, makes me speculate whether or not the “perfect” something is out there, just waiting for me to fnd it- there’s an illusion created that “good enough” need not be good enough any more. Ideal and perfection may be just around the corner, after all, the selection is already so wide…
One Attempt to Scale the Conversation- Education
Taking this out of the marketplace, let’s look at education. Schools are based on delivering information on the one-to-many scale, but tends to do so in smaller “cafe-sized” classrooms. It works best when the groups are even smaller, even one to one. But to administer and deliver the information to the maximum number of people, the institution, just like a company, has a heavy administrative burden. It can deal most easily when everyone gets the same stuff, in standard format. We’ve built in exceptions for students that learn differently than the middle of the curve, through special education or gifted education. This customization of the mass information delivery model works okay, but perhaps not optimally in all cases. This causes many consumers (ie parents) to see if they can game the system to fit their individual needs, to supplement outside the system, or to opt out altogether and send their kids to private schools or even home school them.
I’d argue that these options for education are equivalent to people taking their jeans and modifying them to suit individual taste, with embroidery, paint, “bedazzling” , rolling up cuffs, creative wear, wash and rips, etc. We’re taking what the mass market does offer, and customizing it to meet individual needs- the one on one conversation where the mass market left off.
Customization versus The Right Neighborhood- Good Enough
When I started writing this piece, I thought it would be about the overwhelming nature of the selection currently offered in the mass market, and how small things, like better customer service, provides that one-on-one, cafe-class attention that makes all the difference. It’s certainly one of the things that differentiates quality in my mind and makes a difference where I decide to spend my dollars. If the people care and are engaged, that is huge to me. But that is the retail end of things.
From the company production end, I really don’t need Prego or Progresso to have an all-hands on deck customer service team, because I don’t have or need a one on one relationship with my soup or sauce provider. If I need something slightly different, I can customize the “good enough” product with items at home and make it m own, better than they ever can. They can get me in the neighborhood of good enough, and my customization will make it perfect for me.
Companies who have a significant investment in service products, like banks, utilities, retail stores- these are the people that should take social media conversations and opportunities to provide great customer service to heart. They are the people who should look for ways to better serve customer needs, rotate stock, get a better “neighborhood” of customer needs they fill every day. Customer service and relationships matter here much more than they do for strict manufacturing of items.
From a manufacturer’s point of view, they will never be able to fill every need for customization out there, and I think they should probably stop trying. Apple, for example, does well enough with a few models, and a few colors-they leave the etching and customization through cases and accessories to others, and have spawned additional support industries because of it. Cafe conversations with Apple happen through their retail store- Steve Jobs doesn’t feel compelled to hug every ipod owner, and we still love him.
I think social media is a great place to engage consumers, figure out what seems to work and what doesn’t. It’s a great way to problem solve and to generate and keep loyalty. But it won’t work equally well for everyone, so seriously consider with whom you need to be having a conversation before you try to wrestle people into one. No one wants to be the person who talks too loudly and won’t shut up in a cafe. We all want those meaningful conversations that generate new ideas and make us feel engaged and enriched by the experience, and that should be enough.
Tags: apple, cafe conversations, chrisbrogan, customer service, customizatin, education, mass market
