Framed Conversation: National Challenges from PSOL 2009

Enjoyed my first time attending and presenting at a Minnesota State College Student Association (MSCSA) Conference on Friday, October 22, 2010.   What an energetic audience! The students were active, engaged, and provided Minnesota Online with theirthoughts on challenges identified by online learners in state and national surveys.

In the conference session I used graphic facilitation to frame a student conversation on challenges connected to online learning. The image on the right is a collage of the images used in the student conversation, the image below is the graphic record of what students had to say.

The MSCSA student conference has an emphasis on building student leadership skills as well as promoting knowledge of the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system.  The MSCSA "is an association of the Minnesota public two-year college students, which works to ensure accessible, quality, and affordable public higher education while providing students with representation, leadership development, and communication across the state. Students in this organization are representatives on many of our system standing committees.  They take on the job of representing students admirably as the work to on important issues in higher education.

Individuals interested in student leadership may also want to check out the Generation Yes Blog.  This blogs focus is on empowering students with technology and in a recent post provided some information on the topic of ,Student Leadership - Building Authentic 21st Century Skills.



Blog Slacker, but not a total slacker

Have been busy since March.  Not writing or blogging, but have been working on improving my graphic faciliation skills and using them in focused presentations. Two topics over the past few weeks have kept me busy.  One a conversation on perceptions of and pursuing quality in institutions of higher education (in September) and the other on priorities of online students at a student association conference in Bloomington, MN(October, 2010). 

In each conversation issues of quality are key.  Have also been continuing my reads about women's leadership and qualities of our leadership as this topic continues to intrigue me.  Lots of good articles out there, but for tonight share the following thoughts from a  Caliper Study:

About Women's Leadership Qualities


1. Women leaders are more persuasive than their male counterparts.

2. When feeling the sting of rejection, women leaders learn from adversity and carry on with an "I'll show you" attitude.

3. Women leaders demonstrate an inclusive, team-building leadership style of problem solving and decision making.

4. Women leaders are more likely to ignore rules and take risks.

Overcoming the Stall

It's been a while between posts, but current research on gender, marriage, and a recent report titled The White House Project: Benchmarking Women's Leadership jump started my thinking about all this again and inspired me to submit a presentation proposal to The Chair Academy in Minneapolis, MN March 15-18, 2009.

If you read the The White House Project research and PEW research you will find:

1.Women's leadership research indicating a stall for women leaders in all sectors of the workforce (The White House Project, 2009),
2. Research that indicating women are surpassing men in earnings (PEW, 2010),
3. Gender and leadership research indicating that both men and women make good leaders (PEW 2009).

So, voila paradox. The good thing about paradox is that it gets the brain all fired up and energized (at least it does my brain) and so while the blog stalled for awhile (13 months) I am back at it and through the required paper that is a part of the conference I sort of met a goal posted in 2008.

Any writing that helps the thinking process is good and maybe with the push the conference proceedings and the recent research provides I will get back on track with the paper and webinar thing. Maybe the blog thing too.