League of Innovation Day 2

The day started out with Applying Management and Business Theory to Community College. It was interesting, looking at the following theories:

• Group Think
• Double Loop Learning
• Stakeholder Theory
• Change Theory
• Upper Echelons Theory

Explaining the effective application of so many unfamiliar theories proved to be a bit too much for a 60 minute session. Still, the ideas were good ones and now I know what to read to learn more about these theories.

Next, I went to a session called Unified Messaging: Reaching our Students and staff wherever they are.  I was particularly interested in this topic in my new role as dean over Continuing education. Our college will soon abandon its print quarterly schedule, the key marketing tool for continuing ed. Thus, I am very interested in anything about how to get the word out.  Sadly, the key policy ideas around unified messaging - who has access to the messaging, how does the college decide what messaging happens, how are the message recipients involved in the process, etc - were not addressed. Rather, it was more a technical presentation, showing us how to use RSS to send messages.  I like the idea and we can certainly make use of RSS without doing unified messaging. So, though not what I was hoping for, still an idea worth pursuing.

Next, I attended Ideation + Implementation = Innovation. The presenter, Trudie Giordano from the Coast Community College District, was clearly passionate about her topic. She presented a pair of methodologies (Action Colabs and scrum) for generating and testing innovative ideas.  However, like the business theory session, the volume and complexity of the information was way too much for the 60 minute session and I and others left thinking it was a great idea, but we didn't understand it enough to do anything with it. 

After lunch, I attended Say Goodbye to BORED Meetings. This was basically a 60 minute advertisement for a program called Meeting Booster. I usually avoid these kinds of sessions like the plague, but I hoped to get a good idea or two about running more effective meetings.  Nearly everything the program did you could do with Outlook and Microsoft Office. However, it did generate some cool analytics that would be really useful in business. I'm not sure we could make effective use of the data in higher ed.  My takeaway ideas were

• identify pre-meeting tasks and who will do them
• have a conclusion statement in the minutes for each item on the agenda
• include all needed documents in a single file.
• have a single college wide location for meeting minutes.

The last session I attended was Strategies for Developing An Adult Learner Support Program came from the folks at Foothill College. Apparently they have a huge traditional college age population, so their faculty and staff were surprised at the significant presence of traditional students. Since our average student age at Seattle Central is 27, not 18, we're clearly coming from a different place. I was hoping to get some ideas about appealing to potential continuing ed students, but that didn't really happen. Still, I got some good ideas about supporting students in general and the take away message was that one size does not fit all and that we should develop student support with discreet populations (adults, veterans, disabled, etc) in mind.