Sunday, January 5, 2014

5 Closing Points

you can be hurt

school is no longer a game

events do occur in real time

not everyone is as they seem

everybody else is using live ammunition



gunther  October 31, 2013

Advanced Research for the Liberal Arts: the Library as a (entrepreneurial-ish ) Research Incubator

As we struggle with multiple concepts and assorted directions for library growth and development I keep coming back to the concept of the iterative, entrepreneurial research incubator. These would be spaces for students and collections of students and faculty (classes?) to camp out and develop, over time, experimenting approaches to original research in all areas of the academic program. That, I think, is what a library in the new age should spend its resources of time, effort, space and dollars promoting.

It’s a shot of industrial strength research skills and techniques both for finding data and turning it into analytic information for further testing and hypothesizing, the results of which are presented through compelling stories, images and sounds that capture and enthrall our attention and promote and deepen our understanding of the world, our history and our future.

If you buy into my concept of the new research or are at least modestly intrigued let’s just stop a moment and step sideways. This will be the easy part of the project. It’s also going to be the fun part, but there’s an associated hard part.

The hard part is the space between walking in the front door and signing up for the new research carrel. (Oh, did you notice that easy sliding in of the term research carrel? In my mind it’s more of a Silicon Valley corporate team space (of various sizes) decked out with advanced media devices and capabilities that a team could “rent out” for long/short time intervals. Well, that’s my concept at the moment.)

Back to the hard part. So much time and energy is lost to a student in that limbo time between the front door and starting an advanced project in research. We treat the building much as a department store used to do. There are “areas” that serve differing types of products (LC numbers) or experiences and we let the customer wander through the racks perhaps librarians answering questions about color, size and where the dressing rooms are – maybe really technical questions about the ice maker in the door – until they drift over to the checkout counter and make a purchase, then leave.

The new library environment should be aggressively interactive, we should approach and confer, advise and direct, discuss and evaluate and most of all collect data about the experience, the process and the outcome. We’re a service organization, but deliver that service at only a few touch-points none of which we track deeply enough. It’s that concept of tracking a customer as they turn into a user and what makes (promotes) that happen most effectively and can you polish that experience to be more enjoyable and productive.

I wonder if we utilize the data we already have? We know who checks out a book, but I would suspect we treat that as privileged data. Or the printers? No one gets to see it. Wouldn’t it be useful to let a professor or advisor know that some of their students have never used the library and who they are. That’s the power of big data, oddly it can be quite personal, yet used responsibly.

As for the entrepreneurial research spaces? Well that’s the easy/fun part isn’t it. We’ll have a good time deciding what’s in those spaces, how it’s arranged, how big or small they are and how do you get to use them – useful, useable, affordable, sustainable.

gunther – November 29, 2013

There’s an Important Math Equation We Need to Know

We’re (well the Summer Media Institute actually) about to buy 15 DSLR cameras with money from an outside donor. Wow, that’s a big deal for us. We almost never get to make that large a purchase and certainly not that many of any one thing that expensive. This will be a decision we will live with for some time, affect the style of work students make and commit us to spending more money in the future to maintain that equipment. Is it the right decision and how do we know that?

One of the most important math equations that we can rely on to help us make good decisions shows us the distribution effects of camera life over both a long and short time span: from 3 years to 13 years. Our worry is that we might purchase the wrong cameras and then later we’ll have a lot of items we regret.

The question: is it smarter to buy a lot of less expensive cameras or fewer higher-end more expensive cameras and more importantly how does that play out over time as cameras break and have to be replaced. Additionally is it better to buy it all at once or spread it out over a period of a year and buy different models of cameras. 

There will inevitably develop over time a drift between the original camera models and the ones that we buy to replace the ones that die. For a short period of time we can just buy the same ones for replacement, but at some point they’ll no longer be manufactured and only new/different models will be available. It’s inevitable.

A second part to the equation is how long before that happens, how fast does it take to tip the balance, at what point are all the cameras completely replaced and finally how much money have we spent as we reach the end of the complete cycle. Oh, yes, one more important question - are we happy about the whole outcome or will we wish we had played out a different scenario. 

So here’s the equation:  (oh wait, there isn’t any).

If any of us could figure that out we’d be working for some investment bank instead, right? The reality is no one knows how it’s going to play out, what to buy, what’s going to break, in the end was it all affordable and did we have a good time. Just stop back in in a few years and then we’ll know. Until then, think hard, read up, try stuff out, think about what’s happened in the past and then go for it.

However. This is a great test case and we should track the hell out of it for data and user satisfaction. Indeed, is it better to buy low or high? How long will it take before we have to replace a camera with a different model and how does that affect everyone? Are we now obliged to keep that many cameras in the pool and what will be the cost of doing that? Will we notice a shift in the style of work and how might that affect a programs direction? All good questions and I’ll bet there’s a ton more that we’ll come up with over time. We should embrace this as a great experiment and formally track the data and share the results quite formally.


gunther   November 19, 2013

Hampshire Needs A Story

Hampshire needs a story. A story that allows others to more easily comprehend what the Hampshire experience will be. It’s definitely not a mission statement. It’s not a list of buzz words on the level of collaboration or entrepreneurial. It’s not about feminist politics nor sustainable agriculture. It’s not a listing of what the best students are doing this year, though you might use some examples. It’s a story that explains what will happen, what good that will do you, and why you should care.

It should be easily tellable not convoluted or have complex sentence structure. You shouldn’t have to look down at a piece of paper to remember some important point or where you are in the story. While it’s not really an academic story it should explain our academic process while honestly reflecting what really happens, not just what we say happens. It should have warmth, insight and drama. It should be fun, open and believable. We should be proud to tell it and believe it ourselves.

It needs to be long enough to not feel rushed or have topics crammed in though there’s no need to mention every program or department and it definitely shouldn’t have any Hampshire jargon or acronyms. The story should be about people working together and the pleasures and problems we all have, how we approach those problems and how they are resolved. It should be about how we engage personal and social issues and how growth, personal and intellectual, occurs through experiences, actions and interactions.

It should honor the philosophy of the liberal arts, but from a modern view point. It should be about what happens in and outside of classes from the perspective of a student. It should describe and reveal the differences between the three divisional levels and what each experience feels like over time. It should illustrate the benefits of a division contract and it’s accompanying narrative evaluation for both faculty and students.

Finally, it should provide examples of what life after college could be like and some possibilities for living a meaningful life in the future.

Hampshire needs a story.


gunther    December 3, 2013

Do The Math

How much is 5 + 6 ? Ask three different people that question. If that question was a job you needed to fill who would you hire and how much would you pay them. It doesn’t matter does it, the answer is always going to be the same. There’s no differentiation from one person to another so you’d pay the least possible to get that job done.

Next, what does each number represent and how did you find that out. Ah, that’s slightly deeper work that requires some important skills and analytics. You’d hire the person with the best track record for delving into the analysis of the field and pay them the market rate.


Finally, tell me the real story behind the 5 and 6 and deliver it as a 20 minute movie on a Blu-ray disk. That’s even deeper, combining an historical reference of some depth, an analyst’s insight into the relevance of the past and the direction for future action with a storytellers skill in organizing that information and conveying it back to us. Who to hire would be based on the total quality experience and its usefulness. We might pay quite a lot to get it right because not only can we benefit directly from the information about the numbers we can also use the story itself. It’s no longer just analytics, it’s also an experience and one that everyone can understand.

You don’t want to be one of the three people back at the beginning just building the same answer. They’re in a race to the bottom, undercutting each other selling the exact same product.

The middle group is just that, they’re analytic middlemen stuck in a marketplace economy in competition with each other over reputations, referrals and analytic speed.

The final group are independent contractors that may be singular entities or collections of people working toward the same goal. The quality or valuation of the product is based on both their insights about data and their artistic skills at storytelling and presentations; it’s an artistic entrepreneurial skill set – the art of producing the insightful deep-structure story/experience.

We want to be in that last group. It’s a more intricate job, but much more interesting and we think, much more sustainable into the future as everything around us changes. We would prefer to be in the business of telling stories about the meaning of the numbers, not shuffling them. If you’re not in a high-value-added job, one with creativity as a significant part of the process, then you’re in a race to the bottom or maybe even in competition with a digital version of yourself.

We understand that you would have to at least understand the analytic process, though not necessarily run the numbers yourself. In fact that final value-added group would probably hire both of the other two groups to work for them, but end up keeping most of the profits. It’s the business side of the new liberal arts media education and that sound you hear is the future knocking on your door. Remember, just a few time zones away it’s already tomorrow. 

gunther   November 10, 2013

Why We Are Here


I frequently ask prospective students what area of study they’re interested in. There are all kinds of responses back as you might imagine, but sometimes there seems to be more anguish than necessary, more uncertainty, more worry or a nervous blank look and no answer at all. Here’s a small hypothetical "welcome speech" to first-years to help them think about how to stake out personal and intellectual turf. It posses a simple question that they will eventually confront.

Some time from now you will be asked a question. It may be eight years or fourteen months or two decades, but it will come. It will be the most important question you will ever answer. You may not have studied it in school. You may never have thought about it at all. You'll think, why are they asking me, but they are and you'll need to answer, because there'll be no one else.

Your response will save the life of your friend, your lover, your next door neighbor, the person at work you hate. Your answer will save the company you work for, the neighborhood you live in, your daughters school, the little park just down the street, New England.

The person who asks you the question will be your younger sister, the guy in the elevator, your best friend, the CEO of the company you work for, the woman in the car across the street, the governor of Massachusetts. They'll be depressed, crying, fearful, in pain, desperate, stoic, angry, or simply have a blank look on their face. You won't have time to look it up, ask someone else, talk it over, think it through or read about it on-line. Everything will stop. People will turn to hear your answer. Faces will lift. It will get a little quiet. Suddenly it will be now.

The question you will be asked is, "what should we do?" Your answer will change the course of your life and the lives of others for better or for worse. Will you be able to give that answer?

Is this actually going to happen? Maybe. But here's the "really scary" version – perhaps more likely is that no one will ask at all. People will just stand there frozen, uncertain, bewildered, baffled, trapped in the middle of a horrible, desperate situation – physical, emotional, economic – and simply wait for something to happen. That's when you need to lead. Unasked, you have to step forward and say what you think we should do. Answering the unasked desperate question is the hardest thing in the world to do and the most important, but to be able to do it you have to prepare – starting now.

So that's why we're really here, to get you to a point later in life, where you could answer that question or even more importantly the unasked desperate question. If you want to change the world you need to get ready. You may not think you're up to it, but everyone here is. However, if you're just here to have a good time, later you're not going to be much help to anyone because you won't be able to answer the question – you didn't prepare, you didn’t learn enough, you didn’t grow, you didn’t gain enough confidence. You'll have small ideas and that great desperate question will just hang there – unanswered.

So what is it that you’ll have to learn to be able to answer that question? What is it that you’ll have to develop in yourself to be able to stand and respond? Who will you have to become to be able to do all of it? There’s your curriculum. There are your learning goals. Find the questions that you want to be responsible for in the future. Don’t pick something trivial, choose to be responsible for ideas and actions that are truly important.

But wait, there’s one more thing. Not only do you have to be able to answer the question, you also have to be there, don’t you. Step forward. Get on the front line. Always be at the head of the crowd. Not only is it a better view, but you’ll understand more and have more influence. One day in the future, right there, right then, it could, you know, all come down to just you. 

gunther   October 14, 2013

Das Neue Implementation 2.0

I just survived one of those well meaning, but off-target how to group-think about priorities and get (more) stuff done workshops. Now, in retrospect, I think it simply needed a better preface, focusing discussion and progressive lead-in. Instead we jumped into solving the problem. Wait, I said, what problem? How do I come up with a solution if I don’t even know what the problem is? I showed up just to discover what the problem is, not solve it. I don’t need a prescription, I need a diagnosis.

The methodological approach of todays technique was to write down the problem, post it on a wall, notice other people’s problems then draw on possible resources, develop actions and feel good about having solved the problem in less time than talking about it. Well some hits and some misses I think.

I’ve come to value the “talk about it” model more and more. Not actually for solving problems, I agree it’s way too slow, but for discovering them. That always seems to me the more important and less examined area. We’re all too quick to come up with solutions, but less interested in the taxonomy of how problems relate or separate. Are they perceived or actual? Are they tactical or strategic? Are they engineered to happen or are they accidental? It reflects my Hampshire philosophy that I think the power is in the question, not the answer.

This isn’t the only workshop of it’s kind. Bob Crowley and folks in IT are doing similar kinds of trainings that offer a small range of approaches and methods for feeling better about your workload. Well, at least feeling better about the method of approaching your workload, but Bob’s current method – service design – is much more introspective while being analytic at the same time. Nice house blend.

This also meshes well with the frequent and on-going strategic planing discussions that we’re all invited to. The end result is an increased awareness of how to think about problems at work, of work and how to approach their solutions. That’s good regardless of how modest or off-center it is.

What this really shows, I think, is what I’m calling The New Implementation. It’s the next fast approaching version of Hampshire now that so many of the first generation faculty are retiring and the new folk are looking around and re-examining the lay of the land.

The New Implementation isn’t about new buildings or a bigger budget, but simply refining the way and the why of what we do all day (also perhaps slightly into the night), though there’s going to be nothing simple about it. What we’re going to experience is a fissure of procedural behaviors. As we think through and work differently what we end up doing will slowly reveal the next iteration of what we call Hampshire, the college. There’ll be a lot of congruity in some areas, but less in others.

It’s all to be expected and embraced as long as we build a common and agreed upon story that captures the spirit, drive and excitement of what education needs to become to be both effective and sustainable and still wear the name Hampshire. Everyone is going to play a part in The New Implementation – whether they want to or not.


gunther  12-5-2013

Multi-asking: the professional use of questions

It’s common for people to have significant difficulty asking meaningful and important questions even in situations where asking those questions is their number one task. Part of the problem is emotional fear and social reluctance. We’re all shy at some level and usually loath to actively make ourselves look foolish to others, so instead of speaking up we remain silent and try and blend into the background – a poor choice when we’re actually trying to learn something.

I see this in the early part of the semester where students in a class have not fully bonded together and have limited trust of each other. I also see it in tour groups of prospective students and their parents. None of them want to be thought of as the people who don’t know what’s going on or show how little background they may have. Silence seems to be the cloak of invisibility that gets pulled over their heads to let time pass in those slow tick, tick, ticks, hopeful that someone else will ask or that it’ll all be over soon. Sad.

Unfortunately people seem to think that questions are like arrows that must be shot directly into the center of the target to be useful or feel important. That’s wrong, or less critically, that’s not a useful understanding of the function of the art of questioning. First, it’s not a competition. It’s a dialogue. That means it’s more like ping-pong, but it’s not a game anyone should try to win. Think of it more as an extended practice session. The longer you can keep the volley going the more practiced and developed each of you become. It’s the flow that’s the goal, not hitting the ball off the table. If you try to win, you lose.

Asking questions is like open-air thinking. Part of it is conversation, part of it is inspiration and part is effective listening. The goal is to move understanding from one person to another and maybe even back again. A sequence of good questions can lead a conversation, highlight lack of clarity or reveal insights.

Done well it offers participants the pleasure of discovery and the gratification of personal growth. Done poorly it may feel like a knife fight or the demeaning harassment of bullies. Ouch, don’t want to do that again do you? In a classroom people are not opponents, they’re colleagues and friends. In large open lectures that may be less so, and yes, perhaps more confrontational at that, though if you’re trying to win it’s a unattractive sport. But our goal should always be directed to personal development and, alas, practicing to withstand bullies may play a useful part of that after all.

I admit that one of the fundamental problems with using questions for learning is that you have to follow the dialogue. What, you actually have to follow the thread of the discussion - astonishing. A useful question pauses the speaker and informs them that there might be some vagueness in what they just said, or there’s some confusion about how a statement might apply to a variant of the situation. The point is to address an uncertainty directly related to or just slightly a variation of what was said. If you didn’t get what they just said you derail the flow, there’s an abrupt stop and then you all have to realign and start in again hopefully with more attuned listening.

Another useful result of asking questions is reverse interrogation. The speaker discovers from the questioner just how far off the track they are from the questions they ask. A pointed question shows both people are aligned while an inappropriate question shows the questioner is way off base. Both are useful, though one requires a lot more work to get back on track.

Our Hampshire mode is, I believe, to value the question even more than the answer. I keep telling students in the film building to beware of easy technological answers because they have a finite shelf life and soon become the wrong answer, but by being able to ask the appropriate interrogating question you can derive the correct answer yourself again and again. It's not the answers that set you free it's the questions.


gunther 12-10-2013

Metrical Questions or Who Is Sitting at That Table

As a faithful disciple of the cult of the brightest shiny object in my mind, also know as “what are you reading now” syndrome; the ability to generate an accurate persona of who is the patron sitting at the far table is my current favorite (it’s basically Service Design).

Lots of people come through the front door and mill about. Some even sit down and look like they’re doing work. I wonder who they really are – first years, Div III’s. Who knows? No, I mean who knows. I would suspect no one. It’s something we don’t track, but if we did how would we do it, what would it take and do you think it would be beneficial? Oh, maybe the most important question of all – what would you do with that information now that you know.

We often think we’re doing a good job helping people, but it’s really based more on assumptions than facts. In the labs I can usually judge who’s an advanced worker simply because I recognize them more often from simple repetition of showing up over the years. But not always. The discussions I have with them are fundamentally different than what I talk about with a first year student. Talking with first years is more directed at concrete answers that add to functionality with a little contextualization spread around to rationalize why we do things the way we do with the hope that they can buy into that also and give them a perceptible pathway into how they’ll work in the future (while it may not be exactly a straight path it is usually continuous).

Talking with Division III students is a little more slanted to mental health, the benefits of diligence, a supportive dialogue about their project, family history, track record with their committee, suggestions for project development, techniques for managing work over a long period of time, prospects for the project and a gentle reminder that there is a future beyond graduation and are you sufficiently prepared for that. It’s as much social as technical. 

It’s also more about how the added time factor (significant temporal duration versus a typically truncated class assignment) affects all aspects of the work (scope) and how our emotions play out differently over such an extended time period. It’s about how work is done in an immersive world not the artificial ephemeral effects of short assignments. Not only does the time scape of a year add to the quantity of the work it also adds to the quantity of the worry.

But back to the question of who’s sitting over there at that table. We can take it down to the fundamental question of do you think it would make a difference if we knew? I do. Not only is that the fundamental knowledge of who the patron is (or the theoretical persona), but it’s the consequent knowledge of what’s an appropriate interaction – some, none or in-between. While the first floor is a remarkably social space it’s also one in which staff doesn't seem to interact with the patrons unless asked (approached). Is that an appropriate business model? It may be traditional, but what do we care about that at all. Is it effective? As I’ve said before, it’s not interactive unless you interact.

But perhaps I’m completely wrong. Maybe the students who sit at the tables are all doing fine, their work is exemplary, need no help and will flourish in our absence. Oh, but wait – we don’t know that either do we. Say, if that were true wouldn’t we want to know that even more.


gunther  12-1-2013