Higher Education Annual Conference

I am heading to the HighEdWeb 2019 conference! It's in Milwaukee (hello polka escalator) and I'm excited to get back there. 

I find this conference to be a useful touchpoint and learning opportunity for me.  Will share updates at the end!

Books and Work and NCAA

Update on the reading (three more done). Am tracking all of them on this Pinterest board cause I'm lousy at the running count ! It says 21 so far, so I'm well ahead of the goal. I am sure real life will stop me at some point LOL.

• 700 Sundays by Billy Crystal
• The Blessing by John Trent
• League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth by ESPN reporters

I tried to read a Rex Stout mystery but just could not bring myself to sort through the old-fashioned language and sexist attitudes. I know that noir literature is like that but I just was not in the mood.

So, next I'm going to read the Divergent series. We have a rule in my house that you are not supposed to see a movie until you have read the book. As Maggie points out regularly, I have not held Matthew to that standard all the time. But he was a baby when we started reading Harry Potter and I wasn't going to stop him from enjoying those movies. However, I am enforcing that rule with the Hunger Games, Enders Game and Divergent. So, now I have to read those books!

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Off Peak Update
I am in the process of launching some new initiatives for the Tri-State Consortium including surveys to help with their research, an experts roster and expanded LinkedIn options. I'm excited to work on their materials because it is such a great way for me to connect all of my marketing and highered experience.  Plus, it helps me to start new projects because it keeps me current. I find sometimes that we just let things ride until we are forced to change. By continuing to expand my skills, I can bring new ideas to work and vice versa. Grateful for these opportunities. 

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Just a note about the NCAA.  Boy, the brackets are broken. I don't recall any other tourney where there have been so many upsets. But the basketball has been amazing to watch. I love March Madness !

Day Two HeWeb12

So, Day 2. Much busier than day 1 if you can believe it. I blogged two sessions:

Using the Right Tools  and Web Content Strategy.

Both were great sessions and I learned a lot. By the end of the day I had 15 golden nuggets!

Tuesday afternoon I did take the lunch break to walk over to see the Bronze Fonz and the Milwaukee Public Museum. It was a beautiful but cool day and a nice walk. The museum was actually small compared to many others I've seen (I might be a museum snob) but one of the Security Guards (Darlene) and I had a great chat about the butterfly habitat and walking sticks.

I also genuinely enjoyed the "Streets of Old Milwaukee" exhibit. I love the architecture and am learning a great deal about cities younger than mine.

I made it back for the poster presentations, the end of the vendor conference, a quick run around to earn SCVNGR points and dinner.

HighEdWeb and Link

So, I'm plotting my sessions for the HighEdWeb conference next week when I saw the "call for bloggers" from Link, the Journal of Higher Education.

It's been a while since I wrote for a journal but I miss it. So I sent an email to the editor and got a response back almost right away. I am now scheduled to cover three of the sessions next week with a possibility of adding two more once I finalize my plans.

I am really pleased I followed up. It will be nice to connect with the "reporters" covering the conference and also be able to contribute to telling the story that evolves in Milwaukee.

Keynote for HighEdWeb

Today the HighEdWeb team announced the keynote for the conference: Adam Savage from Mythbusters.

This will be very, very cool. Love that show and find their promotion of the scientific method, the never-give-up mentality and the overall positive nature of the show to be wonderful ways to sneakily teach my kids new things. Looking forward to what I'll get to learn.

HigherEd Web

Looking forward to this trip and the October conference. I had the chance to go to Austin last year and it was an amazing experience. Learned so much, I actually came back with about 20 take-aways and tried them all. Implemented about half into my day to day job. Hoping to do the same and possibly figure out a presentation for when it comes to BUFFALO.

My fav photos from Austin:







My movie about the bats at the Congress Bridge:

Got approved to attend and just booked my airline travel. Very happy I can attend the HighEdWeb conference again this year.

Going to HigherEd Web in Austin

My first conference since joining UB and my first professional conference in years. Roswell used to send me to work the booths for their conferences (not that I fit the classic definition of a booth babe by any stretch of the imagination) but I don't think I've traveled for learning in over seven years, maybe longer. I am truly looking forward to a chance to think outside of the box.

Let me know if you're going to be there too!

Global Learning

I work for a university... and my son starts at one in the Fall.

He's going almost seven hours from home for the experience. Makes me wonder, do we need classrooms if the students can connect online from different locations?

Should the goal be to teach students a series of tasks/topics or to teach them how to learn so they can stay ahead of the learning curve? I'm thinking the latter. Time will tell.

I believe that shared experiences and collegiate life are important to adults in today's world, but I also want to be sure that the costs we're going to pay to give him this experience prepare him for a modern career.

Changes

So, I'm sitting at my desk today monitoring the PSEWeb conference in Toronto... lots of good information coming from twitter (#pseweb).

What suddenly hit me was how I'm chatting and "listening" to people from all around the world on topics that are important to all of us. We're not in a vacuum, we're having a "global meeting."

I'll be honest, when I went to college, no internet - no web - no cell phones. That all changed at my first job where I got a cell phone, email and used a collegiate intranet.

So, how much more will the world change for my kids? If the past 20 years is any indication, the world will shrink further... how will we distinguish between work/family time? Will that matter? If everything is out on the web, how do we compensate people? For what tasks? Time will tell, but the only constant is change

Social Media Gone Wild

I've spent a good amount of time this week participating in the Mercedes-Benz Tweet race to Dallas (around the "big game"). Two members of the higher ed community (@tsand and @ijohnpederson) managed to be selected as one of four teams to participate (the others are media personalities, bloggers etc). Each team was assigned a celebrity to "help" and guaranteed their charity $25,000 for being selected. St. Jude's is the "only pediatric cancer research center where families never pay for treatment not covered by insurance."

So the race begins. I don't have any idea if they thought they could win or if they were just happy to get that major donation... and then the community went crazy. Higher ed is a tight group of interconnected, intelligent, creative and obsessive people. We crushed every challenge, we tweeted enough that their fuel tank NEVER dropped below full (to the point that @tsand thought it was broken) and today, the start of final day 3, they have more than double the points of any other team.

MBTeamS: 65,485
MBTeamGL: 26,345
MBTeamE: 20,486
MBTeamCL: 26,733

Based on how the other teams are doing... that was probably what was expected to happen... a nice close race into Dallas. But the highered community stayed up to finish challenges, ran around to local dealers and sent photos, changed avatars when requested etc.

From the headquarters:
MBtweetraceHQ Mercedes Tweet Race
#mbtweetrace Update: Pts earned from #DLER #challenge: #MBTeamS 325 #MBTeamGL 150 #MBTeamE 75 #MBteamCL 50
MBtweetraceHQ Mercedes Tweet Race
#mbtweetrace Update: Pts earned from #AVTR #challenge: #MBTeamE 70 #MBTeamS 365 #MBTeamCL 160 #MBteamGL 255

This is an example of how social media differs from every other form of marketing communication. If your community cares, they will come out and help when you need them. Or they will at least pay attention to what you are doing. If they don't care, you're begging them to notice.