Review: iChampion Presented by the CORE Initiative

One of the things I like to do is attend professional development related to teaching. It is a great way to find out about all kinds of tips and tricks related to teaching. I've been to some good ones, some not so good ones, and some in between. But, this one was pretty solid. From the keynote speaker, Mr. George Couros (@gcouros) to Ms. Amy Mayor (@friEDTechnology), iChampion was a great professional development conference.

George Couros

This guy is good. VERY good. Entertaining and inspirational. A former educator and administrator, he has taken his insight on the road to share his knowledge and push his book, The Innovator's MindSet. Now, I say "former" educator but only in the sense that he is no longer working in the classroom. The reality is that we all, teachers, students, and graduates must be lifelong learners. The pace of change is too rapid and sticking our head in the sand will mean we are quickly out of date. My advice is to start by reading this guy's book. See him speak. Attend professional development opportunities and take them seriously. Get audible to make your travel time to work more productive. Follow professional developers like FriEDTechnology (see below) and Mr. Couros as part of your professional development network. And, if you get the chance, see this guy speak. Not only is he inspirational, he was entertaining as well.

Effective and Speedy FORMative Assessment with Google Forms

I've been a fan of Ms. Mayer of FriEDTechnology for a while. She puts together GREAT YouTube videos. Short little, helpful videos that really get to the heart of the matter quickly. Long story short, she makes it look easy. This session was packed. Clearly, lots of people were interested in what she has to say or, just wanted to see her as the face behind those videos. Being somewhat of a more advanced user of Google Forms and already being familiar with formative assessment, this session was not particularly valuable for me. But, she did a great job and I did manage to take away a few tips and tricks, particularly with respect to Fubaroo, an add-on to Google Chrome that can be integrated with Google Forms to automatically grades form submissions. Very cool. If you are in education, be sure to check out her YouTube channel. Great source for professional development.

Personalized Learning to Create a Collaborative Culture

I was a little confused by this session. It was not quite what I was expecting. I was looking for collaborative tools and techniques to encourage students to work together to accomplish some sort of task. This was more focused to collaboration as it relates to professional development, not so much as the teacher level but more so from an administrator level developing a collaborative professional development environment for teachers. This is great and it is necessary. It was just not quite what I was expecting. The presentation itself was also a little old school, despite the attempt to incorporate a few interactive tools in attempt to engage the audience.

Beyond the Red Pen: Providing Meaningful Feedback for Students

This was another session by Ms. Mayer. One of the first things she shared was pinning tabs within Chrome. This is great when you have lots of tabs open and you need more space. Right click on the tab of interest in Chrome, then select Pin. Then, she moved on to reopening a closed tab again, by right clicking and selecting 'Reopen closed tab', useful for reopening a closed tab that you accidentally closed by accident.I was pretty familiar with the next part where she showed us how to leave comments within a Google Doc and Make Suggestions. One thing that I did learn was the inclusion of someone's name in a comment to direct them to a specific comment. Simply type '+' and their email address. This allows you to direct a comment to a specific collaborator on a document. When they are notified, they are presented with a link that takes them directly to the location of the comment within the document. She then shared another add-in, 'read&write'. Unfortunately, we were not able to get it to work and there was not enough time to troubleshoot the issue before she moved on to ScreenCastify, another Google Chrome add-on. I have seen this add-on before but I did find it useful to have it demonstrated for me. I can now more clearly see the applicability to quickly and conveniently provide feedback to students. So, rather than marking up a document, a short 2-3 minute video could be used.

Recipe for Fried Learning: G Suite Hyperdocs & Slides Part 1 and 2

This was interesting. As the title implies, this session was over hyperdocs. I've heard this term before but was not positive to what it referred. But, based on what I saw in this session, I already practice some of these principles. She did share with us various eye dropper add-ons within Google's Chrome Store that we could use to match up colors in documents. She also shared with us Flat Icon which is useful for finding unique icons. Then, she went over using Word Art to spruce up text. Then, you don't want your slides to be boring do you? Try Auto Draw. This is a pretty nifty site. You draw something relatively quickly and it tries to interpret what you are drawing and "cleans it up" a bit. Pretty cool! Another nifty little trick to get "audio" to play on a slide is to record a video and insert it into the slide. Right click on the video and set to auto-play and then shrink the video the "hide" it from viewers (note: you cannot completely hide it but this essentially gives the viewer the illusion of a slide with audio. Again, pretty cool. She went over a few other nifty little tools but honestly, I was already pretty familiar with some of those such as the format painter, grouping images, etc. One final thing that I really thought was great was creating a shared document that forces users to download a copy, rather than your original file. Copy the share link and then delete everything after the final forward slash (i.e. /edit...). When your user clicks on the link, they will be presented with a dialog screen that forces them to create a copy of the document into their own Google file located in their own Google Drive. That was a great little find. Thanks Amy!

Scott Burrows

Mr. Burrows, a motivational speaker, was brought in as the keynote for the second day of the conference. He did a great job of relating his struggle to overcome adversity to the issues faced in education today and inspired the audience to

Online Instruction: Best of Times, Worst of Times

This session was not quite what I was expecting but I did take a few things away from it. This was really about aligning objectives with lessons and assessments using appropriate course design and applications that are available and suitable at different levels of Bloom's Taxonomy.  Part of this included rubrics that are aligned with course design best practices as well as Bloomin' Apps, which aligns apps with different levels of Blooms taxonomy for teaching and assessing student learning. Very cool. One little tidbit that I did take away was the comment that it takes 3 times as much time for an instructor to teach an online class compared to traditional classroom instruction. Given the front-loading required to do an online class properly, I believe it. But, I asked for and am waiting on the citation for the study this referenced.

Quick and Easy Ideas for Integrating Technology into Your Class

Dr. Putman is a fellow professor here at Tarleton though, being on the Fort Worth campus, I have rarely crossed paths with her. It is a shame. While I have run across most of the tools she went over, I have not seen anyone who has mastered them as much as she has. Her primary presentation tool was Nearpod. While not earth shattering, it was the content and layout that blew me away. Extremely professional. Everything seemed to have a place and a purpose. Various pages required the audience to engage with her while others took us to different pages on her site. One take away I thought really useful was the use screen casts to explain assignments. I have some rather robust discussion boards in many of my classes that I think including a brief video could more clearly outline my expectations for what I want the students to do. One tool I was not familiar with but when she demoed it, it was pretty cool; Padlet. Another idea I really like was to have students submit writing assignments to a blog and have them Tweet out their blog post to some one specific (domain expert); she noticed the writing quality increased. She recommended the use of class hashtags, something I already do. I include them in the syllabus (a Google Doc) and whenever I reference the course, I use it. The last thing I made note of was Popplet, a free mind-map tool. I've used mindmup before but pretty cool.

Use of Video in the Classroom

This was kind of informal but a pretty cool presentation. It would take me a little out of my comfort zone to do some of the video this guy was doing. But, it was cool none the less. He does little short videos using his phone and directly uploads them to YouTube. Though He uses YouTube Capture on his iPhone, we found the YouTube app on android has the same capability. This session definitely had me rethinking the need to be so formal for short little explanation videos. He also mention Screencastify for PC screen captures but I prefer Adobe Presenter myself. As a bonus, I overheard that Explain Everything and Flip Grid were also pretty awesome tools though I am not familiar with either of them.

Merging Media Literacy & Student's Connection to the World

This was an interesting session though there was not much take away in terms of tips and tricks or tools. The discussion revolved around millennials and how to reach them. Lots of interaction in which the audience replied to PollEverywhere and TodaysMeet. Pretty cool. The discussion centered around media/digital literacy. Most, if not all of her content can be accessed through her presentation.

Google Classroom...Teachers are Students, Too

This was a 30,000 foot view of Google Classroom. It was really geared towards the value of it as a professional development tool for districts. But, the presentation provided very little in the way of detail. Again, very high level. But, it was my first real exposure to Google Classroom. Looking forward to my training session tomorrow.

Google Educator, Level 1 Training

I am a bit of a power user when it comes to Google. I do not do all things Google but I use their products a lot. Having said that, I still managed to learn a fair amount during the training session. Put on by +friEDTechnology,  I have been a fan for a while and was not disappointed. While not particularly deep, it was wide. They covered sheets, docs, slides, sites, search, hangouts, groups, Google+, and perhaps a few others I can't recall of the top of my head. What I really thought was cool was not so much the specifics but rather, the method of using hyperdocs to provide starter documents and the use of screen shots to validate effort. Pretty cool. If EdTech is your thing and you get a chance to attend their training, I highly recommend.

Conclusion

All in all, this was pretty darn good. While not a "techie" conference or academic conference, like I normally attend, this was more for practicing teachers in primary and secondary levels. But, I found much of it quite interesting and useful. I am glad to hear that thye have a grant to continue to do this next year for sure, probably the following year, and hopefully it becomes self-funding beyond that. Next year, I will move up to Google Training Level 2 and beyond that, shoot for becoming a Google Trainer. With any luck, I'll see you there next year!

Review: International Conference and Annual Meeting 2017

Well, here goes my next review. My school, Tarleton State University, is pushing for AACSB accreditation. For those who may not know accreditation is a designation that recognizes that you meet some minimum threshold of standards. As it relates to AACSB specifically, they are the premier accrediting body for business schools. So, it is kind of a big deal. They make sure that we have processes and procedures in place to insure faculty development, assessment of programs, funding models, etc. We have joined AACSB, filed our initial report, have been assigned a mentor, and are actively working on our self-evaluation report. All of this to tell you that attending various AACSB functions is part of the process as we learn the ins and outs of accreditation, identify opportunities for improvement, and network with other AACSB member schools/faculty. In this particular case, I am attending #ICAM2017 . This is their big international conference and annual meeting. This year, it is in Houston Texas. I've never been a big fan of Houston though I have to admit, the more times I come here, the more it grows on me.

Back to the conference. My first session was a pre-conference workshop. AACSB has what they call "Affinity Groups". This particular affinity group was the Online Affinity Group. Ironically, at least to me, this was their very first meeting. I would have thought that such a group would have been around a while. But, being the very first meeting, there was a bit of housekeeping that was necessary. We started off by reviewing a set of by-laws and then moving to approve them. They had already been in the AACSB online repository for review and they were modified versions of by-laws from other affinity groups so that was a pretty smooth process. They rest of the meeting was at the heart of what you might think the Online Affinity Group is about. They setup 6 poster sheets with topics on them; topic that were identified in the AACSB online forum. Each person was to choose one they were interested in and then identify a second one they were interested in. For the first have of the rest of the meeting you discussed your topic with others interested in the same topic and then over the last have, you moved to your other topic and did the same thing with a different group (for the most part) of people.

Online Affinity Group Meeting
The first topic I participated in was "Curriculum & Learning: Design for Online Learning". We started off by introducing ourselves and describing our experience with online learning...and teaching. One of the biggest issues discussed was the importance for training and support for faculty. Additionally, funding and faculty buy-in are musts. The issue of insuring quality online offerings came up to which one person identified Quality Matters and how they use them to certify the quality of their courses. With respect to training faculty, some indicated that training was mandatory before a faculty member could teach a course while others indicated that training was optional. Additionally, it was noted by a few individuals of differences between younger versus older faculty and their interest and developing and seeking help in developing online courses. In general, it seemed like most participants at the table were more or less involved with online courses/programs but it was clear that everyone was interested in various nuances that could be used to improve what they are doing. One program brought up an interesting approach, at least interesting to me given that we do not do it. Their program is synchronous. They require students to participate in online courses synchronously. This is great for interactivity but can be problematic for student over widely dispersed areas and for those who have work/life conflicts. But, in their environment, it seems to work. They stressed the need for internal support, keeping supplementary videos at 10 minutes or less, and they use WebX to communicate with students. The one last thing worth noting was that everyone at this session was using Blackboard for the Learning Management Systems (LMS) thought the school providing synchronous online courses is considering moving to Canvas due to their ability to align course results with assessment data.

The second session I sat in on during the Online Affinity Group's session was over Improving Online Delivery. A LOT of the content was simply a rehash of the content from the first session. Synchronous versus asynchronous came up again. A discussion about online groups and appropriate sizes came up; 10-20 is too many, 4-5 is ideal. The issue of asynchronous projects and how students collaborate was mentioned. One thing I thought was interesting was the need for course updates. One school requires courses to be updated every three years. Some schools pay professors for those updates. However, one person mentioned that there's no definition of what constitutes "an update". In my particular field, this is not an issue;) The use of instructional designers should not be overlooked. This table also mentioned the use of WebX to work with students. In fact, they use WebX to interact with students online and , for hybrid classes, then have a flipped classroom in which students only work on projects in face to face classes. They also mentioned that they have students physically show up to campus for 1 week at the beginning of their programs.

Technology in Business Schools

This session was for the the Technology in Business Schools (TBSr) Affinity Group. A large portion of the session was on describing the roll that TBSr fulfills, the benefits to membership, etc. The speaker, from the University of Texas, described the value of membership from the perspective of a dean as providing advice on targeting dollars invested in IT, assessments of investment effectiveness, etc. From a college's IT director perspective, it provides  exposure and opportunities to learning from some of the best in the business, a confirmation of efforts, and so on. Related to this are some of the benefits which includes bench marking, best practices, TBSr survey results, reviewing and sharing of literature, etc. Membership also provides opportunities to develop relationship, attend their annual conference, and engage with members throughout the year, each of which can be helpful when trying to address problems today's business schools face.

One thing that drew my attention were some of the results from the 2015 TBSr survey in which the average AASCB school spent approximately $1000 per student on IT/IS and approximately $8000 per faculty member. What I found interesting was the comparison to non-AACSB accredited school which was approximately $700 and $6500 respectively. The conclusion was clear. AACSB schools invest more heavily in technology than their non-accredited counterparts.

Another very interesting benefit discussed was the external review they provide. A free service (the only charge is paying for reviewer travel), they will examine a school's use of metrics, IT/IS administration, application support, lab and classroom scheduling, desktop support, mobile device support, budget responsibilities, digital signage, research support, classroom and instructional support, event support, infrastructure management, etc. Essentially, the process is to establish the scope, build a team, go through a discovery process which includes initial exchanges of information (strategic plans, org charts, etc.) and then an onsite visit. It is very similar to the assessment process BUT, results are not shared with AACSB nor anyone else, unless you say it is ok.

The last tidbit that I thought was important was a brief discussion about building a new building. Make sure you have somebody, if not multiple somebodies that support technology on campus heavily involved in the approval process of a new building. Once the walls are up, construction is done. But, technology changes so fast that any new construction needs to be built with the idea that the technology infrastructure can be easily updated and implemented in a way that maximizes the value of future technologies with minimal impact on building renovation in the future.

Plenary I – Daring Leadership: The Four Pillars of Courage

Dr. Brown talked about "the four pillars of courage" and the role that vulnerabilities play with respect to courage. The author of several books, Dr. Brown related vulnerabilities to courage in an entertaining and unique way. She was quite clear that she is referring to social vulnerability as opposed to other types of vulnerabilities such as system vulnerabilities.The four pillars of courage are vulnerabilities, clarity of values, trust, and rising skills. Values keep you grounded and provide guidance when faced with difficult situations. Trust is needed to make deep connections and finally, rising skills, help you learn from mistakes and allow you to improve. She is far more articulate that I am. See her TedTalk by clicking on her image above.

Online Education: Challenges and New Business Models

I am some of my colleagues were a little disappointed with this session. It was not the speakers. I think we were just looking for more actionable content; things that we could take back home and implement in order to improve our online programs and courses. Rather, this session was more focused on some of the social ramifications that online education enables and causes.

Plenary II: Culture and Customers
This session was interesting. Presented by Aylwin B. Lewis, President and CEO of Potbelly Sandwiches. He gave a very cool talk about how he has tried to developed a diversified, values based leadership team at Potbelly Sandwiches and tie that to a corporate strategy that resonates all the way down to local employees at their stores. This guy is inspirational and if you get the chance to see him speak, take the time. It is worth it. 

Documenting Faculty Contributions in Engagement, Innovation, and Impact

Now, this was the best session so far in terms of identifying actionable content that we could take back and do something with. The session began by briefly identifying engagement, impact, and innovation as "defined" by AACSB. But, as noted in this brief discussion, their definitions are purposefully vague enough so as to allow schools to more operationally define them within the context of the mission and values of your particular school. So, a brief discussion among the audience ensued to define the each term as "we" understood them. Then, each speaker proceeded to provide sample definitions from their respective institutions and then provided sample examples of artifacts for each term. These definitions and metrics were developed This, I felt was particularly valuable. Both presentations can be found in the AACSB Exchange and are each worth looking through for those examples. but, briefly, one of the examples was about teaching effectiveness (AACSB Standard 12). They use peer evaluations, student scores on standardized tests, etc as metrics with which to assess teaching effectiveness. Then, in the specific example they provided, they have each faculty member document their performance on each of those metrics. They do this annually and require it as part of their qualification for merit raises. This session was pretty darn good. Take a look at those slides. Well worth it.

Leveraging the New AACSB Brand
This was more of a housekeeping session. It was somewhat relevant though. AACSB is making a strong push to make their "brand" more recognizable to potential students and businesses. Part of that includes not only new logos but also a logo for AACSB Members who are not necessarily accredited. This impacts us as we are members working towards accreditation. What this means is that we can start using their member logo to let our students know that we are members of AACSB and start to tell them our "story".

Plenary III – Brace for Impact

This was another interesting session. The speaker was Margaret Heffernan. She too has a TedTalk that has gone somewhat viral. Actually, she has several. But, this one was about her book, Willful Blindness. She painted a picture of a world not only full of problems but also full of opportunity. Perhaps one of the things that stuck out most to me was her description that business leaders are better educated, have more resources, and access to more information than they have ever had in human history and yet, mistakes continue to get bigger and more impactful than ever before. Part of this, she argued, has to do with willful blindness in which people simply do not want to take the risk of speaking up for fear of somehow being ostracized. Relating it to Ms. Brown's earlier talk, she reiterated the necessity for courage and for people to be willing to take chances, even when the outcome is uncertain.

Defining and Measuring Impact

This was my final session. It was one of the best which was nice, leaving on a good note. The two speakers first related AACSB definition of 'impact'. Impact is about making a difference, having a strong effect, about change that can be attributed to a particular action, etc. While the standard provides a list of examples of impact, the speakers explained that you neither have to provide examples of all of their list not are you limited to there list. But, the speakers also noted that the AACSB's definition is purposefully vague as it is really up to individual schools to define what impact means to them. To that end, they stressed relating impact to your mission statement. Look for impact as it relates to the important issues you've identified in your mission statement. Talk to stakeholders such as students, alumni, businesses, etc to determine what they think impact means and how the school has impact. The speakers distinguished between quality and impact, where quality might describe journal rankings, acceptance rates, etc whereas impact might be represented by research being used by external stakeholders, faculty invitations to present at conferences, citations, etc. They also stressed the need for balance and less emphasis on inputs (student profiles, organizational structure, etc) and more focus on outputs (student placement, career opportunities, number of majors graduated, etc.). As I said, this was a good session. It came with some actionable things we could take back and use to improve what we do.

All in all, this was a pretty good conference. We got to spend some time connecting, learn a few things, and get away from the office for a bit. And, as I understand it, my office is still there. I have volunteered to attend next year's ICAM. But, I think my Dean is on to me...it's in Hawaii;)

Review: 3/14 ISSA Ft. Worth Chapter Meeting

I attended the Ft. Worth Chapter ISSA meeting yesterday for the first time in a while. My new position has made it difficult to get away and they have undergone some changes that I was excited to go see. At this point, there is a lot of aspiration. I am excited to see what the perspiration is able to produce. Nevertheless, the first meeting's presenter did a great job. Ms. Sharon Reynolds, CISO of Omnitracs, LLC, gave a presentation over the security, or lack thereof, of the computers within our automobiles. While she is in the area related to trucking and freight, the issue is much larger in scope. Essentially, this issue stems from poor designs developed decades ago before IT computer security was on the tip of everybody's tongue like it is today. Controller Area Networks (CANs) are used in automobiles today and essentially let anyone send messages of any kind across the network. This is like in the "old days" of shared ethernet...but worse. When your computer crashes, you reboot. When your car crashes...  Because it is a shared bus with not authentication, once you access the system, you can start sending commands to virtually anything connected to the CAN. Unfortunately, in today's automobiles, that can be an awful lot. Consider that braking, steering, ignition, fuel, etc all tend to be computer controlled in new automobiles. Toss in Bluetooth functionality and all of a sudden, attack vectors go wireless too. This can get scary really quickly. See the video below. In their case, Chrysler had to issue a recall which can get extremely expensive.

Now, Jeep Grand Cherokees were not her only example. Toyota, Fords, and even other "unnamed" vehicles were cited. One of the more recent examples was Tesla. However, in the case of Tesla, something interesting happened. Tesla issued a patch within 10 days of the exploit that automatically updated their cars remotely, thus representing a significantly more efficient process of addressing the issue than having to perform a recall. Additionally, they upped the security of their cars by requiring updates to be digitally signed by Tesla for the car to download a patch. Pretty nifty Mr. Musk;). At least passenger car do have one thing going for them. Their CAN design is unique to each manufacturer, model, and year. So, they have security through obscurity. For those of a security mind. That is of little comfort but at least it is something. Large vehicles, including semis, school buses, etc are standardized meaning as these hacks get easier, it would be easier for organized crime to shut down a fleet of vehicles, holding them for ransom until a company paid. Nation states could paralyze critical infrastructure by making it unsafe for trucks to safely deliver needed goods and services.

Now, it was not all doom and gloom. There are a number of acronyms working on this problem from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI). They are looking to develop standards as well as policy to make it more difficult to hack vehicle and impose stiff penalties for those who do. In the mean time, they next time you are driving down the road and your car does something weird, maybe it's a glitch. Then again, maybe it's your friendly neighborhood hacker;)

Review: Southwest Decision Science Institute Conference 2017

This is a small regional conference that I like to attend regularly because it is laid back, friendly, and most of the research presented is exploratory and thus, usually quite interesting. I usually get some of my very best research ideas from this conference (as opposed to some of the big name conferences in my discipline). So, with that in mind, here's my review of this year's conference in Little Rock, a new location for the conference.

The first session I attended was part of the Innovative Education track. Since there were multiple sections over this track and my paper later in the day was in this track, I wanted to see what was going on. The paper was titled "IT Careers Camp: Broad Lessons Learned from Eight Year of 'Doing IT'" by Bartczak, Downey, McGaughey, and England, all from the University of Central Arkansas. Doing something like this is a little out of my comfort zone but essentially, the idea was putting on a summer camp open to high school students from around the state. Cost to students was free due to the sponsorship by an area fortune 500 company. There were multiple goals given the different constituents involved. For the sponsor, it was to address shortages in technical staff. For the university, it help to develop a pipeline of students as well as job placement for their students. The camp is something they were doing for 3.5 days and they felt that having students stay overnight in dorms was important. Again, there was no cost to students. Important things to include are parent involvement the first day to help answer questions about what IT is (increase awareness of IT), make it fun, promote the university, and actively recruit females. They emphasized the need to partner with area employers, collaborate with other departments, identifying best/appropriate advertising channels, dorm stay, factoring in "slack time" for students, and the encouragement of "return campers" who are candidates for more advanced activities and can become leaders in subsequent camps. Regarding execution, build excitement before the camps starts through FB, crowd source t-shirt design, etc. Include hands on activities such as robotics and 3-D printing. Include some variety in the schedule and encourage students to bring their own devices. Seek help from area businesses and "keep 'em fed'. The results indicated that the camps did increase female student awareness of IT major and related careers and approximately 10% of campers ended up attending the university.

The second presentation I attended was, well, my session, the second Innovative Education session. The first presentation was "An Analysis of Student Perceptions of the Quality and Course Satisfaction of Online Courses" by Cynthia Barnes and Michael of Lamar University and the University of Houston-Clear Lake respectively. I was surprised a little as they go into their presentation because the focus was a little different than what I had anticipated. They examined student perceptions of the quality of online versus face to face classes by asking students of their perceptions. They found that students like online classes due to their flexibility, responsiveness to emails, technical support, ability to control use of multi-media, instructor's delivery strategies, etc. Factors that lead to student satisfaction include timely feedback, social presence, support services, quality learning outcomes, and collaboration and interaction. Unfortunately, most students feel that they learn more from face to face classes than they do online. Teaching mostly online courses, I found this disheartening but, they were not done just yet. While there were no difference of opinion between the genders, older students stated that they tend to learn more from online classes whereas younger students learn more in face to face classes. Additionally, those with little experience taking online courses state they learning more from face to face classes while those with more online class experience state they learn as much or more in online courses. All students, regardless of major, seem to feel face to face classes are better learning environments.

The next presentation were "Tips for Effective Student Engagement in the Classroom" by Khaled Alshare of Qatar University. He discussed the importance of student engagement, regardless of whether or not it is academic or non-academic. He described student engagement as "energy in action". It is important to develop student engagement "patterns", particularly for students at risk so they do not fall through the cracks. Demonstrate each classes' relevance by taking the time to go over the objectives for the day in detail and relate them to the students. Plan class activities around the objectives and provide students time to reflect on what they learn. Finally, it does not all have to be academic. He included an extra credit assignment where students submitted jokes relevant to the class to him which, if approved, he shared in a "joke" discussion thread with the rest of the class. Reminds me of the funny videos that I share with my students.

The presentation right before mine was "Technology, Education, and Development: The Driving Factors" by Kamssu, Siekpe, Alyami, and Nkonge, all of Tennessee State University. The impact technology has on education is largely seen as positive but there are negative effects as well. For example, there has been a decline in student handwriting ability given that many/most students use a keyboard of some type to complete their homework. Nevertheless, Brewer et al, 2005 found that technology, when combined with sound educational principles, can enhance student learning. Students find technology interesting, it can increase skills, and replace irrelevant/dated text books. It can also improve students' communication skills, collaboration skills, as well as their ability to concentrate and it can improve their global awareness. Because students are becoming more comfortable with technology, they are helping to future proof their prospects as they become more adaptable to potential technologies of the future.

The next presentation was the best of the conference, mine, over "'Chunking' Semester Projects: Does it Enhance Student Learning?". It was well received but I will dedicate a separate blog post to that so I can go into more detail.

The next session I attended was the Marketing track where the session chair was Dr. Thiagarajan Ramakrishnan of Prairie View A&M. "Ram" an I were doctoral students back at the University of North Texas and it was great to catch up with him. I sat in for the first presentation by Dr. Wu, one of my colleagues at Tarleton State University who gave a presentation over "Neuromarketing Stimuli, Methods and results: A State-of-the-Art Review". Between being a colleague and out of my area of expertise, I am going to pass on summarizing her presentation.

I sat in on a few other sessions and presentations but did not get a lot out of them until I sat in on the Social Media & Social Networking track. Specifically, a presentation by Dr. Hill of the University of Central Arkansas over the "Temporal Effects in Social Media Based Big Data Streams" was interesting. Important aspects of big data include the volume of the data, its velocity, and variety (Laney, 2001). Social media typifies this definition. To be able to identify patterns, temporal precedence is important as well (Cook and Campbell, 1979). This makes something like Twitter a treasure trove of data. In order to examine this, Dr. Hill looked at social media based election predictions. Models built "after the fact" for the German election of 2010 and the U.S. election of 2008 suggest that such prediction might be possible and there is real interest in this. A Google Scholar search for "Social Media Election Prediction" yields over 130,000 hits. Now, the caveat to this is that these have been models based on "past" elections. Detractors of this approach include Gayo and Avello, 2012 as well as Lazer, Kennedy, King, and Vespignani, 2012 whi argue that so far, such models represent post-hoc analyses and are not predictive tools. Dr. Hill gathered data for the 2014 and 2016 U.S. elections to examine differences. He gathered data from candidates for the house and the senate from candidate Twitter accounts. Not surprisingly, he found significant differences and "habits" that seem to be related to the success/failure of a candidate's election to office. However, he also found that the time element has an effect on the volume, velocity, and variety of big data and that as a result, the development of a true predictive model is unlikely. He plans to continue his data gathering over future election cycles in order to further his research.

Unfortunately, I was late to the next presentation, "Automating the Literature Review Process for Academic Research Studies by Dr. Stephens and Dr. Young both of Bradley University. I thought it might be quite interesting and the part that I was able to see truly was. Essentially, by using a web scraping tool (Web Scraper.io) and Google Scholar, you can gather articles for review almost instantly. While this certainly would do little good for articles that you need to read and digest, for research in which you are wanting to do some sort of text analysis on, it could be hugely beneficial. Even in the case of the former, it at least provides you with a way to methodically and consistently gather data through Google Scholar. For example, you can pull different fields, such as the abstract for textual analysis. For articles that have PDFs attached/linked, you can "grab" those as well if you want to go into more depth. This was very cool. I wish I had been able to see the entire presentation.

The final regular presentation I saw was titled "Behavioral Intentions of Performance on Student Evaluation of Course Quality: An Application of the Theory of Planned Behaviour" by Miller, Furman, and Jackson of Henderson State University (HSU), Augusta State University, and HSU respectively. The biggest take away for me from this presentation was to survey students at the half-way mark to make sure that the class is on track to meet the objectives stated at the beginning of the semester. As someone who has started paying closer attenuation to course level objectives, someone who has in the past taken unofficial mid-semester surveys to gauge my own performance, and someone who has, just this semester, formalized my mid-semester survey based on our own university's extension/application of Chickering and Gamson's (1987) work, I found this particularly interesting. It made me consider the need to update my mid-semester surveys to include some sort of statement to determine the student's opinion about our progress as it relates to meeting the stated course objectives.

After that presentation, I stepped out and ended up joining the doctoral consortium that Mr. and Mrs. Dr. Prybutok led. For the most part, I was not officially invited and rather, joined them along with Ram who was there to discuss some of his experiences as a former doctoral student and now professor. I have always taken to role of mentoring very seriously and appreciated those who have taken the time to mentor me. Unfortunately, but the time the focus shifted to junior faculty (I guess technically I am now senior faculty, just less senior than Mr. Dr. Prybutok), I had to leave. But, this is something I would be interested in participating in, in the future.

All in all, this is a nice conference to attend. It is part of the Federation of Business Disciplines which brings together several other small, regional conferences under one umbrella. As a result, you get some of the advantages of a larger conference yet at the same time, a small, cordial environment to discuss research, bounce ideas off of one another, and just generally catch up with old friends. While I was not able to make any of the security related tracks where my research interests are due to scheduling conflicts, overall, attending the conference was still a success. If you are interested in this conference, next year, it is being held in Albuquerque New Mexico next year, March 7-10, 2018 at the Hyatt Regency. So, join up, get involved, and attend!

Review: 34th Annual Academic Chairperson's Conference 2017

I've taken over as Department Head approximately 8 months ago and our Provost took us to this conference so we could learn some of the tips, tricks, and just generally, the ropes in general about running a department. I have to say I'm impressed. I've had a session or two that were perhaps not particularly valuable. But for the most part, most sessions have been extremely valuable. So, to share a little of what I learned (and to document it for myself for future reference), I will share with each of you here my take aways from each session I attended.

1. Thursday 8:00-9:00: Keynote Address from Dr. Carolyn Jarmon, Rochester: "Addressing Traditional Trade-Offs". She presented something she referred to as the 'iron triangle'. At each point, were cost, access, and student learning. Changing one affects each of the other corners of the triangle. There are pressures from state legislatures to enlarge class sizes and cut costs. Per the iron triangle, that might suggest that student learning has to suffer. But, by leveraging I.T. and through course redesign, this mandate just might be achievable. Having participated in course redesign at my institution, I found her argument inspiring and encouraging. But, course redesign can be used not just to improve student learning. It can also be used to reduce instructional costs, thus helping to achieve the mandate from many legislatures. Team effort is key from all constituents including administration, faculty, I.T., and assessment experts. Results help to reinforce the use of course redesign. Cost savings range between 5% and 81% with an average of 34%. Improved learning occurred in 72% of the cases. Why not the other 28%? Recall, a goal might be to reduce costs rather than improving student learning. If student learning is already strong but costly, this makes perfect sense. Introductory courses are usually well suited. I am thinking of BCIS 1305 and Marketing 2314 from our department, the introductory CIS and Principles of Marketing respectively. The point is, course redesign transcends disciplines. It tends to use less lecture and involve more engagement. It tends to use more software (that can automatically measure student involvement). It also includes deadlines to provide structure for students. Lastly, course redesign results in increased feedback and opportunity for mastery from students. One interesting side example given was a math lab in which math students from several different courses (algebra, trig, and calculus) might be working on computers, working through problems. A faculty member, along with GAs (it was a particularly large lab) staff the lab and students with questions place a red cup on top of their computer tower whenever they have a question. GAs triage questions and pass the more complicated questions on up to faculty when necessary. It was equated to the one room school house. Her last "take away" was what to do when we got home:

1. Identify the problem
2. Identify the team and inform others of redesign
3. Review other re-designs on NCAT and others
4. Review NCAT guide for academic area
5. Visit other institutions who have re-designed with success
6. Review resources available for the re-design
7. Establish the plan and get going (no analysis paralysis)

She concluded with her contact information at www.theNCAT.org and cjarmon@theNCAT.org. Overall, it was an excellent kick off to the conference and as previously mentioned, having gone through a course re-design and now being department head, it has me thinking about some other classes that we should target.

2. My first regular session was "Performance Management Or "Herding Cats"? Strategies to Support Faculty Success by D. Bratson-Prince and R. Bagley of Iowa State University. This one set the bar high as it was one of, if not the best session I attended. LOTS of great information. As department heads, we manage resources. Resources come in several different forms: funding, space, and of course, people. As it relates to people we want to develop successful faculty. But, there are challenges: research demands, lack/loss of motivation, power related issues (tenured vs. non-tenured relationships), etc. To be successful, you must understand "the animal". To herd cats, you simply have to know what motivates them. We were then presented with two slides. The first was a picture of cats all over the place, doing their own things. The next was of each cat, lined up...at a food dish. Clearly, food was their motivation. Some might argue that faculty fall into a similar camp. What makes working with faculty difficult in the first place? It is by design. They are by their very nature, intelligent, independent, opinionated thinkers. In order to manage their performance, you need to address four things:

1. Process (for expectations and providing feedback)
2. Formative and Evaluative
3. Outcomes Based
4. Challenging

But, the benefits of performance management are numerous:

1. Faculty know where they stand
2. Chairs gain insights into motivations
3. It enables you to retain productive people
4. It contributes to the overall success of the team
5. It contributes to their success-salary, promotion, recognition

Set and communicate expectations, be specific, and hold people accountable. Some of the pitfalls include:

1. Knowing what your role is; being unclear is problematic
2. Providing unclear, vague, or ambiguous performance expectations
3. Avoid minimizing, justifying, or ignoring a problem
4. Avoid letting a pattern develop
5. You must get to the root of a problem/cause
6. Don't let the past pile on
7. Do not make it personal. Keep it professional

Document

1. Write a narrative story. See my second to last entry in this post.
2. Keep factual, not personal
3. Shows you treated them fairly, consistently, within policy
4. Proves you put them on notice of expectations, performance, or behavior
5. Establishes timeline

As part of this, having an inclusivity or collegiality statement in faculty handbook that covers bullying, harassment, etc might be helpful. They also mentioned the use of DISC four quadrants as being a useful tool to facilitate communications with faculty. Back to motivations, 6 sources include personal, social, structural, ...  All in all, this was an excellent presentation which opened my eyes as to some of the breadth of my responsibilities as the head of my department.

3. My next session was "Developing a Succession and Transition Plan for Chairs". I have to admit, this one was a bit odd, particularly since my Provost sat in on the same session. She told me I became department head too recently to be considering succession. Nevertheless, I took away some good tips and tricks from this one as well. Essentially, we have both formal and informal approaches for developing future chairs. Formal methods include having an assistant chair position or support for other leadership positions in which faculty can develop leadership capability. Informal methods include tapping search committee chairs or "Friday Chairs", those who fill in for the chair when they are away on business/vacation. One of the challenges for outgoing chairs is recognizing that you won't get everything done that you want to. I can easily see this issue and I myself sometimes feel overwhelmed just with the day to day running of the department. In this sense, this conference did not help as I have identified several holes in how I have run the department so for. So, I have some catching up to do there. Anyway, some of the challenges for an incoming chair include:

• Paperwork (the volume of it)
• Adjustments to relationships (I noticed this one myself)
• Making the department yours
• The feeling that you need to know everything and always be available

Some of the most valuable tools at your disposal as an incoming department head/chair include:

• Consultations and warnings
• Administrative assistants
• Professional friendships: cohorts and mentorships
• Meetings (informal and retreats)
• Forward or CC on emails
• Continuing relationship with previous department chair/head if possible. They can be a great resource due to their institutional knowledge.

Lessons learned for future department head transitions:

• Solve personnel issues first (re-appointments, P&T, etc.)
• Discussion of the budget
• Identify programs or initiatives that need to be kept or can be discarded from the outgoing department head/chair
• Ask the question "Does this decision make the job harder for the next person?"
• Share and include the incoming chair in memos, calendars, and checklists
• Go meet with the Registrar and develop a relationship. They know about courses, scheduling, etc.
• Email students about changes (letting them know that you are the new department head)
• Keep a calendar about important things due so you know what is coming up next year.

This one was not quite as well presented as the first session I attended but the content was quite good. I certainly came away with some great nuggets that I can put into practice.

4. The next session I attended was titled "Developing and Supporting the Diversity of Chairpersons Roles. This was presented by several faculty from Augusta University. It was not quite what the title indicated but the description in the conference catalog is what attracted me to this session. They focused on a Chair Professional Development program that they have at their university. Awesome idea, huh? Why don't we have something like this? It is included in their equivalent to CII in which they develop not only instructor's/faculty teaching ability, but also, administrator's (chairs specifically) leadership ability. They run this out of the Provost's Office, sidestepping deans so they have direct communication. They have monthly meetings where they discuss resources and develop leadership. They facilitate the sharing of information and how to handle challenges. This one ties in to the previous session in that they emphasized the need to use delegation to help develop faculty for future administrative roles. The outcome of their development program is that it provides a safe place to vent (to your new peers of fellow department heads as opposed to faculty), results in more information sharing, skills development, lessons learned (FAQs), and even a Chair Resource Handbook. I found this one helpful. There was not perhaps the instant gratification of nuggets I could go back and use immediately. But, it reinforced previous sessions AND provided the nucleus of an idea that I would like to see our university incorporate at some point in the future.

5. My second to last session of the day was titled "Leveraging Technology for the Recruitment of Students and Faculty". This was led by W. Hoon and C. Hirschler. Having an interest in promoting our department and programs as well as an interest in social media, I thought this session had the potential to be an interesting session. In the end, it was not quite what I expected but I did find it interesting. Get the program affiliated with every site you can to increase the links and raise your Google Page Rank. For example, he brought up Learn.Org as an example where he spent some time completing out their profile which to a lesser or greater degree, increases the visibility of his program. I would add Cappex.com as another possibility. I need to spend some time looking into this further but I can see the benefit of doing so. Make sure the university's site is consistent in terms of content with your own site as well as both being current. Include pictures of students in action, engaged with activities relevant to their major. Video content is another winner. It does not have to be studio quality. Genuine is more important. Include a photo gallery. Lots of photos of students in action. Include multiple people/faculty as administrators to your FB page so they can post pics and whatnot to the page. Make use of Twitter and Instragram as well. They have a faculty member (it rotates) that has lunch in the cafeteria with their students to help answer questions and build a rapport and they just happen to take pictures there and post. They even tried a crowd funding campaign to raise funds for new equipment. This might be a good idea for our AITP to help fund travel to regional and national competitions!!! Include hyperlinks in your recruiting letters, email videos and show them at open houses, connect with alumni via LinkedIn and email students and ask them to like us on Facebook. Make sure your LinkedIn profile is solid and ask for recommendations and use videos. LinkedIn can be useful in finding quality adjunct professors. Overall, this was a decent session though I would not say anything earth shattering came from it. One point that I think they did help emphasize is that this is not easy. It takes work. All these tools are neat but content is king and generating and managing content can be time consuming.

6. The final session of the day was "A Blended Family: Leadership of Multi-Disciplinary Departments" by B. Bonnekessen and C. Patterson of Pittsburg State University. Having both Marketing and CIS in our department, I was interested in getting some of their insight. Unfortunately, I did not get a lot out of it. Their examples included departments with LOTS of different disciplines, in some cases 10 or more. I simply have two so their rationale behind having program coordinators did not seem particularly relevant in my situation. But, having little background in Marketing, this might be something to consider at some point if necessary. One take away I did get was that one of the presenters served as a chair in such an environment as an Assistant Professor. This led to the rather uncomfortable situation of doing performance evaluations on professors who outranked her. Her solution was to name three senior faculty members to a faculty review committee whom she worked with to perform reviews. As a result, she could argue that faculty were evaluated by not just her but also senior members of faculty peers. As a result, she could deflect some of the potential ire of some who might have questioned her legitimacy to review their work. That was a pretty nifty move. Regarding their use of program coordinators, they use a 3 year cycle to not allow anyone to dominate a program for too long. They also indicated that an administrative assistant is a MUST. I have to agree on that. They hold a lot of institutional knowledge. Good admins are invaluable.

The next day, the opening session was a panel discussion. I really did not get much out of this session but I did hear the interesting statistic that the University of New Orleans dropped from being 75% state funded to 25% in, I believe the guy said, 9 years. 9 YEARS!!! Amazing. This is a telling tale about the assault on higher education. We need to re-frame the how and why we invest in higher education. For me personally, I look at it like a research and development investment for a corporation. Sure, a corporation and drop research and development spending. It looks good on the books today. But, the real impact is 20 years in the future. But, that's just my own little soap box.

1. The first actual session of the day was quite interesting. It was titled "The Four Quadrants of Administrative Effectiveness" by Robert Jenkins. The scales for each dimension were Responsibility and Control. We took a scaled down version of the instrument and while there was some question of validity (the instrument is in beta and we essentially we part of the validation process), many of us, myself included turned out to fall in the High Control, High Responsibility quadrant. More on that in a moment. The Low Control, High Responsibility (LCHR) group tends to represent the best administrators. They are liked and respected. They do not pass blame and they accept responsibility. They share credit and do not micro manage. They hire quality people and let them do their job. They trust people, seek consensus but are not afraid to make tough decisions. High Control, High Responsibility (HCHR), you know, like me;) tend to be well liked, often beloved. They give everything to the job. They sweat detail, start early and leave late. They send emails at 3 AM. They are very effective...to a point. They tend to burn out. They can also burn those around them out too...to the point that eventually, people start to avoid them, not because they do not like them but because they are afraid they are going to have more work assigned to them:( Low Control, Low Responsibility (LCLR) tend to be the least effective. They leave people alone (which faculty like) but there is a complete lack of direction. The are not control freaks and do not micro manage. They do not expect much of others or even themselves. They are rotten leaders because they do not lead. The autonomy is great until you need someone to steer the ship in which case it has to be a collective faculty endeavor. The last group, High Control, Low Responsibility (HCLR) are also ineffective. They can sometimes get short term gains but usually at the expense or morale. They constantly point fingers, take credit, always come from the position of "being the boss", can sometimes be irrationally demanding, micro manage, sneer at those in the "trenches". They are usually shown the door but not until they have done great damage to morale. In order to move your point to a more desirable spot on the control dimension, there are four key factors to consider: balance, empathy, transparency, and trust. Regarding balance, he gave the example of keeping all the balls in the air. But, the problem with that is that it is less about balance and more about being OCD. True balance is more about being in the moment, with the people around you, when you are supposed to be, doing what you are supposed to be doing. Balance is about scheduling, de-cluttering, and harmony. In order to do this, you need to prioritize. This leads to the 7 questions of prioritization:

1. Does this need to be done?
2. Why does this need to be done?
3. When does this need to be done?
4. Do I have to be the one to do it?
5. How does it fit into my personal mission (statement)?
6. What are the consequences of neglecting or putting it off?
7. Who is relying on me to do this?

Two types of balance include work-life balance (often discussed) and work-work balance, which is what he addressed. Essentially, there are three types of tasks: those we like, don't like, and indifferent about. We need to find an equitable equilibrium. Over your career, we should be moving to more 'like' and less 'don't like'. This leads to the paradox of leadership. Advancing to the department head role seems to take a step backwards on the work-work continuum. The choices are to step down, suck it up, or move to a better work-work balance where you are doing more things you like and fewer things you don't like. Regarding empathy, it takes self awareness and humility. Recognize that you are not the center of the universe and stop dwelling on problems to solve other's problems. If you understand where people are coming from, you might be less inclined to control everything they do. Transparency is a function of honesty. It requires that you relinquish control. It also require discretion. despite the need for transparency, some things must be "hidden" (i.e. medical issues of faculty). But, you should never have hidden agendas. The last way to move the point on the control dimension is through trust. This is another function of honesty. Trust is a two way street. You must give it if you expect it. Leaders that don't trust tend to micro-manage. They roam the halls to check up on people which does not tend to go over well with faculty and can have a devastating effect on morale. Trust needs to be your default position. To show trust, treat people like professionals. deal with problems face-to-face, privately. Just because you have one bad apple, do not assume the rest are bad too. Be careful how you respond to complaints. Most complaints require no response whatsoever. Always assume your people are right until you know otherwise. Keep confidences (when able to). Tell the truth and follow through. Be reliable, predictable, and let people know you have their backs. Now, moving the point on the responsibility dimension. Know who you answer to, make sure you meet acceptable standards, and accept the consequences. You may be accountable to many. You may get to set some of the standards. But, you must accept the consequences for not only yourself, but also your academic unit. Integrity is another way to move on the responsibility continuum. It is a function of honesty. To thine own self be true. It boils down to simple truth telling. Fairness is another approach. This is a function of justice. But, it does not mean that life is always fair or treating everyone the same in every circumstance. He gave a little league example in which he would not let a player play a particular position not because he was truing to be mean but rather because they player was not yet performing at a high enough level and was liable to get hit by a hard, line drive ball. However, you do need to insure equality of opportunity. Make sure everyone has the same opportunity. Service is another way to move on the continuum. This too is a function of humility. Set aside egos. At times, step aside and let others lead. Cultivate the leadership of others. He gave the example of serving on a committee within the department BUT, make someone else the committee chair. Finally, you need courage to move on the responsibility continuum. There is the classic definition of courage as not being the absence of fear but rather, conquering some obstacle despite fear. There are several models of courage: personal, physical, political, and societal; self>others>principle, etc. But, you need the courage to do what is right. This will help you build trust and become a better leader. You need courage to take risks. To trust those around you, you need courage to take the risk that they will complete the task. You need courage to buck trends. Everyone says "think outside the box" but they do not really mean it. Not because they fear failure but because they fear being perceived as incompetent. You need courage to lead. "If the leader is going to be an a-hole, the leader might as well be me." This means there is not leading from behind. True leaders are out front, whether they want to be or not. Finally, you need courage to confront. But, it does not have to be done with negativity. Approach with humility and in a constructive manner.

2. The next session was shorter but really needed a little more time. It was titled "The Art of C.Y.A.: Documentation for Department Chairs" by C. Barrick of the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith. The message was clear: keep good records. Why? To support, inform, and justify future action. Evaluations can improve performance, can lead to evidence based decisions, and and provides a picture of what happened. Keeping good records is part of the job as an administrator. It is like keeping grades for faculty. What needs to be documented? Faculty events/incidents (complaints, inappropriate behavior, etc.), significant meetings/conversations, and student events/incidents. But, documentation does not have to only include negative things. You can also document student and faculty awards for example. The speaker the discussed his tool of choice: "Memo For Record". 90% of the time, this is just for your own record and does not go into an employee or student's file. It needs to become a record of habit, not just a document. The format does not really matter but needs to include who created, what it is regarding, and the date as well as narrative, bullet points or whatever to communicate the event. The content needs to include what happened and what was said. Do not interject opinion. Just the facts. First or third person is preferred with third being more preferable. Remember who potential reader might be; provosts, presidents, deans, lawyers, etc. Use full names and titles and do not abbreviate. Provide background when necessary or give specific references to previous documentation if it exists. Such documentation should be done as soon after an event as possible. Accuracy and detail are important. This does not mean it has to be a long, drawn out task. One page should suffice in most instances. Clear your schedule if necessary. Perhaps the last few minutes of each day is appropriate. To speed the process, have a template setup. In some instances, you might even be able to record such meetings. To me, depending on the circumstances, this could include using a web cam in the office to record, with everyone's knowledge, meetings between faculty, students, or whomever. As for who to include, recognize that most MFR will never see the light of day. If necessary, email the dean or other appropriate party. Email provides a time-stamp which can help strengthen your documentation. It was during this discussion that I though about including an MFR template in each faculty Google Drive folder as well as a more generic student folder. File name should be MFR-date-and then the RE line in the memo. The last point he made was on papering. Do not, under any circumstances, start to over document after and event occurred. It is too easy to observe and weakens your case. You must consistently and repeatedly document all events, regardless of who it is.

3. The final session I attended was titled "The Art and Science of Evaluating Online Programs" by M. Smith and K. Alder of A.T. Still University. Having an online program, our MS-IS program, I thought this would be interesting. Also, given my background in assessment, not that I am a guru by any stretch, it just added to my curiosity. But, it was not quite what I expected, not that I really knew what to expect. But, I did still have some take aways. They use TK20  for student surveys. They survey student half way through the semester. They survey them again at the end of the semester. They give their faculty the curriculum (they are some sort of health/medical school) and so the instructors themselves are also surveyed at the end of the semester. They survey graduates and ask questions like what they liked, didn't like, courses, etc. This survey also includes collecting employer information so they can then turn around and survey employers which they do once per year. They usually have to mail those surveys but the information they get is invaluable and helps them validate their program competencies or objectives. They also conduct alumni surveys.

All in all, this was a great conference. I came away with some great information and some ideas about things we should consider doing at Tarleton State University. I saw real value in this and mentioned to our provost who also attended, that I could see real value in experienced chair returning periodically to kind of "retool". I highly recommend this conference if you are moving to or are already in higher education administration.http://conferences.k-state.edu/academicchairpersons/

Review: 2016 Social Media Conference

I attended the 2016 Social Media Conference yet again this year. I think it was the best one I have attended, with each session giving me little tidbits of information about how to better manage and utilize my use of social media as a professional and in my classes. This is not to say that the conference can't be improved. I would like to see stronger session on leveraging some of the analytics available in some of the platforms as well as to see a track dedicated to academic research revolving around social media. But, from top to bottom, this year's conference was the best I have attended.

For my first session, I attended a session on "In Introduction to Social Network Analysis" bu Vivian Ta (@VivianTa22). A doctoral student from UTA, she presented last year and was back again. She described social network analysis as mapping and measuring the flow of information. It enables you to identify connectors, influencers, bridges, and isolates. The methodology allows you to track the spread of disease, sexual relationships, collaborators, business, law enforcement, etc. The value of social network analysis is that it allows you to identify data and patterns of information flow. There are two types of social network analyses: egocentric and socio-centric. Egocentric revolves around a single person to demonstrate economic success, depression, etc. Socio-centric social network analysis focuses on large groups to describe groups of people to give insight into concentration of power, spread of disease, group dynamics, etc. There are three types of measures used to analyze social network relationships (referred to as centrality measures): degrees, betweenness, and closeness. Degrees refers to the number of relationship connections each node has. Betweenness refers to nodes that link together multiple groups. They represent single points of failure and can be important linkages in terms of allowing information to travel between groups. Lastly, closeness refers to how quickly information can travel between nodes. As for actually gathering the data, you can utilize direct measures such as surveys but this can be time consuming and difficult. Indirect measures can come from organizations, citation analyses, co-authors, memberships in organizations etc. This is a cheaper approach but does not indicate how nodes are truly related to one another. Still another approach is to use data scraping, web harvesting, or data extraction techniques to pull data directly from user's social media accounts. For example, you can harvest likes, follows, friends, reply to's, retweets, comments, tags, etc. See OutWit Hub for an example of a data scraper. As for analyzing the data retrieved, there are several FREE platforms: NodeXL, Pajek, UCInet, NetDraw, Mag. e, Guess, R Packages for SNA, and Gephi. You can examine the frequency of interactions, types of interactions or flows, as well as the similarity of characteristics (status, location, educations, beliefs, etc.). This was a nice presentation that gave me a research idea so in my mind, it was excellent.

The second session I attended was titled "How to Use Social Media in Higher Education to Tell Your Program's Story" by Dr. Becker and Dr. Putman. The started off by citing Hoover, 2015 who found that interacting with current students and staff through social media is more effective that interacting with them face to face. They stressed the need to align social media efforts with strategic goals and that you need a dedicated social media person to handle efforts 10-15 hours per week. They used a work-study position for this which is funded mostly through the federal government, thus reducing the funding requirement on the part of the department. Start by developing strategies and goals and develop a consistent message across platforms. It would not be wise to have a very conservative message shared through one outlet and then a very wild approach on another. Develop a hashtag for your department. They noted that it is challenging to consistently post, create messages with audience appeal, and dedicate time of an employee. You should post photos with your messages as it leads to significantly more likes, comments, and click throughs. Short posts and pose a question also tend to be more effective. Finally, the best times of the day to post are around 9:00 AM and 4:45 PM so, 1-2 times per day. This was a good presentation, which gave me some good ideas for managing our own department's use of social media.

The third session was titled "Twitter for Educators - Network, Learn, Grow" by Yvonne Mulhern. She started off with an interesting quote from someone I did not catch: "Twitter makes me like people I've never met. Facebook makes me hate people I know." She talked about using Twitter for professional development, self-promotion, and the use of Twitter Lists. Follow people you admire, leaders in your field, etc for professional development. Tweet publications, research ideas, etc. Finally, follow other's Twitter Lists which enables you to more efficiently follow leaders in your field. Follow HigherEdJobs or Chronicles Jobs. The idea is to develop your own personal learning network (PLN). There are also several tools that enable you to streamline your use of Twitter: Twistori.com, TweetReports.com and do not forget to look at Twitter analytics.

The fourth session was presented by Dr. Goen and Dr. Stafford and was titled "Remaining Legal and Combating Trolls on Periscope, Facebook Live, and Meerkat". They limited the discussion of Meerkat given their recent demise. They first defined a troll as an individual that visits a page to post insulting, off-topic comments to provoke some sort of emotional response. In general, they identified two different types of trolls: spammer trolls and disruptive trolls. Spammer trolls are all about them, selling their stuff, etc. Disruptive trolls spew insults, often sexual, violent posts, etc. Regardless of the type of troll, there are ways to combat trolls. On Periscope, you can set a post to follow only which means only those who follow you may post a comment. All others can only watch. You can also block users on a live broadcast. This does not remove a negative comment but it does prevent them from making additional ones. Finally, you can set a broadcast to private which only enables those following you to make comments. There are similar tools on Facebook (FB). On FB, yo ucan report/block a person from your page. The report aspect provides FB with information about your objection and allows you to continue to view the other's account. If you simply block a user, you do not have to report anything but by doing so, you can no longer see the other's account. You can also adjust your general privacy settings to limit what others can see. Alternatively, you can customize each post to limit its exposure. Finally, you should only accept friend requests from people you know.

The final session was over YouTube by Dr. Mitzi Lewis. Titled "How to Make the Most of Your YouTube Channel", Dr. Lewis boiled it down to three essential areas: Brand Your Channel, Be Found, and Keep 'em Watching. For Branding Your Channel, know your mission and post videos that are directly relevant to it. If you need to deviate, consider adding another channel. Make sure your banner, name, and icon are consistent in terms of terms, colors, style, etc. You are trying to give off a consistent image. Have a good, relevant channel trailer that is, ideally, 30-60 seconds. Finally, include channel sections to groups similar/related videos. For Be Found, make sure your thumbnails are images that are relevant to the video content. She gave the example of Jimmy Kimmel videos in which then thumbnail is usually an image of the guest being interviewed. Make sure the titles use words that people will search for. Put the meat of your descriptions early in the narrative, so they can be seen without hitting "more." If you want to identify good key words to include, google.com/trends/explore can be helpful. Finally, keep tags short and meaningful. Finally, for the Keep 'em Watching group, Dr. Lewis suggested maximizing watching time by hooking them first and then let them watch. So, given them a tease, intro, and then discuss your topic. It is extremely important to hook them early. If you use playlists to organize related videos, limit the number of videos in the playlist to the teens or so. Use a watermark which will exist on all of your videos. Finally, regularly upload videos so subsribers have something to visit. For other helpful tips and tricks, she recommended creatoracademy.youtube.com.

This year's conference was better than years past. Again, I would like to see an academic research track included as well as some strong sessions on analytics. But, this is a nice little conference that is applicable to this in higher education, primary and secondary school, as well as businesses and other organizations. So, plan on attending next year!

Review: ISSA 2016 International Conference

As a new ISSA member as of late last year, I attended my first ISSA conference, conveniently located (for me) in Dallas Texas. Being used to academic conferences myself, I was not quite sure what to expect. I knew it was going to be more practitioner based and practitioner based it was...largely from a fairly managerial perspective. So, that was in my favor. So, here's a recap of the session I attended.

For me, the first day was the weaker of the two days but the first session of the day was the strongest. It was titled "Architecting Your Cyber-security Organization For Big Data, Mobile, Cloud, and Digital Innovation" by Mr. David Foote. He discussed the importance of aligning business and security objectives and that part of making sure that happens is having CISOs report to Boards of Directors rather than to CIOs. He argued that part of what makes managing so difficult is due to churn within the field. This is a result, he argued, of being spread too thin and burnout as experienced cyber-security specialists are constantly having to re-tune because of disruptive technologies such as Cloud, Big Data, IoT, etc.). According to his research, cyber-security jobs require more certifications than other IT jobs and that there are roughly only 1000 top level security experts compared to a need for 10,000 to 30,000. This brought him to the point that we are in deep need of "people architecture", an alignment of people, programs, practices, and technology. The benefit is an optimization of assets, improved decision making, minimizing unwanted circumstances, etc. Finally, Mr. Foote, discussed the need for consistent job titles and skills across organizations and industries. The lack of such a consistent job definition makes it hard to compare, for exam, a system administrator for one organization to a system administrator for another organization. Mr. Foote did an excellent job presenting and I would highly recommend attending other presentations he puts on.

The second session I attended was not quite as good but I did still come away with some good content. It was titled "Improving Incident Response Plan With Advanced Exercises" by Chris Evans. He stressed the need for "pre-incident" training in order to develop muscle memory. The goal is to stretch beyond just compliance. He described several ways of doing this: workshops, table top exercises, games, simulations, drills, and full scale exercises from least to most complex with the more complex yielding more tangible benefits but require more investment of time, resources, and expertise. The first step is to develop the objectives so that the people that need to participate can be identified. The key take away was that we need to evaluate > test > assess > drill.

The third session on day one was titled "Cyber Law Update". The presenter struggled on this one. She was neither a technical person nor a manager of technical people. She was, I believe, an insurance person. But, she found herself being corrected several times by the audience. Nevertheless, there was some good content to come out of the presentation. One of the key points was regarding the establishment of FTC authority as it relates to cyber-security breaches. She discussed LabMD who was not liable for the breach but rather, for the failure to take "reasonable" security measures. Another valuable contribution from this presentation was that the inability to show injury is what stops most law suits against companies from being successful. Emotional distress does not count. You must show some sort of physical injury. If you cannot show what or how much you lost, you have no case.

The forth session of the day was titled " Posture Makes Perfect: Cyber Residual Risk Scoring". This one was interesting. The presenter was a little unclear in terms of specifics on his scoring model but the general idea was a calculation that gave you a residual which represented risk. He briefly mentioned threat maps and displayed one by Kaspersky and mentioned the Norse Map. I have seen these before but never spent much time looking at them. Having said that, in looking through my notes for this blog post, I Googled them and ran across a site that lists both of these as well as several others. These are pretty slick and can be interesting and compelling when trying to discuss how pervasive security issues are. He also reference the over referenced (his words) Sun Tzu's quote about know your enemy, know yourself, ... While he made the argument through the process he was advocating that you could know your enemy, he started off stating that given the complex threat environment, that you could not know your enemy. This seemed more realistic to me. There are nation states, organized crime, hacktivists, cyber criminals, etc. This make make it seemingly impossible to know your enemy with certainty, at least without a delay to properly investigate. There are just too many possibilities. But, it does suggest that we need to develop methods to more quickly identify these sources so that we can more adequately combat threats. He finished up talking about there being lots of standards and lots of certifications that demonstrate or express proficiency as it relates to assessing, developing, and implementing security in organizations. Despite all of this, breaches continue to occur. Touche!

There was a fifth session for the day but I had to leave. Day two was really pretty solid. All the session were quite good I would say. For my first session on day two, I attended Advances in Security Risk Assessments". Presented by Mr. Doug Landoll, he started with an Einstein quote: "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them." He talked about the threat calculation, which ever one you use, needs some sort of data. You can get that data from many different places. This may be as simply as a survey; "Do you have a firewall in place?" ... He stated that CISO's are in high demand and that if you examine job requirements on job posting sites, the requirements can all be boiled down to "reducing risk." In order to determine risk, the process for determining a risk score is important. You have to examine controls that are in place. For example, what is the hiring process like? You need to establish physical and logical boundaries to your assessment. You also need to apply a legitimate framework. In his opinion, some "frameworks" are not frameworks but are really just a collection of a few best practices (i.e. SOX, HIPPA, PCI, etc.). Legitimate frameworks include COBIT, NIST, ISO 27001, Cyber-Security Framework, FISMA, etc. With a framework identified, you need to have it mapped (hopefully it is already mapped by a good source) to a standard such as PCI. His point here was that standards and regulations are not frameworks. He then pointed to an article he published on LinkedIn. For assessment, he mentioned RIIOT: review documents, inspect, interview, and observe. Combine multiple approaches. To do good assessment, you need objectivity, expertise, and quality data. Finally, he plugged another person's book on quantitative assessment (Doug Hubbard). Follow this presenter on LinkedIn.

The second presentation on day two was titled "Culture Changes, Communicating Cyber Risk in Business Terms." One of the panelists stated that technology was similar to dog years, referring to the speed of change. The concept of nation states launching cyber attacks is recent. attack surfaces have mushroomed. It was also pointed out that the boundary of the enterprise is becoming harder to define as we rely more and BYOD devices, cloud services, etc. When asked about some of the recent drivers of culture change, the data breach at the Office of Personnel Management was brought up as was the Mirai DDoS attack and Dewall. The interesting thing about this last one was they were held responsible, not for a data breach, but rather for claiming through advertising that their systems were more secure than they actually were. Another example of driving a culture of change was ransom-ware and the interaction between victims and hackers. The panel concluded by discussing some of the existing standards (NIST, ISO 27005, etc.) and the focus on IT security risk and that we need to refocus on enterprise risk instead. I read into this an alignment of security and business objectives.

The third session I attended for the day was titled "Stepwise Security - A Planned Path to Reducing Risk" by Wade Tongen. He described the "de-perimeterization" of organizations and how that makes securing them difficult. Per the 2016 Verizon Data Breach Report, 63% of breaches occur as a result of weak, default, or stolen passwords. He mentioned the need for identity assurance because users have multiple identities (i.e. personal, professional, privileged, non-privileged). There is a need for consolidated identities. Fragmented identities result in sticky notes, use of same password for multiple systems, spreadsheets, etc. Use multifactor authentication EVERYWHERE. Organizations need role based provisioning so that applications, services, licenses etc. are all associated with a role so that when that role changes, access changes accordingly. Finally, the speed with which we can identify perpetrators, maximizes the chance of being able to do something about it. He used a convenience store robbery as an example. If it is robbed and you can give the police and accurate description quickly, they are more likely to be able to do something about it than if you can't provide them with evidence (such as video surveillance) for several days.

The final session I attended on day 2 was over Mr. Robot and whether or not it was an accurate depiction of a hacker's perspective. A panel session, the consensus was that it was. I left this session as I did not really see much value in the discussion. Overall, it was a good experience. It was new to me. As I mentioned, I am used to academic conferences. But, this was a nice conference to attend; one that I can do some further research about some of these concepts and take bake and use in my classes.

#BCIS5304 #BCIS3347 #ISSEConf