Reflection | Higher Ed Solo

Oh, Behave!

By: @marleysmom

19-06-2013

At Work, Careers, Motivation, People, Reflection, Social Media

After each presentation, I take a little bit of time to look at the tweets that have come across during my talk. I want to see what resonates with people, what they have questions and concerns about. I think it helps with future presentations.

Sorting through the tweets about my recent PSU Web Conference (@psuwebconf) presentation, These Are Not the Droids You Are Looking For: Making Social Media More Human, I came across this one from @bethkocher:

I have to admit, if I’d thought of saying this before I talked, I could have saved everybody in the room two whole hours.

Beth was totally right. However, it seems in this day, when we’re interacting on social media – heck, when we’re just talking to one another in person – we forget the good manners our mothers taught us. Is it time to go get a switch off the tree?

I don’t think so. Maybe we just need reminding of our manners – a refresher course as it were. I find I come back to the manners thing a lot when I ponder interpersonal communication rules and how they play out in our computer-mediated communication. It will continue to be a theme as we talk more with our thumbs and less with our ears and mouths.

In the interest of refreshing what Mama taught us, I’m including my take-home points of the presentation here:

Be real
Be accurate
Be respectful
Be positive
Be a listener

Mind your manners. Just be a human your mom would be proud of.

#beepboop

Walk in My Shoes

By: @marleysmom

06-05-2013

At Work, Motivation, People, Reflection

“You can’t really understand another person’s experience until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes.”

So goes the old story, parable, proverb, or whatever you want to call it. It’s a seminal truth tied to our need to develop empathy for others. The more we can understand a person’s experience, the more we can have empathy for that person. The development of empathy is the one of the highest attainments in the human experience.

If I’ve ever given you one of my MOO cards and you’ve looked at the back of it, you’ll notice a quote from philosopher Martin Buber, “Through the Thou, a person becomes I.” In the 1923 work, I and Thou (where the quote appears), Buber speaks extensively about dialogue, developing authentic relationships with other individuals, and how, through language, we come to appreciate the other’s experiences – even to understant what the dialogic partner has lived through.

In other words, when we regard other humans as the same as we are, we develop empathy. We begin to consider them the same – as the subjects of our actions instead of the objects.

Whoa. Getting deep here, right?

Which brings me to a thing we all did last week – Higheredshoes. The tumblr features pictures of shoes from folks who work in all parts of higher education. Y’all – developers and designers and writers and professors and managers – submitted photos of your shoes and they were posted on the site.

The tumblr design is bare, maybe too stark. But it doesn’t detract from the photos. We all wear shoes – well, except for Debra Goldentyer at UC-Berkeley and you know how those Berkeley people are. We’re the same like that. We’re also different like that. Berkeley is especially different like that.

Shoes are more than their design or color or whatever. They ground us. They plant us on this earth, and they help us stay up straight. They point where we’re supposed to be moving.

They remind me of the higher ed community. We’re all dramatically different in our roles and talents and personalities, but we’re all the same. And most of the time, we manage to regard one another as true partners in producing something great through higher education.

We all wear shoes. We’re all the same.

As Buber goes on to say in I and Thou, “All actual life is encounter…. All real life is meeting.”

I am truly thankful I belong to a community that is same and different and full of respect. I’m thankful y’all will send me pictures of shoes – no questions asked.

I’m glad I met and continue to meet you.

Things I Learned In the Kitchen (and took to work)

By: ronbronson

11-04-2013

At Work, Motivation, Reflection

Folks at work love cake. Seriously, if we could celebrate a birthday everyday so people could come together and share desserts I think there’d be a long line for that.

I’ve always been interested in cooking, but it’s been a gradual process for me to get to the point where I took it somewhat seriously. A lot of people who know me now, assume that I’ve just always been this way. But I know how much of a process it is and it’s been for me to get to the point where I get invested in making things.

Along the way, there are lessons I learned from cooking so much that I’ve managed to apply to my work life as well.

1. When you feel yourself getting into a rut, make changes.

After moving back to Wyoming, I spent the first few weeks in a bit of a food rut. I was new to town, I’m single and I was still getting my feet wet. I noticed myself eating out pretty often and this is before I was diagnosed celiac and was told to start on a gluten-free diet. So I had (or at least, I thought) more options to choose from and I exercised them. After about a month, I decided to start Operation Stop Eating Crap (OpSEC) and make a commitment to myself to eat better, start planning my meals and be more deliberate about what I ate.

When you find yourself doing the same things at work, getting into the same habits or after the rush of a big project find you’re settling in, it’s healthy to push yourself out of your comfort zone. Not everyone around you will understand your unique situation or be able to give you advice. It will be up to you to advocate for yourself and make the changes you need to.

2. Embrace community

If you’ve ever followed the #foodhat hashtag on twitter, it spawned from a misspelling of foodchat and came to be known as just another of the hats that we wear in our lives. Embracing community has been an unexpected gift and really began with Tim Nekritz and his monthly scheduled weekend #pancaketweetup on Facebook and Twitter. All of this leads to improving connections. In the work world, my cooking exploits have co-workers who I didn’t interact with asking me things about food or giving me something to connect with folks outside of my office on. You never know where your personal adventures will take you and how they’ll enable you to reach outside of your circle. Embrace community where you find it.

3. Explore

Despite a reputation for having a discerning palate, I am really a reluctant foodie. I like what I like and it’s easy to stick to a rut of eating a lot of the same things, especially if something looks weird or it confuses certain people in my family when I post something obscure on Facebook. Still, I push the envelope. Sometimes #2 helps and I have friends who will push me out even when I don’t want to, but on the whole, I am fond of heading to the supermarket with the idea of trying things I’ve never made before.

In the office, this remains. Keeping a voracious appetite for learning and knowledge are what set us apart. Melding what we learn with our unique experiences and skillsets make us valued members of our teams. Never be afraid to be explore.

Walk in My Shoes

Things I Learned In the Kitchen (and took to work)

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