Now, Discover Your Strengths
July 22, 2006
Last summer at the EDUCAUSE Management Institute I won a challenge the faculty gave the participants. We had to think of five things to share about ourselves, share these observations with the group at our table, and then write up a list of everything we could remember about the others at our table. I don’t know if it was the caffeine or my interest in the challenge, but I won.
My prize was the book Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham & Donald O. Clifton, Ph.D. I’d seen Buckingham speak at EDUCAUSE and was interested to read the book. But it’s been a busy year (no director and all) so it wasn’t until this past week, while on vacation, that I got the chance to read it.
The book is structured around Clifton’s work on positive psychology. There are two basic premises:
- Each person’s talents are enduring and unique.
- Each person’s greatest room for growth is in the areas of his or her greatest strength.
Most people feel that to improve, they need to build up their weaknesses; Buckingham and Clifton argue that to really excel you should develop your strengths and manage around your weaknesses.
A central part of the book is taking the Gallup Organization’s Strengths Finder survey. The survey identifies your top 5 strengths after you answer more than 100 Likert scale questions.
For the curious, my strengths turn out to be:
Thanks to Baylor for the linked descriptions. It’s also interesting that Baylor has given all of their employees the survey. The book makes a recommendation that organizations consider doing such a thing, but that’s an expensive proposition and I don’t know if I’ve had enough of the Kool Aid to invest so much in one instrument. Still, it might be something we could do on a smaller scale if anyone is interested…
Technorati Tags: personal development, reading
Preliminary Results of the 2006 ECAR Study of Students and Information Technology
July 21, 2006
Judith Borreson Caruso and Robert B. Kvavik are beginning to release the findings of their latest survey of students and technology. EDUCAUSE has posted a presentation that was given on June 29.
96 institutions participated (52 of which participated in 2005), over 28,000 students took the survey, and as before there were qualitative surveys with a group of (78) students. Some of the findings include:
- Both desktop and laptop ownership are up by about 10% each over last year.
- 71.3% own digital cameras and 57.3%Â own a music device
- 88.2% have 2 or more e-mail addresses, and students are evenly divided when it comes to whether their university e-mail account is preferred over another account (50.3% vs. 49.7%)
- 84.9% of the students prefer to be contacted via e-mail by their universities.
- 56% of students use an electronic device between 11-40 hours a week
- Almost 75% of students say they use an electronic device for course activities at least several times a week
- More than 80% of the students use an electronic device for creating presentations at least once a semester
- 25% of students are not using a course management system
- 46.1% use the Library at least once a week
- 79.5% use e-mail every day
- 46.7% use IM every day, but 18.5% never use IM
- 71.4% have never used a blog
- 30.5% use online social networks, but 29.4% never have
- The top 3 items students picked for additional IT investment were computer labs, printing, and network speed. Faculty IT training ranked as the lowest priority.
- Student desire for IT in courses is up. In 2005, 40.5% looked for a moderate amount of IT in classes, this year 56.2% prefer a moderate amount of IT. Preference for extensive use of IT is up too - from 19.5% last year to 27.3% this year.
- 69% agreed or strongly agreed that IT in courses helps them do better research
- 68.7%Â agreed or strongly agreed that IT in courses results in more prompt feedback from instructors
- 56.8%Â agreed or strongly agreed that instructors use IT well in their courses
- 55.3%Â agreed or strongly agreed that IT in courses helps them better communicate with classmates
- 72.7% have used a course management system; 75.5% of them report a positive or very positive experience
- Keeping track of grades remains the most popular feature for students in a course management system (50.1%)
- 64.2% report IT in courses improves learning
- 68% never bring their laptop to classes
- 90.3% of students most frequently use Broadband access to the internet (41.8% using campus services)
Lots of good stuff here. I look forward to reading the full report.
Technorati Tags: students, technology
Tourist Remover
July 21, 2006
Here's an interesting new service: Tourist Remover will take the tourists out of your pictures. If you've got a series of sequential images of essentially the same shot, you can submit them all to the Tourist Remover service and they'll compare the images and take out the transient features.
It's free, but they're willing to take your money if you want better service. Might be worth a look.
Kudos to Boing Boing for mentioning this.
Technorati Tags: digital images
TEDTalks
July 2, 2006
If you haven't had the chance to watch any of the videos yet, be sure to take a look at TEDTalks. TED is an acronym for Technology, Entertainment and Design. It seems to be a very exclusive conference, but this year they're sharing some of their content on the internet. So far I've watched Al Gore, David Pogue and Tony Robbins and they've all been great.
Al Gore is doing a follow up to an earlier presentation at the conference. I think that presentation is much like the one I've heard about in An Inconvenient Truth. In the presentation he discusses what each of us can do to make things better while we're waiting for the government to catch on. David Pogue talks about software design. My favor
ite part is when he explains the difference between Microsoft and Apple in software design. Tony Robbins was surprisingly interesting, even if he didn't have enough time to cover his material.
Next I'm going to watch Sir Ken Robinson on education. If it's anything like the first three presentations, I'm sure it will be great.
