• 20% more office space requests for their group
• 20% more room reservations for events 
• 20% more marketing material needing approved
• 20% more paperwork to fill out
• 20% more groups to monitor
• 20% more people needing an advisor to listen to their love spats
  

This will be a picture of what is possible, and the benefits, complete with notes. While I will aim at "reasonable and doable," the degree of difficulty will vary by campus. This certainly isn't THE way to do this, it is a draft plan to pick apart and play with.

This plan isn't about just getting something up or what can be done in an hour, this plan is about creating a cost effective community that will help your leaders be successful.

Goals:

1) Build a statewide community of student leaders. Use the in person experience as a catalyst for building an always-available community online.

Notes: Many leadership conferences focus on skills. "Sit in a Educational Session and learn what you need to know, then go do it." While skills matter, engagement is more important. Community leads to engagement, conversation, and retention.

Student leaders often face frustration on their own campus. Most of their peer students just don't care as much. Giving them easy access to peer student leaders, who do care as much, will help them maintain their own motivation while building their skills.

2) Teach and encourage student leaders to share their model of high education involvement and education via social media and the internet.

Notes: Sharing models of engagement is good for the school (great content for the web, first year experience, etc.) and for the student - they have a positive digital identity that will help them find a job.

The Plan and Steps:

1) Use a public collaboration space to plan the events of the conference. I recommend wikispaces.com Start with the free version.

Here's a great template from an education technology conference happening next weekend.

Notes:

- The point of using a wiki without a password vs. google docs is that you are modeling for the students how to plan in the open. If they begin to plan their events on campus in the open, they will, in turn, be modeling the various stages of involvement for other students around campus. This is a very good thing.

- Wikis are not magic work solvers. While they do open up the possibility of community members contributing some effort, don't count on it. It will likely be the same 3 people that always to 90% of the work, plus one surprise over achiever that will come out of no where and be very helpful.

- Wikis will make it easier for the planning group, and early interested students, to get on the same page. Compare it to sending lots of emails, where the information is in small pieces spread everywhere. Wikis bring it together.

- Click on the "Notify Me" tab on the top of the page to get change notices to your email. This makes it easy to stay up on things.

2) Set up a Facebook Group (not a fan page), put a link to it on the wiki.

Notes:

- I feel conflicted about this step. Facebook Groups don't last, as a general rule. Even with student groups, most get set up and forgotten. The goal here is to establish a longer term platform. If Facebook groups typically die, does that mean any lines of connection or artifacts (pictures) burried within the Facebook groups are taking away from energy that could have gone into something else? I'm not sure. It's close, but I think not. I think it's worth trying both and seeing where the energy goes. It might just be both. Facebook has changed the design now, to be more stream oriented, and the message boards now allow threaded messages and replies in emails. All of this adds up to: maybe Facebook groups are worth another shot.

- At the very least, it's worth including in the organization process to give students a place to post their pictures. Pictures are one of the most important artifacts of community. Profile pictures, pictures of fun, pictures of people - it's one of the best online reinforcement of feelings that we have.

3) Set up a twitter account specifically for penn state leaders. Something like twitter.com/pennslead

4) Spend 30 minutes learning Mailchimp by watching their howto videos.

Notes:

- Reach out to the attendees as soon as you have a list. Make it a goal of having a preliminary list as quickly as possible. The first email should be very short "We're excited for the conference! Sign up for the facebook group here or follow us on twitter."

- If you just want to use Mailchimp for the run up to the conference, it will be free. If you fall in love and want to use all the features over a longer period (to send lots of emails), it's $30 a month. The tracking alone is worth it.

- Mailchimp will allow you to see who opens the email, and who clicks on the email. Send a follow up email with a different subject line within two days to everyone that didn't open the first email (Mailchimp makes this easy.)

- Mailchimp will be one of three communication methods you will use. You will also use Facebook and Twitter (depending on how many students follow- I would expect 10% or so.) Twitter will get you to the cellphones if the student wants it, now you have Email, Facebook, and Text Messaging covered. This makes you awesome.

5) Now look at the students that have joined the Facebook group and how many have followed on twitter. These are your leaders among leaders. They are your biggest enthusiasts. Send them a personal email asking them to get involved in planning the conference. Send them to the wiki with a specific task and see who follows through.

Notes:

- Again, two things are happening here simultaneously - you are getting the work done, but you are also teaching. Think of this process as an ed session in and of itself. If this sounds like a lot of time - and it's a couple of hours - ask yourself how much time you would spend prepping and delivering an ed session for the purposes of educating the students. Why not teach them online? And doing the work with be teaching yourself as well.

6) With the help of the students, fingers crossed you'll find some techies, build a collaborative place online to put content up from the conference when it is happening. The goal is to generate a lot of content at the conference and then keep it going afterwards. Whatever method you decide on below, you will use the mailchimp interface to notify students about it before the conference and after the conference.

There are two main options for pulling on the content together in one public place:

A) A posterous blog, where lots of people can email pictures and words. This creates one central public blog. Students with smart phones can email pictures directly from their seats to this blog.

Notes:

- This is the easiest and fastest platform to set up. It has it's own comment system which works well.

- Every student that emails in content will get posted on the common group blog as well as creating their own personal blog. Apologies if this makes your head hurt, it's an important point.

- Everything the student emails to

B) An aggregated Wordpress blog like the new student affairs collaborative platform.

Notes:

- This requires the selection of a common word that students would attach to their blogs, pictures, or tweets. Use something short and easy to remember. Best if it is the same as the twitter account. Like #pennslead

- We went to this system because we wanted to aggregate twitter and blogs in the same place using one common tag. We wanted student affairs professionals to have their own blogs where they wrote about what ever they wanted. When they wanted to add their content to the collaborative space, they simply add "#sachat" to the blog or tweet and it shows up on the central blog.

- This system is more flexible and allows participants to use whatever they are already using (instead of asking everyone to use posterous.) More flexibility for users requires a little more investment in the platform. You would hire someone to build this using Word Press. It's not a huge expense, but expect about $1000 up front and $200 a year to keep it going.

- This system would work with whatever blogs your students were using. So you could encourage them to set up their own blog on penn state's system, and then pull together only the content with the tag #pennslead.

- Notice that this system works. We'll be posting more on this in the future, but the student affairs blog is a great and growing community. It's a perfect example of exactly what we would want to see for the student leaders of any state.

7) If you use Wordpress, take the RSS feed and add put it into mail chimp as a RSS -> Email Campaign. You can set this to go out every Wednesday morning if their is new content on the central blog. (posterous has it's own email notification settings that students will control on their own.)

Notes:

- To build the community, you'll need both content and notification of the content, until it is a habit. This will take a while.

- Follow up with those students you found in step 5. Ask them to create content. Tell them they are special (because they are) and you need their help in creating this place for them to connect and learn online.

- As staff members, you can keep putting content into the blog and sending it out. The goal of course, is to transition from staff to students over time. Keep pushing them, it will happen.

- You will have lots of assessment to show anyone. Mailchimp will give you open rates and click through. You'll know traffic to the blog, new content, and comments. Share these stats with the group to keep them motivated.

Fire away with comments and questions.

In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

Here are parts 1, 2, and 3.

Your comments and critique, as always, are appreciated.

Comfort

Comfort is curing the loneliness that inevitably comes with moving to a new peer network. Some evidence suggests that the brain may even process social exclusion using the same circuitry as physical pain. Loneliness hurts.

I grew up in Minnesota and went to college at the University of Oregon. In high school I had an incredible group of friends. I was never cool per se, but I felt appreciated, influential, and comfortable.

My first year at the University of Oregon was a social mess. I was lonely and often depressed.

In hindsight, it's clear that my sense of personal worth was embedded in my social network. The network I left behind. I went off to college and left my confidence at home.

My roots were deep in Minnesota - 18 years with pretty much the same group. The creation of my group while growing up was unconscious and slow; it was identity development in a crock pot. (For those not from the midwest, that's slow marination in low heat.)

It took me a few years to find my friends at Oregon, re-grow some roots, and reestablish my sense of belonging.

Those first few years were not very "educational" in the sense of engagement with my classes or academic ideas. Being lonely colored everything in gray. Belonging comes before confidence, aspiration, or problem solving and learning on Maslow's Hierarchy and this is reflected in my transcript. Big lecture halls just made me feel more alone - people all around me, but very few connections.

I had it better than many. My family was strong and supportive (if far away). I had models of college success nearby. It was still a very hard time.

Being in a strange new place surrounded by new people is disorientating. What has changed is that the tools to stay in touch with the old network have become much, much, better. When I went to college in the early 1990's, I largely left my network behind. I had no cell phone to keep me in contact with old friends and parents. I had to plan a scheduled time to call home, or rely on written letters that came few and far between.

Cellphones, instant messaging, Skype and Facebook, as connective technologies, all serve to keep the new student connected to their old network of family and friends. In 2008, a poll published by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that technology enables connections "that revolve around remote cell phone interactions and communal internet experiences."

Some see improved connectivity to home as a concern. The concern is that students will come to be addicted to their online relationships in their old network at the expense of new, real world relationships. The other common concern is that connected parents let students feel coddled, preventing them from growing up, and destroying their ability to make new contacts and become an independent person.

Embedded in both of these concerns is a preference for discomfort as catalyst for growth. The worry is that comfort - either through online relationships or frequent conversations with parents - will actively prevent growth.

A core tenet of John Gardner's First Year Experience movement is to move higher education past this "college as boot camp" mentality. The goal is not to make students suffer, weeding out the weak. The goal is to make them successful. More swimming lessons, less throwing them into the deep end. To abuse the metaphor, if Facebook and "Helicopter parents" serve as "social floaties" for those that need them, all the better, as long as they don't get stuck with them.

Switching networks, from old to new, is important for growth. Getting emotionally and mentally stuck in the old network does not help the student succeed. Cutting them off from the home network entirely is not the answer. It's also not possible.

Much like the media perpetuating fear around the internet, higher education loves to share ghost stories about helicopter parents. Did you hear the one about the student that brought their parent to a job interview? While surely some parents go over board, the name calling and stereotyping unfairly impugns the actions of the vast majority of parents who are simply being helpful. In an era of ruthless budget cuts, higher education can use all the help it can get from a student's supportive home network.

The benefit of a supportive network is highlighted by the stories and statistics of its absence. First generation college students are more likely to be an anomaly among their home peer network. For them, there is an acute need to connect to the new network and new peer norms.

Carlito Umali gave his commencement speech at his college. I found him because he was profiled in an article in the Seattle Post Intelligencer. Carlito is notable because he is a first generation college student who succeeded against the odds. More than half of first generation college students who enroll in a four year college will not graduate.

What does he think is the most important aspect of his success?

"Community, I believe, is really the foundation of all education no matter what you're studying," the English major said. "In one way or another, you're trying to find community."

If the student is lucky enough to have a supportive network, this early, now transportable, sense of emotional security and belonging is actually a great place to start. It's a terrific foundation on which they can build new connections to their new place, without having to endure the rootlessness that I felt.

These tools - cell phones, the internet in general and Facebook in particular - are great for staying in touch with the old network, but they are not as good at helping the student find comfort within a new network. They are designed for social capital maintenance, not the social or academic integration that is needed.

Finding Comfort Online:

Even though it's not designed for it, students do try to use Facebook to find comfort in common attributes among the new people. The nature of the web, and search specifically, changes the game. Online, search replaces small talk. This is especially true in asynchronous environments (anything other than live, synchronous chat). Students naturally start by trying to search and express their identity attributes as a starting point for social comfort.

Most schools will have an incoming first year student group on Facebook, called "Hamline University, class of 2013" or something similar. The wall posts on these groups show students putting up identity flags: "Who's playing soccer this fall?" "Who else is in Watson Hall fourth floor?"

The problem with the Facebook wall as a place to meet new people is that each question pushes down the question in front of it, so a typical wall has many questions and very few replies. While it's better than nothing, it's far from ideal.

Schools get concerned, and occasionally overreact, when the common facet of introduction on the Facebook wall sinks to the lowest common denominator: "Who else can't wait to party this fall?" These comments come from students who are not shy, but don't yet have a better conversation starter.

Students want to meet new people to create comfort in their new environment. Many of us find meeting new people in a new environment a bit of a challenge. For many students (or adults), if they can't find something positive to meet over, they will meet over beer. This can be an especially challenging dynamic for schools that serve as a "13th grade" - a second choice culture, where students end up there precisely because they have not yet found a direction for themselves. These students need the most support in connecting over something that won't lead to a hangover.

How can you help students find comfort within the First Year Experience?

Label the process. Let students know of the emotional challenges to expect. Help them frame the positive feelings they will get from Facebook and their online interactions with the old network, while at the same time emphasizing the fact that their success will be in finding community feeling and comfort within their new environment. Ask them about their success in using Facebook to find new people - have an open dialogue on the topic - experiences will vary. The students will learn from each other in this discussion and begin to place new goals on old (to them) technology. With the goal of feelings of community in mind, have the students brainstorm tactics for reaching those feelings. When I've facilitated these conversations in the past, it does not take long for some students to express the importance of finding possible connections online and then following through to a face to face meeting. This "don't get stuck online" reminder is best delivered by peers in discussion, rather than by the teacher or facilitator.

Invite student leaders, or other model students from past years, into your class to share their stories of finding an early community and what steps they took. These stories will add meaning to future assignments designed to help with social and academic connection and integration. If you are lucky enough to be in a school where there are blogs (online journals or reflective learning artifacts) from previous students at the same school, provide these to your students - prioritizing blogs of students from similar backgrounds. It is extremely interesting for students to read the thoughts of people like them who have been through the experiences they are currently going through. Second best are blogs from other schools. At the end of this supplement, there will be links to resources online to help you find these blogs.

Bring exercises into class that help students explore their interests through conversation and activities with other classmates or members of the college community. This will begin to grow their expectations of their network - moving past simply social comfort (people to hang out with) and into topic connection (people to learn with).

Work with orientation to expand the identity expression / connection pattern as close the admission process as possible. Studies have shown that a longer orientation time period leads to better retention rates. The more time students have to get socially situated, the more comfortable they become. Refer to the online materials for examples of schools using technology to implement various versions of this.

What to expect from technology in the near future.

Students will continue to share personal information online through Facebook, blogs, Twitter, and photo-sharing sites. Technology will continue to get better at leveraging this information to connect students to others based on shared interests, backgrounds, and goals. Many organizations and private companies are actively working on this challenge. A few schools across the country have already deployed "roommate matching" services that connect students with similar interests or levels of cleanliness. This is a small example of the possibilities.

The narrative of dislocation, loneliness, and finding one's place is very common and very old. As more students blog, schools will begin to aggregate these narratives, providing an authentic, journal like glimpse into lives of other students. Peer stories, combined with relevancy matching, will serve as a powerful source of comfort.

Engagement through social media (blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) creates huge amounts of live data. New tools will leverage this data to provide live assessments of a variety of online social activity. These behavioral metrics, will, over time, begin to supplant less accurate and less actionable self reported surveys for both focusing staff and faculty time where it is needed and providing feedback and encouragement to the students. Imagine a dashboard display that measures the social connectivity of students based on twitter conversations, Facebook photo tagging, new "friends" on Facebook, school fan page responses, etc. If you as a faculty member could map the social network of your class, and watch it develop over time, you would have a powerful feedback mechanism to help the students that need it. While the statistical models are still emergent, the collection technologies are here today.

The tools will evolve, but the goal will remain the same; Help new students find social comfort. Help them find comfort within the first year experience class and at the school. You are not competing with their home network, you are building on top of it. Creating or leveraging a foundation of social comfort for students reduces their risk of them dropping out and allows them to move to the next level of student success: connection.

While I'm numbering these parts 1,2,3, etc., the sections themselves won't be in this order in the actual curriculum, this is just the order in which I'm finishing them. This section is towards the front. Please forgive my process : )

Your comments and critique, as always, are appreciated.

Keeping Up With The Students

Preparing Them for the World of Today

As society gets more connected, and technology gets cheaper, we collectively switch our tools faster. Social networking is just one example of many. Getting to 150 million users took the telephone 89 years. Television reached 150 million users in 38 years. Facebook did it in 5. The problem for Facebook is that the competition will do it in 3.

Back in the good ol' days, schools had to provide phones in the residence halls. Because the school provided it, the school could limit access and control the use. Values could be imposed on to the new tool. When the phone entered the residence halls, Resident Assistants metered usage to prevent overuse or abuse. The schools' values also came bundled with other school provided technologies - computers, email, and software.

Technology was expensive and complicated and this meant limited supply and easy control. Institutions in general and schools in particular became used to the control. Without frenetic competition, purchasing decisions had a more thoughtful pace.

Now, no student needs their college to provide an email - there are hundreds of ways a student can set up a free email account. Many students can afford their own computer, many more can afford cell phones that are increasingly as useful as a laptop computer. With website functions quickly supplanting installed software, students have both access and control of their technology.

A values debate that might lead to learning, about what is useful or appropriate, gets confused with simple fight about control of technology. High schools ban cell phones. Higher education fumes about behaviors it sees as unwarranted risk, unjustified by student benefits that are often dismissed as "not real". Overvaluing control prevents the institution from recognizing other possible institutional values, like connection and mentoring, in the new technology.

Students did not need, or ask for, permission to use Facebook. They simply found it useful. Where it was briefly banned by by a few campuses, students used proxy servers to get to it. This is the same technique monks in Myanmar and protesters in Iran used to get information in and out of the country. Institutions try to control. Mobs grow restless. The internet changes the balance of power.

Like many institutions, Higher Education, on average, has struggled to match the pace of technological change. The challenge then, for schools, is to catch up with the students. To accept the tools so that the school can be back in the business of modeling, teaching, and exploring values.

As technology costs drop, especially with web tools, the primary difficulty is no longer capital or hardware, the difficulty is in updating the ideas of the institution.

The big advantage students have is that they don't have old habits to unlearn. The don't need committees to approve anything. They just use what works for them. They don't have to be convinced to give up the way they used to do it to accept the new way.

It's totally normal to resist change, for individuals, institutions or societies. Especially when the change comes at a cost of lost power and control. Any progress comes with backlash. This pattern is as old as history. At least as old as written history.

Writing, as the technological innovation of its day, had a powerful educator against it: Socrates. Plato quotes him, in Phaedrus, on the terrible effects of writing:

“[It] destroys memory [and] weakens the mind, relieving it of…work that makes it strong. [It] is an inhuman thing.”

The backlash serves a purpose. It can help clarify values. Holding firm to values while changing with the times is not a new dynamic for colleges. Individual colleges will continue to find their rate of change according to their leadership, community and culture. The problem is that the world outside of academia continues to accelerate. Schools now have less time to react and still be relevant.

Socrates had almost 2000 years until Gutenberg's press gave the masses the incredible power of literacy. Even at the beginning of the 20th century, one could still agree with Socrates in practice, be illiterate, and still be successful. Being literate was not a requirement for success, though the educated and literate had a massive advantage. We are in that same position today with technology- schools who can move quickly to blend their values with the possibilities of technology will provide that huge advantage to themselves and their students. Students, as always, need to learn to value learning.

In effort to accelerate the blending of old values and new practices, let me address some of the common objections I hear when talking with administrators, staff and faculty. In general, my explanations will only convince those that want to be convinced. Perhaps that is useful. For those more hesitant, models of instructors successfully encouraging educational values with current technology will be more compelling. We will review those later in this text.

Frequently Posed Objections:

The students networking ability and skills will improve along lines of practice and intentionality. There is much we, as an older generation, can do to help students expand their thinking and increase their intentionality. We jeopardize much of our credibility, however, when we start by dismissing half of their world as something less than real.




"How can someone have 500 friends on Facebook?" (They're obviously not real friends, it's just some sort of popularity contest.)



In social capital theory there are two main categories for relationships: bonding capital and bridging capital. Bonding capital is limited to close friends, usually around three. Bridging capital in the past has been capped at around 150, known as Dunbar's limit. This number comes from Robin Dunbar whose research lead him to believe that 150 people is the carrying capacity of our social memory, after 150 it gets too hard to remember who is dating who. Bonding capital is made up of the people we share secrets with and the shoulders we cry on. Whereas bridging capital is made up of relationships based on things like high school, geography, church affiliations, and random happenstance. Friendships exist on a continuum between very tight bonding capital and very loose bridging capital.


According to Facebook's numbers, the average person on Facebook has 200 "friends," while the number is slightly higher among college students (Source: TechCrunch NDSU 2007 Survey). Because everything that happens online is trackable Facebook has an incredible amount of data and insight into the social capital structures of its users. Based on the research that they've released, it seems that bonding capital has not changed with Facebook use. People still have, on average, three close friends that they interact with substantially more than anyone else in their network. Bridging capital, however, has dramatically changed. With the use of Facebook the carrying capacity for bridging capital has increased allowing the people to easily maintain double, or more, Dunbar's limit.



The concern implicit in the objection that people have "too many friends on Facebook" is that the idea of friendship is being watered down. Facebook is not devaluing friendship. For the sake of simplicity all connections on Facebook are referred to as "friends" but every user maintains their own distinctions between bonding and bridging relationships. Facebook is a power tool for bridging capital. Bridging capital will contain new ideas, new opportunities, and seeds of new relationships to spark growth. 500 "friends" is a lot of positive bridging capital. Facebook makes this possible. The opportunity for the university is to teach students to make the bridging capital development process intentional.



"Are you going to tell me I have to be on Facebook?" (Because I'm too busy / old / bad with technology / professional to do that.)



It is beneficial to be on Facebook to give you some personal experience with the way students communicate in their social world. It's your job as an educator to prepare students to be successful in the world in which they live. Social belonging will be a foundation for their success and Facebook is a common part of that world. If you are between the ages of 30 and 85 there are currently 75 million of your peers on Facebook (and at current growth rates, that number will be 3 times larger by the time you read this). The most important thing to keep in mind as you explore is that you are in control. You determine what you share, who you share it with, and how much time you spend on Facebook.



Think of showing up on Facebook like you're going to a school barbeque. It's not a classroom, let your guard down a little bit. Be authentic. As to friending students on Facebook, the general guideline is to let students request to be your friend rather than the other way around. This is out of respect for the inherently imbalanced power dynamic between the instructor and student.



For the sake of this curriculum supplement, the information to follow will be more approachable if you have the experience of a Facebook account. So if you don't yet have one, set down this book and go to http://www.facebook.com and set one up, it will take you about twelve minutes.

Long time readers of this blog will recognize these ideas.  Swift Kick, and Red Rover, have been focused on social capital and engagement for sometime. As the overall curriculum comes together, we're tying all of the pieces into one framework. 

Your comments, as always, are highly appreciated. 

The Dance Floor Theory Engagement Model

Teaching students to be aware of their engagement, to expect it of themselves and to manage it to get what they want, is a very powerful addition to the standard curriculum.

An interesting way to explore the dynamics of engagement is by exploring the dynamics of dance floors. Dance floors and college campuses work the same way.

Imagine looking at a normal dance and rating the individual's engagement in the dance by their body language. Rate the engagement on a spectrum from three, meaning the most engaged, to neutral, meaning not yet engaged. (Where neutral is a friendlier way of denoting what comes below one.)

If you could hover above any dance floor with this rating system, you would  consistently see the "3s" clumped together in the middle and the rest forming this pattern:

This self segmentation is simple people stuff. People like to hang out with other people at the same level of engagement - "3s" with "3s" and "2s" with "2s" and so on. There is some natural friction between disparate states of engagement.

If you were to drag a "neutral" into a pack of "3s," the "3s" would attack, and try to get the neutral up to their level (probably freaking out the poor "neutral" in the process.) Most people will increase their engagement slowly, needing time to make connections and increase their comfort, competence and confidence. It rarely works to pop one person from a "neutral" state of engagement to a "3", but, crucially, "neutrals" will watch "3s" for inspiration, even while they get their next new move from the "1s" (because those look a little easier to pull off).

Everyone will likely be effected by everyone else, and the whole system, the whole dance floor, or the whole institution, will be judged by the collective average level of engagement. 

Though it might have been awhile, we’ve all been to good dances and bad dances. A good dance has all levels, but the average is high. At a good dance, a new person is likely to give it a go, just based on following the crowd's average. A bad dance is defined by a low average level of engagement. It's just not fun.  More people will leave a bad dance (and be less inclined to attend the next one).

If, as noted earlier, 60% of students at four year institutions never participate in college sponsored activities, we have a dance where 60% of the people present are not dancing. Our college campuses, on average, are not great dance floors. 

So how do we increase engagement? How do we turn a bad dance into a good one?  We shouldn't be surprised that students, like many of us at awkward wedding dances, look to alcohol as social lubrication, but there is a better way. 

If you ask one hundred people on the street, "What makes a bad dance?" ninety-nine of them will say bad music. They will blame the DJ. Just like students will blame professors or the activities department (as the analogous DJs on campus.) But yet, what I saw, all through junior high, was groups of friends forming circles. If the bond of friendship was strong enough, and the vibe was supportive, it didn't matter what the DJ played, that circle would go crazy to any song that came on.

In short, circles of friends trump bad DJs, or, put another way, social connections are more important than music.

While the DJ's music does matter, as does the professors' curriculum, focusing on social capital of students is a more effective method of increasing engagement and making a better dance floor.

Research on college campuses supports this. The 2006 National Survey of Student engagement put it succinctly: "The most important factor in student engagement is the connections between the students." The dance floor analogy gives us further subtleties. There are crucial patterns to the connections.

The goal is to increase the average state of engagement for the entire campus. We do this by moving one person, one level at a time. In short hand - the goal is simply X + 1.  

To help students maintain their engagement at every level of the success pyramid, education should design systems that use various technologies to provide dynamic assessment of engagement and interests to provide the following:

1) Relevant introductions to other students who are at a similar level of engagement. Neutrals to neutrals, 1s to 1s, etc.

2) Connections to students who share interests, at a slightly higher level of engagement (X+1), for a model and a new, accessible, peer group in which they can develop competence and confidence.

3) Visibility into the most engaged and most competent circles for inspiration.

These dance floor patterns of engagement are how people work. These successful engagement and learning patterns are how education has always worked. What is now new is that we now have accessible technology that can combine publishing, expression, automatic match making, and live individual and systematic assessment to optimize all of these processes.

This is the huge opportunity for social networking. Social networking in general, and the many varieties of web 2.0 services, now allow us to map, teach, and intentionally facilitate the social learning systems of students.

As students publish where they are at now - in words, pictures, or videos - systems can match them with other students who are producing similar content. Various search methods allow learners to easily find "people like them." Assessment can be based on live behavioral data already being provided by students. This new data allows educational stakeholders, faculty, staff, peer mentors, etc. to focus their energy where it is needed.

As students progress, they'll leave a record of their educational path for other students to follow, providing many +1 examples.

The most successful students will continue to publish their content online, where it can serve as an inspiration to an unlimited number of students simultaneously.

While it will take awhile for all of these broad goals to be realized in an experience as simple as an iPod, you may be surprised by just how much of this is possible, and already happening, today.

In the next section, I'll review each of three phases of the student success model and discuss what is currently happening, what can be brought into the classroom, and what future developments will bring.