• Just the facts? The way you say it matters
• Choice of fact selection will bias your communication
• Flipped classrooms hold implications for communication (part 1)
• Flipped classrooms hold implications for communication (part 2)
• Introverted speakers: don’t divert from networking
• Communicate your singularity
• The components of confidence
• Eye contact helps overcome stage fright
• What Sleeping Beauty can teach about communication
• Taking your face-to-face confidence on stage
• Seven tips for using your microphone effectively
• What a Tibetan Buddhist lama can teach us about speaking
• Be skeptical of your own thinking
• Why do it out loud?
• Narrow your focus and go deeper
• How to save your voice while speaking
• Shoot down slideware bullet points
• Questioning the Q&A placement
• Setting matters

Man, I was busy! I’ll try to link those posts more often.

It’s easy to assume college students have social media all figured out. Experience shows, though, that while many are savvy about Facebook, they may not realize they need to build a social media presence in other avenues before graduation rather than after. Sue Murphy notes in her article Social Media Success Tips for Students two particular areas that seriously need attention while a student is still in school but looking to the outside world.

Many students believe they don’t need to worry about getting their profiles up on LinkedIN until after they graduate. But nothing could be further from the truth. You need to get on there. Now. LinkedIN is one of the best places to connect with the kind of companies and people you want to eventually end up working for. And the only way you’ll be able to find and connect with them is to start building your profile there.

She also builds a case for starting a blog–and she’s not talking about a chatty personal journal you share with the world.

The only thing I wish she had commented on that she didn’t: Twitter. Though Twitter gets a lot of media attention, it still lags in number of users (38.44 million unique visitors in November, vs. 162.85 million for Facebook according to Compete.com), and of course it is used quite differently. Nevertheless, its public nature (Twitter users can set their streams so that only followers can see it, but that’s very much the exception; otherwise, streams are completely public) and the difficulty of purging posts means that students should consider establishing an identity for the long-term in Twitter as well.

At least one former student has done a good job of doing so, and I think it likely contributed to his snagging a job he really likes. (Although Twitter streams are public, I’m not going to mention his unless he tells me it’s OK to do so. Maybe this post will get updated with his Twitter name later.)

EDIT: Got permission! Will Webb was in my public speaking class a couple of years ago, and even at that time was building a business. He has since moved onto the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and is now doing an internship in Delaware that really excites him. His Twitter stream isn’t just business–you get a sense of his personality too, which is good. But I’ve been following Will for some time now, back before he graduated, and I can attest that he didn’t post things he needed to find later and delete. (Some other former students are really going to have to do a lot of that unless they go to work in product testing for Jack Daniels.) It wasn’t the major thing that helped him get the internship or promote his business, but it certainly fit those efforts.

In any case, check out the advice from Suze. Are you a student? What are you doing with social media? Use the comments to, well, comment.

[Note: cross-posted at Donn King’s Corner.]

Cross-posted at http://donnellking.com/blog/2011/11/advice-for-business-owners-helps-speakers/

Via: OnlineEducation.net

Among many useful bits:

From a biological perspective, we are all still hunter-gatherers, doing the best that we can to cope with the conditions of life that exist today…. One of the most cherished values of all band hunter-gatherer societies that have ever been studied by anthropologists is freedom. Hunter-gatherers believed that it is wrong to coerce a person to do what the person doesn’t want to do—and they considered children to be people….

The hunting and gathering life required great personal initiative and creativity, and it required trust that people would share and cooperate because they wanted to. Hunting and gathering people seemed to understand that—and they also seemed to understand that children would best grow up to be free, trusting, cooperative, creative adults if they were permitted freedom throughout their childhood, in the context of the moral community and models that the band provided.

I might also point out that extreme freedom was seen as the best way for people to develop a sense of responsibility to the community. To be the most effective human, we need to do the exact opposite of what we are required to do in the compulsory school system.

What do we do about this? Grays says:

We can continue stumbling along with our coercive system of schooling and continue to fight our children’s instincts, using drugs or whatever other means we must to dampen their cries for freedom.  Or, we can adopt what to most people today seems like a radical, even crazy approach to education, but which to hunter-gatherers seemed like common sense.  This radical approach is to let our children educate themselves, while we provide the conditions that make that possible.

This runs counter to current assumptions, but Gray says the evidence is overwhelming that is can and will work, as shown by the success of homeschooling and such initiatives as the Sudbury Valley School.

I can see the effect of this forced system that counters our biology every day. Further, I can’t help but connect it to the research on learned helplessness, as explained here and here. It takes quite a bit of effort to overcome learned helplessness (the behavior that results from being completely unable to affect your circumstances), and the passive, stoic attitudes that result from it absolutely characterize many of those in college classrooms, even though they now have the ability to affect their circumstances.

Sir Ken Robinson supports these ideas in many talks, perhaps best seen in an increasingly popular RSA Animate production.

What do you think? Is it possible to change the paradigm? What has to happen for this to come about?

This post has been cross-posted here.

1. In Publishing student work via Flipboard I have a short post for pointing to resources mentioned during my presentation at the Innovative Professor Conference at Austin Peay State University.
2. I also posted What’s a Degree Worth that points to an interesting infographic that shows the relative financial worth of a given degree level (e.g., a Bachelor’s degree or a Master’s, etc.).

If all goes well, this will be the last “test message” to be sent out. Thank you for your patience! If bit.ly doesn’t like the setup, though, I may have to send one or two more.

Why the apology? I’m trying to set up one of the tools I’ll be showing, because the blog I had intended to use isn’t feeding correctly, and I don’t want to muck around with that one since it has a lot of readers. I’m assuming anyone following my personal/academic blog will be more forgiving. I hope that’s the case.

Note: it’s possible you’ll see several tweets or other notifications about “new” posts that aren’t really new as I republish some older posts in order to generate the feed I need. Once I have everything worked out, I’ll share the information from the presentation on this blog as well.