MMP10: Get a Clue: Shift Happens

[Intro Music]

Announcer: You’re listening to one in a series of presentations from the 2008 HighEdWeb Conference in Springfield, Missouri.

Gordy Pace: Thank you. We'll use microphones. First of all, I just want to thank you for choosing this session. What I'm going to do with my presentation is address one of the questions that came at the end of the first session we started yesterday. And basically that question was, "How do you get the baby boomer administrators and folks at our campus that are leaders to have a greater way of doing things, understand that there's a new world out there, a new generation of students coming in?" To say that I am going to address that issue, I don't know if I'm going to answer it but what I'll do here in the next 45 minutes is tell you our story a little bit, some of the things that I've been involved in in trying to be somewhat a changed leader, make some influence or to get the University of Montana to move forward a little bit.

I will start with just a little bit of information. I'm originally from the University of Montana. We're in Missoula. Actually, I was looking at the Missouri State website yesterday, looking for a load of information about the size, the demographics here. Some applications had mentioned peer institution. And I clicked on the link and one of the schools mentioned as a peer institution in the Missouri state is the University of Montana. So, in a lot of ways, it's very similar to the institution here.

I'd say we do some things very well. We grew our graph. I mentioned being associated with the University of Montana. When I was a student there in the year 1980s, there were fewer than 9,000 students. We're around 14,000 now and are about to be seven or eight new buildings on campus that we have a lot of students.

Let me talk just a little bit about my experience just to give you some background. You don't want to hear about me but you'll get a little bit of an idea of some of the things I've been involved in at the university. I graduated from the University of Montana in 1986 and was in admissions. I spent a lot of the time working in admissions there. I was actually really surprised at how many people I have encountered in this conference who are in Web jobs or in IT jobs who started out in admissions.

And so, in college I really needed a lot of money to do it but I knew I loved being in a college campus. I really like my university. So, there's an opportunity to do some marketing, work on strategies. I did all of our publications and those kind of things until the Web came along. It was something that I had to add to my repertoire. I think everybody recognized right away that this was going to change the way that we recruited, the way that we communicated with respect to students.

My first-ever Web job came in 1999-ish, '98, '99, when our division of student affairs created a position to coordinate all those Web strategies and activities for about 11 departments. And then, it was only about a year when we had a new CIO that I worked with a little bit during that time offered me a position in IT. So, for the last 10 years in our IT organization, I have done a number of things, managing a digital media group. I have managed an application development group. I was IT/Web leader for a about year. And currently now I'm the director of IT communication, which I'll talk about a little bit more later on.

For me, mid-1990s was a huge turning point in my career. As I mentioned, I came out of college. I didn't really know what I wanted to do with my life even at that point. But the Web was something that I think had also changed everyone's lives. Probably all of us here changed our careers pretty dramatically. I did have some need for some leadership with the things that were coming that motivated me to go back and work on public administration degree. One of the things that I really focused on during that time back in school is organizational theories, organizational behavior, trying to understand how any organization like the university works and how decisions are made, how behaviors come about.

One of really valuable experiences that I had came shortly after I got my master's degree. I was getting involved in some of the governments on campuses is something that I would recommend if you're not really involved. I spent a couple of years as the president of our staff senate. I had the opportunity to rub elbows with presidents and vice presidents, deans in regions and legislators. Just like I said, I didn't understand how decisions got made, how the politics of a campus worked.

Probably the best experience I've had in IT in terms of learning and character building was leading an enterprise portal project over about a 4-year period. I think the first technology conference I ever went to was a form of technology conference in about 1999. At that point, I was just getting into IT. It was way above my head, the technology part of it. But on the first session that I went to, the speaker was talking about portals. And he said the technology part is the easy part. The hard part is going to be changing our institutions. It's going to be changing our policies and our processes. It's going to be changing the culture. It's going to be changing our concepts of ownership and all those kind of things.

So, I think it was at that point when I knew there's a place for me in the technology world, someone who may be isn't a technical person but can recheck the outcome in technology and what our institutions need to do to take advantage of that.

So, that's it for me. I read this quote or I heard it somewhere a few years ago. And a lot of people are talking about some of the things I've tried and I've been involved with that worked very well. I'll try to be very honest when talking about things that I tried that didn't work well and some of the surprises. There were a lot of surprises in the portal project communications I worked on. And typically, when you have a big project like that, you don't have surprises. The advantage of it is that in the end, I think I gained some experience that I can hopefully pass along here.

In my description of this presentation, when I was writing this description and developing the presentation idea back in the spring, I referred to "The Cluetrain Manifesto" and that was also mentioned in our session yesterday. How many of you have read this? Not too many. This is a book that I read in 2000 but it came out in 1999. Basically, the premise was that everything is going to be changing in the business world and also related to higher education in that this new technology was allowing conversations in a way that had never been possible. It really was going to shift the power and the control.

I think it resonated with me. It was very radical at the time. And it resonated with me, I think, in large part because having been associated with the university for sometime, I could see the frustrations in a lot of students I dealt with, not so much from the education side but more from the bureaucratic side of getting registered, paying bills, getting financial aid, getting actual advice and those types of things. And so, I was interested in this as a vision for how things were going to change on the road to technology that was coming along. And I think what's remarkable now is how accurate their vision of what was going to happen. Naturally, I was bothered then.

So, what we're going to do today as I try to talk about some of the things that we can do as an institution, as Web people, as marketing people, these folks who are in some management or leadership positions, what we can do to influence change on our campus, make changes in our campus and talk about these four areas. Stephen Covey, I read him a while back, his "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People". One of these habits that he talks about is, "Seek first to understand and then be understood." So, I think the first thing that's important is that for all of us, we need to really understand what's going on with the technology. And I think this embodies being in a campus, being involved. You are going to understand what are the most important on our campuses and the impact of the Web environment right now.

Attitude, I'm just going to talk about this a little bit. I think anytime we're trying to change behavior, attitude is a critical part of that. I had a real fear when I was moving from a divisions area into more of a technical field that I certainly wasn't prepared for that. I didn't have the technical background I needed. And I think what I was afraid of more than anything and what I think most people are afraid of is looking foolish.

I had this perception that people who were the technical people were a lot smarter than me. They knew a lot more than me and that was hard to deal with. I think at one point I just had to accept the fact that I may look stupid, it's OK. I'll just go along and I'll play along and I'll run along and I did. I think what I've learned more than anything, though, is that people who look like they know a lot, they do know a lot in certain areas but they also have gaps in their knowledge, gaps in their skills that someone with a communication background or marketing background or management background can fill in. I'll go into this a little bit more. Some of the attributions that I think every individual has to address and then try to influence others.

Opportunity. Let me talk a little bit about some of the things that I've done to actually try to influence change. I've been going to all the things I could possibly do. There are just some things that we tried that had worked or hadn't worked. And remember, once you have the opportunity to communicate or to influence, try to persuade people on your campus. I'll just talk about some things that I think could help you do that much better.

So, I understand this is our last week here at HighEdWeb. I mentioned something early on. I try to start every day at work by opening up our enterprise portal, a whole bunch of RSS feeds coming in. And the first one I read every day is Seth Godin's blog. Let me talk about some of the books that I've read from the influential talk leaders that I follow. I think Seth is one. We absolutely have to look at it in terms of understanding the current environment and where we're headed.

Just about a week ago, actually I read his blog and this comment was in there, "It's easy to be against something you're afraid of and it's easy to be afraid of something that you don't understand." And so, I guess as I turned that around and went from the bottom up, if we understand something, we're not going to be afraid of it. And if we're not afraid of it, we're going to be more likely to adopt it.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I read a profile he sent in Business Week. And basically it said that he has mastered marketing in the Digital Age. I believe you have seen his book "Meatball Sundae". So, if you don't read any other book, I would recommend this certainly, if you're in the marketing area, really, if you're in any kind of a management position at your university or college.

So, basically the premise of Meatball Sundae is that you can't put new marketing techniques on top of all those already in business and have to come out where you want. Really, what it's saying is that new marketing requires us to reinvent our entire organization. That's a lot to ask, obviously. I don't see our universities being totally reinvented. So, you'd say that we are looking forward in terms of understanding marketing and changing the way we market. But in most cases the basic organization, how we operate, is not changed.

I'm not going to go through all these. But in the book it has 14 trends. I think this is really helpful for you to understand, again, the environment and the impact, where our organizations need to adjust in order to take advantage of this.

Audience 1: Can I just say something, Gordy?

Gordy Pace: Yes.

Audience 1: I always worried about books because they take away something?

Gordy Pace: Yes.

Audience: Do you know what year this was published?

Gordy Pace: It was within the last year. And I also want to say I would subscribe to Seth's blog because he posts once, twice, three times a day.

This book, I just read this summer. I think it just came out within the last year. It's another one that I would recommend if you're trying to understand marketing in the new world. They used the term "Groundswell" to describe what's happening in the Web 2.0 world. It's subtitled "Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies". This is by Charlene Lee and Josh Bernoff from force to research. This is fairly research-based. They're having a lot of research and providing case studies about how people have implemented new marketing techniques.

I guess how they describe the Groundswell is, it's a social trend in which people use technologies to get things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations or like higher education institutions. Consequences of this new world are the things that we've all talked about and other speakers have talked about. The balance and power have shifted. Control of our marketing messages have really more or less come our way. If you're trying to control your brand, you might as well give up on that because people are thinking of brand as they would want to with it.

Another thing that really related back to the clue training, it's not just our interaction between our institutions and our external customers, prospective students, alumni donors and all that, but it's really a change in the relationship between our institutions and our internal employees and how they are communicating with each other and collaborating with each other.

There is a nice tool in this Groundswell that talks about how you can go about developing a strategy for social media in your marketing messages.  So, when you look at this, you start with people assessing your customers' social activities. And there are some nice meetings and they show you different types of markets and audiences, what the activity level is, objectives. Decide what you want to accomplish.Im always amazed at how often in our campus and probably elsewhere people jump to the bottom. And they jump to the technology part of it and say, "We need a visible presence so we need this and that," without really stopping to think about whether our audience is actually using that technology, what it is we're trying to accomplish with that technology.

I think what we want to take away from this book that struck me more than any is the strategy part of it and the plan for how relationships within customers have changed, not really, as I thought about that, in my campus anyway. I have always had this vision that the great thing about this new technology is when I look at all these people who applied in customer service support or students, they look miserable because they're sitting there all day long, answering the same questions over and over and over and over and doing mundane tasks over and over and over.

And I have seen how grateful people can be who are doing all of these mundane and repetitious things online and freeing up that personal contact with advisers, the customer support folks, to address much more complex questions and problems that students have.  What I have found for the most part is that, first of all, people feel threatened when you start taking away things they've been doing.  And they also don't really want a lot of things that allows some leadership from their management.  They don't want to take on more complex problems.  They don't want these things coming in to them, things that they don't know how to handle, again, that they might be foolish about.

So, I don't know certainly in my campus if we have achieved the kind of transformation to a much more rich personal contact because we've moved more mundane stuff online. But I do think that that is one area of leadership where, if you're in an office, you can impose to accept the fact that it is a great opportunity for us to interact with students in a whole new level. We'll provide you the training and the course and those kinds of things. I believe that's where we can improve our institution, improve retention issues and those types of things.

And one more book that I read a couple of years ago that I really enjoyed is Robert Scoble's and Shel Israel's book "Naked Conversations" about blogging. Essentially, the idea as I go around talking about blogging, marketing is there are some perceptions about blogging that are fairly persistent. And I don't know if these are your perceptions about blogging. But one comment I get about blogging is it's just personal journaling. Why should we ever use that in a university setting? The other perception is blogging is what journalists use to embarrass people and those kinds of things.

How could we ever use blogging in higher education? What I try to explain over and over is that blogging is a tool and that's how certain people use a tool. They just sit back and think about some ways to really use blogging differently in terms of content management system, influencing thought on campus. I'll show you how we've managed blogs on our campus.

We call it our "readable" blog. One thing I would recommend is that the April of 2007 issue of Wired did talk about an untold story, in particular of how Microsoft opened up blogging and video blogging to its employees. It really changed the perception from the outside world about Microsoft because people had contacts within the organization who were working on development projects. And this issue talks about that transparency in an office as we talked about in the first session yesterday.

And then, I'm just going to mention three other online possibilities that I think will help in terms of understanding what's going on. And quite often, we refer to this "Common Craft - Explanations in Plain English". So, basically what they do is they talk about things like blogging, wikis and RSS feeds, all of these new technologies. But they do it in a way that it's incredibly simple and entertaining. And I thought about the speakers in the presentation today with good ideas so that people can get a grasp of what a wiki is without me trying to explain it.

The New Media Center issues an annual Horizon Report. And it's a nice visionary piece that talks about emerging technologies. And it does it in a way that will tell you if these technologies aren't being used right now in higher education, these technologies will likely be used within the next three to five years. These technologies provide a way to see what the future might be.

And then, the last one that I highly recommend is Educause's "7 things you should know about" series. There's a little explanation what this is. The "7 things you should know about" pieces provide quick, no-jargon overviews of emerging technologies and related practices that have demonstrated or may demonstrate positive learning impacts. Any time you need to explain a new learning technology or practice quickly and clearly, look for a "7 things you should know about" brief from ELI.

Basically, what the 7 things they knew is technology type. I think one of the most recent ones, the thing that we just heard about, an avalanche of these questions. What is it? Who is doing it? How does it work? Why is it significant? What are the downsides? Where is it going? And what are the implications for teaching and learning? So, it's a nice tool. I think we have them back over about a four-year period. We refer to that. So, if anybody in your campus asks you what's this new technology all about and you don't know, this is a quick reference.

So, I mentioned my fear about moving from a nontechnical position to a technical area. I guess one of the experiences I've had is that more than anything, what affects behaviors and our decisions is this fear, this dread. I get to thinking as I was working on this presentation back to the mid-90's and the Web was just coming out, a conversation I had with another faculty member on the campus. She was terrified because she had spent her whole life preparing for this career and she could see that things were changing. She had this vision for her career which she had may not going to be there in a short amount of time.

This is an image that I actually used from a presentation a while back. Most of you will knows straight a case of student cell phone technologies. There was this story in Japan last year. The top 10 selling models all started as cell phone text models. It's a big thing in Japan to have somebody who is my age or older to use it. But I included this picture in this presentation because I think it tells the real story about what's going on. And that is the generation gap. And I've seen this particularly when I was working in our portal project.

I was managing a group of Web application developers who ranged in the age from 19 to 27 or 28. We were working in the group of our enterprise systems developers who ranged in the age from 35 to 65. I think the biggest surprise I had was how those two groups just could not come together. I as a project leader did not know a way of bridging that gap. But I think it's just an incredible mistrust between the younger and the older folks who didn't know what the heck they were doing. When they're older, the older generation thinks that the young, consummate kind of men. They were radical. They didn't know what they were doing, they're impossible, with scary issues and those types of things. It think really one of the most important skills that we have is somehow reaching that gap between baby boomers and these young people, our students, and these Web developers who are going to be coming in, having grown up with this technology.

The kind of vision that I think a lot of people had of my Web team that I just hired is people who are young and irresponsible. I think attitude-wise, the thing that can help most is staying young, think young and hanging out with young people and not just dismiss their ideas and what they're doing with this new technology. I have a 14-year-old son. He's on text messages all day long. I'm trying to pick his brain and I'm trying to pick as much as I can and understand how his world is different from my world and vision how his world is going to be much different in years of college and work.

So, opportunity. I've just been talking about some of the things that I've been involved in. Hopefully, I've had some positive impact and changed leadership in our campus. Honestly, I think the more people that you can have talking the same way who share visions and share ideas, the better. I formed a new group after I became the IT communications director a year ago, last summer. One of the first things I did because I went out individually to a whole bunch of different people who are in the campus, we just had to have a long, long conversation. I asked them what is it about communications between central IT and your area, your concerns, trying to get some other rolled in.

A few months later I had an idea that by doing that, I was connecting with people who for the most part, they truly understand all their issues, their challenges. So, I pulled together a group. We started with one other guy. I said, "Would you work to get a group together that just talked about technology issues?" And he said, "Yeah, that will be great." We started with three and a few other people.

And you could see the list. Obviously, you're not going to know many of the names but you can see what kinds of jobs and what areas they come from. I've got our associate vice president for enrollment services. I have our HR director. I have several people from the faculty, some technical people. For the most part, I've tried to have representatives from every sector of the campus, academics, research, student fairs, on and on. I have my instructional designer from our online area who happened to be married to a girl with some strategic decisions about who I invited. I think this is kind of an anti-Web 2.0 development meeting online. And we're still in a kind of questioning stage.

One of the first things we did was just a little brainstorming about what can you accomplish. And these were some of the ideas. It's pretty easy but I've clumped some of these together and see what people felt I needed to change about our campus -- more cooperation, more openness, more collaboration partnerships, getting away from the turf wars and unification of effort and all those kinds of things.

We call ourselves a "Think Tank". We haven't done a lot of things think tanks typically do in terms of writing white papers or making policy proposals. But more than anything, we're all trying to just jump on the same page and we all have our various channels up through deans and directors and vice presidents and whatnot so that there is some consistent influence, hopefully, about what's going on. So, that's one of the things that we've done.

Under the component of strategic planning, this shows that it involved a lot of people. Again, it's something that is not widely liked or used on our campus. I know your experiences with that. And it goes back to the early stage when we didn't have some control. And I think in a lot of cases, people in my campus don't like giving up that control or having other people have the opportunity to say what they should be doing.

But one of the things I did during the time that I was a Web director is I got one of our vice presidents to support financially this campus-wide Web strategic timing initiative. I needed some financial backing because one of the things I wanted to do is hire a professional facilitator. And all of a sudden, I have some influence somewhat from a higher administration.

My next step is going to our campus Web community and it can be an early sponsoring leader of this. And again, the surprise that came about it. There was some real emergence of resistance about doing this. We ended up having about 44 people from all of the campus who spent four hours in the afternoon and four hours the next morning in this process. But there were people who were adamant that we shouldn't do this. We found strategic planning things before and everywhere. We just generated a lot of ideas that you can't find a way or you can't do.

And I really struggled to try to explain, well, this is a different process and we know we have funding resource. What I want is some prioritization about what's most important and what we need to do if the resources that we have. I ended up having to agree with a facilitator to meet with our Web committee that he could explain the process and what we would get out of this.

Basically, we came up with the vision statement. We came up with three very simple goals, two of which we didn't think have anything to do with the Web. They had to do with leadership, change management and we're continuing this kind of planning process. So, in the end people have participated. I don't know if there is a huge value in changing our Web as it is today. But there is a huge value in changing people's relationship with each other, their trust on each other and understanding that they were part of this process. They were staying over in this and we asked them what they had to say. What we have done here is there is we created a document that has every single idea that's generated during these two days. And it's like eight-point type, three columns and it's 11 pages long. And so I shared that so that people could see all of the common things.

Another planning thing that we did, this is related to portal, and I actually had the same facilitator come back and do this. We were stuck at our portal project. While we were waiting for it, we've been working on it a while. So, we did a thing called a "force field analysis" where we got a group together and we brainstormed about all of the things, all of the possible things, and there were personal project for it. And then we stopped the brainstorming, all of the restraining forces, all of the things that were holding us back. And then we prioritized those into which we thought were the most important.

And this conversation is the result of that. So, our driving force is our ability to have single time under our systems. It's our ability to have a targeted messaging system where we could effectively communicate with folks. On the restraining forces side, there had been a lack of real marketing and communication about the work. And so, those were the three things that we checked and grabbed. And again, it shaped our decision, our behavior and our strategy. But more than anything, a lot of people had the chance to have a say in that process and understand what we were trying to accomplish with the portal.

Moving on, I know that we're actually close to the end. Blogging is a better opportunity. Blogging is a big investment. I started some blogging in our central IT organization. I had a community blog where I tried to focus on the distributed IT community and change the culture there and how we communicated with them. I did blogging again partly because it's a nice way to have some dynamic content in our IT website. We're trying again to change people's behavior in terms of subscribing to content as opposed to doing a listserv and sending it by email. We have our Web redesigning group that use blogging when talking about their project. So, we're starting to move on up. To get a chance to present anytime, that's another thing because I think it's important. This next week, our Web developer and I are doing a Web 2.0. I think there is going to be the 20-some people who will register for that. So, we have a good interest in that. A little bit later on, we'll give you more detail when I blog some wikis.

I think I wanted to talk about an opportunity to rehab. Sometime in our last winter or spring, our executive council actually sent a request to our Web team. They wanted a presentation about social networking. And I've been trying for a very long time to get in to this audience and talk about what was going on. And finally, it came from them. They want to know about social networking. We ended up reworking that, kind of ignoring what they ask. Specifically, the thing that we wanted to do was much more of a high-level talk about Web 2.0. So, what I'm going to do is show you some of the slides and some of the strategies we use to communicate to our executive officers and presidents, vice presidents and a few others who serve on that.

So, this was our open-screen. We talked about Web 2.0. We talked about the attributes, that it's truly about using generated content, sharing, collaboration and willingness. The Web is a completely different platform. And then, the applications show you how we address each of those. One of the things that I felt that we needed to do before we started was to yield and relate this new world where it will be something that they can understand and that's kind of evolved a metaphor. So, it wasn't smart to just come up with another metaphor like a Web 2.0 metaphor, a process that I think would suggest the metaphor, the Web 1.0 was like living in the suburbs and Web 2.0 was like living in the city.

So, we did the slide and said, "OK. So, what's it like to live in the suburbs?" Quite, solitary and private, disconnected, controlled, homogenous, safe. And then, Web 2.0 dynamic, diverse, a little bit dangerous, serendipitous, authentic, multicultural. There's public spaces. There's unique local characters. So, we started with this metaphor for how life can change. We talked about how you can see why our students in the 18, 22, 25 range like being in this area. And they done that and it was quiet for a while but that didn't go very well. And then, one of our associate people said, "I like women in the suburbs."

[Laughter]

And all of a sudden it opened up a conversation. And people then started to inject their fear. They did admit that they didn't like me and that sort of thing. They didn't like inserting an institution being in this area. So, it was a great tool. You can definitely use this if you're going to talk to folks who don't really understand how things have shifted.

So, quickly what we did in our presentation. We just ran through a high-level overview of a lot of these tools. But for the most part, we wanted to show you what was going on in these tools related to the University of Montana so that they understood that without us doing anything, there was a whole bunch of stuff out there that our users were generating 300 and some videos about the University of Montana on YouTube, 1300 photos at that time about to be tagged the University of Montana on Flickr to show the world how this works in terms of tagging and commenting and some conversation that was going on about the University of Montana.

The other thing that really helped to relieve their fears a little bit is, as we showed them a lot of these things, they saw that most of the conversation and most of the comments were very positive. I think I was consigned that even for me having this concern about what happened and then you don't have control over your message, I think it's because we're consigned that we have good things. We have a good environment. We have good education. When you look at the Web 2.0, most of this conversation is very positive.

We ran through MySpace, Facebook, went in. We showed the admissions office about the Myspace site.

Audience 2: Did you check all the comments before you showed them?

Gordy Pace: For the most part, we get pretty much a lot of stuff here. But I certainly didn't try to hide anything. And I think that was one of the messages we try to get across. There may be negative stuff out there but one of the reasons you need to understand if you're participating in this world is that you can't address those negative issues in the same environment that they come up. And also, that it's nice to show that, "OK, one person maybe complained about parking but that's generally a fairly minor issue." But with negative comments, typically people come back and support you. You don't have to be the one, it would be like what our CBS says, that it's more authentic when it's coming from your own students.

We ran through, of course, Facebook at that time. This is about the time that Facebook had announced that they were opening up their APIs. We shared a little bit of research about the very fast road of Facebook among 12 to 17-year-old since all these kids are going to our classes for the next two years. We tried to get across with any idea. Our campus is discovering email is obviously a great tool. We can communicate with everyone all at once and everything to everyone. And so, we talked about this concept that our students really don't use email all that much other than just to read what you sent them when they absolutely have to.

We talked about concept with messaging as opposed to email, messaging not just in text messaging but in all of the experience applications that also changed the concept of how folks communicate with each other. We talked about wikis, again, by showing the University of Montana Wikipedia entry and showing the revision history, who has been involved in writing that. And then, we showed them how one of our graduate programs was using the wiki to do some collaboration online. We showed them a little bit about Second Life. We talked about Delicious and social tagging. We talked about syndication of content and RSS feeds, on and on.

We talked about Mash-Ups. And this is something that I proposed to our CIO and we talked about it. But he didn't actually like the idea of talking about this. This is an example. We use this as example of something we developed in our portal, where we have an off-campus housing channel. We aggregate rental units from various property managements, real estate companies, mashed up the idea with Google Maps.

So, it was nice to show you that and show them what we were capable of doing in-house with existing data. By doing that, a lot of added help to our students in terms of student service, retention issues and those types of things.

And then just to quickly deliver, I have a couple of books that I'm going to recommend. "Made to Stick" is again a very good book that I read within the last year. If your job is to communicate, I highly recommend this. It basically talks about these sticky messages having six attributes -- simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions and stories. This is a book that I've read actually a couple of times and make notes and stick it up on our wall so I can refer to it. I won't go through a lot of detail but the six attributes spell success so it's easy to remember that. A lot of times when I'm trying to craft some communication, I refer back to this and try to take advantage of some of the strategies it suggests.

And then the other one that I would suggest is again a new book called "The Back of a Napkin". And this is talking about drawing as a way to not only communicate but also just to come up with ideas. One of my primary duties is helping our CIO create communications that he can take to his weekly executive officers' meetings. And I almost never need to request funding that don't start with words, "I need a picture that shows our number of infrastructure, I need a picture that depicts our identity creation process, I need a picture that is our emergency communication system."

And so, this really embraces the idea of being able to take a picture and show it to folks. Jeffrey yesterday talked about a lot of organization stuff. When somebody feels down, it is not the fault of the person who's receiving communication. It's the fault of the person who's doing that. So, we've really tried to embrace many things as simple as possible, understand folks who don't have technical background, making them feel like they've been part of the decision because they understand what's going on. We're not using fear against them, I think so. That's how they do.

We've got time for any questions?

Audience 3: For you.

Gordy Pace: OK. Any questions or comments? Does anybody have any experience or anything that you would like to share?

Audience 4: A question. I like the analogy about the city and the suburbs. So, I was thinking, when is the next time the suburbs become more signified as people go there and then it's more scary to become?

Gordy Pace: I haven't thought about that part yet.

[Laughter]

Audience 3: You will be back for the camp part.

Gordy Pace: Right, the camp, yeah. I think that's one thing, too, going back to that thing. We just have to accept that things are going to change so fast. Whatever it is today, we can get comfortable with it. And so, I don't know if I have the answer to what the next thing is but we know it'll change.

Audience 3: Thanks, Gordy. Thank you very much.

Gordy Pace: Thank you.

[Applause]

Announcer: For more presentations from the 2008 HighEdWeb Conference visit HighEdWeb.org/2008 or sign up for our podcast and feed at HighEdWeb.org/podcast.xml

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