At long last, the release of iTunes 7.0 allows Mac users to cre­ate a new iTunes library at launch a la iPhoto. Just option-click the iTunes icon to launch and get a pretty “Choose iTunes Library” window!

Tech­no­rati Tags: Apple, iTunes

And so, the day of the clumsy RL anime mech has come. And just in time, too. Hal­ibur­ton is look­ing for some new hard­ware to exploit.

Tech­no­rati Tags: Anime, Mech, Tech­nol­ogy

The move north, I guess, is some­thing of a nov­elty. Accord­ing to this story, FDU from my old stomp­ing ground in Madi­son, NJ is ope­ing a cam­pus in Van­cou­ver, BC to enroll Asian stu­dents. It’s funny, hav­ing been work­ing on recruit­ing for a US-based insti­tu­tion in Van­cou­ver, BC for the last sev­eral years, we just call them stu­dents.

I kid. I kid because they’re right. And not to be snotty, but what admin­is­tra­tors at FDU have real­ized over the last four years of reg­u­la­tory clear­ance is that it’s really, really hard to get into the states any­more from some coun­tries — coun­tries whose res­i­dents call Canada a nice new home away from home. The impli­ca­tions of the cur­rent admin­is­tra­tions stran­gle­hold immi­gra­tion poli­cies post-[gasp] 9/11 hap­pen to be bear­ing the fruits of eco­nomic rust.

Tech­no­rati Tags: Edu­ca­tion, Inter­na­tional Edu­ca­tion, Uni­ver­sity of Phoenix

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I like fool.com. I’ve found it to be a great resource over the years and I think very highly of the con­trib­u­tors. As a reader, it’s easy to take the off-hand slights on com­pany after com­pany for granted — if they’re writ­ing it, it must be true. But some­times, once in a while, I’ll catch some­thing on Apollo Group that is misconstrued.

Tech­no­rati Tags: Apollo Group, Uni­ver­sity of Phoenix

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As many of you know, Nick had a rough start.

First it was the lungs. We had to have those blown open with forced air in the ICU just min­utes after he was born. That was fixed in the first 20 min­utes or so of life, when they real­ized that his kid­neys weren’t work­ing quite right.

They jacked him into the machines and had him on IV feed­ing for a few days, and by three or four days into life, the old kid­neys turned right on.

Then, it was the weight. When these kids are born, the first thing they do is lose weight. They lose a few ounces here and there and the gen­er­ally accepted rule is to make sure that they’re back up to birth weight in two weeks.

We didn’t hit that. We were out­side the nor­mal range but a pretty siz­able mar­gin. Of course, that keeps the med­ical folks in a tizzy think­ing that things still aren’t work­ing, send­ing us to doc after doc, spe­cial­ist after spe­cial­ist, hypoth­e­siz­ing and theorizing…

That’s the space we’ve been in over the last five weeks.

Last Fri­day, Nick weighed in at 6 lbs 2 oz. That was up 6 oz from his weight of two weeks prior. There has been much stress around the old home­stead because of that slow gain — we should be see­ing about an oz of gain per day to make for solid nor­mal growth.

Well, today, at our weekly weigh-in, Nick hit 6 lbs 8 oz. That’s six ounces up in just seven days. So, he’s cruis­ing on the nor­mal path, accord­ing to the pedi­a­tri­cian, and while they want us in again in a week, they’re finally con­fi­dent that things are on the up and up.

So, to recap: Nick was born on 4/20. I took the fol­low­ing week off, secure in my recent pro­mo­tion to Mar­ket­ing Direc­tor nary three months before for the North­west Region of Uni­ver­sity of Phoenix. By Fri­day of that week, I was about ready to get back to work. That after­noon, I got the call.

“Pete?”

“Yeah.“

My boss.

“Pete, I wanted you to get the news from me before you heard the rumor next week.”

“What is it?” Ner­vous now.

“The North­west region has been reor­ga­nized. It’s been split. I’m now over the Moun­tain region, and Ore­gon is in the West­ern region. I’m not sure I know what to do with this, but we have until June 1 to fig­ure it out.”

“So, if I’m hear­ing you, at this point, on June 1, my posi­tion for your region is no longer a fore­gone con­clu­sion.”

“At this point, as of June 1, none of our jobs are fore­gone con­clu­sions.“



The first call I made was to a dear friend in our cor­po­rate pub­lic affairs depart­ment. I told her the sit­u­a­tion, and told her I needed to work for her. That I still had ideas to share and exer­cise, that it’d be too much of a shame for me to take off when I’m just not fin­ished.

What is it that I’m not fin­ished with, exactly? Well, I’m not fin­ished blog­ging, frankly. I’m not fin­ished explor­ing the demand our stu­dents have to explore these social net­work­ing tools and tech­nolo­gies. I’m not fin­ished putting peo­ple together to see what these things look like on the other side of this mon­u­men­tal tran­si­tion that Gen Y is foist­ing upon us this grad­u­a­tion year. There are excit­ing times ahead, and I want to be a part of them.

To her credit, she gets it. She gets that there’s a dis­con­nect between our adver­tis­ing and our enroll­ment. She gets that there is a prob­lem when our stu­dents come to school to learn, and leave with­out dar­ing to tell their peers where they are going. We’ve cre­ated a cult of embar­rass­ment — a wall of inter­net adver­tis­ing around us which is becom­ing increas­ingly dif­fi­cult to cross. She gets that we des­per­ately need a posi­tion designed to keep us ahead of these tech­nolo­gies and defin­ing a strat­egy to align our­selves with them appro­pri­ately.

The best part is, she gets that I’m the guy to do it.

So, as of June 1, I’ll become the Direc­tor of New Media Com­mu­ni­ca­tions for Apollo Group, Inc. I’ve writ­ten the job descrip­tion and it’s been sub­mit­ted to the job review com­mit­tee for approval. And now it’s time to get to work.

I’m toy­ing with start­ing another blog, maybe over on Type­Pad, to talk more about these things on a reg­u­lar basis, par­tic­u­larly how they relate to our efforts to help enroll­ment and reten­tion. I’ll post a link here when that’s com­plete. In the mean time, thanks to every­one I con­tacted to help get me to the other side of this change. Find­ing out about a poten­tial job loss is a ter­ri­fy­ing thing, while out on FMLA with a new­born. The prayers helped, and to those angles who coached me through this, I am for­ever grateful.

LinkedIn has been a sleeper tool in my bag of tricks. When I say sleeper, that’s to be read as “ignored”.

The premise is so sim­ple: Join. Invite your peers. Meet their peers. That’s it — so sim­ple. It’s some­thing that the busi­ness break­fasts have been work­ing on for years and years, net­work­ing clubs that strive to fos­ter the face to face net­work to expand pro­fes­sional rela­tion­ships. But what LinkedIn dri­ves by lever­ag­ing some rad­i­cally sim­ple tech­nol­ogy is vol­ume.

I made a point to invite 15 peo­ple. Ten of them signed up quickly. Of those folks, four of them had exist­ing net­works. Of those four, two of them had been very active users, with 300+ net­works each by them­selves. The sys­tem did the math and deter­mined that with my users my total net­work went from 1 (me) to over 20,000 in just a short week.

I jumped in and ran some searches on my sec­ond and third degree net­works and found a num­ber of folks that I already knew — acquain­tances and friends — and added them to my direct con­tact list. Then, I searched for like minded peo­ple.

My major project was to find peo­ple who are in a sim­i­lar posi­tion to mine, to start net­work­ing with them, learn­ing about this whole new media thing, how to for­mal­ize some­thing that has yet to be truly archi­tected as a func­tion of mar­ket­ing and pub­lic rela­tions. I found three peo­ple very will­ing to rec­i­p­ro­cate and thus, my net­work is born. The pay­off was quick, the expe­ri­ence uni­ver­sally pos­i­tive, the scope vast.

I imag­ine the trick will be keep­ing it going. There’s a lot of energy around these new expe­ri­ences and build­ing a net­work like this is akin to a non-drug induced high. Once the buzz is gone, will the pay­off stick?

And such is my pri­mary puz­zle; charged with build­ing a vir­tual net­work of nearly a half of a mil­lion peo­ple, how do you cre­ate last­ing buzz and value in a com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nel that is strong enough to last? At this point, I’m tak­ing a page from Joe Trippi, that a vir­tual net­work is only as good as the inher­ent oppor­tu­ni­ties for real life meet-ups. As much as we say we’re a vir­tual soci­ety, as much as we like to think that the 80% of Amer­i­cans on the net are actu­ally using it to it’s poten­tial, I think peo­ple want to touch one another at a very base level. We are the cul­ture of the handshake.

There is much afoot for me at Uni­ver­sity of Phoenix now. I find the tim­ing funny. As it hap­pens, I started five years ago, June 4. To cel­e­brate, I received the fol­low­ing email from Uni­ver­sity admin­is­tra­tion:

Con­grat­u­la­tions

Dear Peter Wright,

Con­grat­u­la­tions on your 5 Year achieve­ment with Uni­ver­sity of Phoenix! Thank you for your ded­i­ca­tion and con­tri­bu­tions to our com­pany. We are pleased to honor you with an award in recog­ni­tion of this accom­plish­ment.

You can order from avail­able award selec­tions online using your per­sonal access num­ber XXXX XXXXX XXXXX.

This email was com­puter gen­er­ated; please do not reply. If you have ques­tions regard­ing this noti­fi­ca­tion please con­tact the award admin­is­tra­tion team.

US and Canada

orders@XXXXX.com

Now, let me tell you: noth­ing says “We appre­ci­ate you” bet­ter than “do not reply to this email.”

That was actu­ally a cou­ple of months ago. I had a few good laughs at it and moved on. Shortly there­after, we had our sec­ond child, Nicholas. That part is wholly irrel­e­vant, or it would have been, had it not been for the fact that on the last day of my FMLA I got a call from my boss telling me that my region had been realigned — my job was no longer a fore­gone con­clu­sion.

I was on the verge of being reor­ga­nized. It was hum­bling actu­ally. For the past two years I’ve been involved in con­ver­sa­tions deal­ing with restruc­tur­ing, reor­ga­niz­ing oper­a­tions, open­ing and clos­ing learn­ing cen­ters: deci­sions that impact indi­vid­u­als’ lives. I’d never been reor­ga­nized. Until that moment, on the phone with my boss, I real­ized that I’d been lug­ging about this arro­gance right on my shoul­der. That those con­ver­sa­tions I’d been involved in that caused the loss of jobs: those had been too easy for me.

Much hap­pened after that. Much that is as yet unre­solved. As soon as it is, I’ll be post­ing more detail. In the mean time, I can tell you that my future looks fairly bright with the orga­ni­za­tion. As of June 1, I’ll be mov­ing to the cor­po­rate orga­ni­za­tion as the direc­tor of new media com­mu­ni­ca­tions. That will allow me to be dou­bly com­mit­ted to this blog and other projects in this sphere, start­ing with look­ing for the best blog­gers that also hap­pen to be stu­dents in our orga­ni­za­tions. I’m excited about it, but try­ing not to get too excited. At least not until I wake up on June sec­ond and still have a job.

A quick note to announce the arrival of Nicholas Elliott Wright, our son, born 8:56PM, April 20, 2006. He’s in ICU with sort of a rough start, but every­one seems con­fi­dent that we’re going through some new-baby stuff and that it will pass. Thank you for all the sup­port so far. More news soon.
[update] Pics are here!

Tech­no­rati Tags: Father­hood

Here’s an inter­est­ing piece I stum­bled on this morn­ing by Angie Her­ring­ton at the Chat­tanooga Times Free Press.

Never too old for school

Apart from being a nice men­tion of my man Alan Yanda — new Asso­ciate Cam­pus Direc­tor for our Chat­tanooga, TN cam­pus — it brings up an inter­est­ing point. Here’s the quote that got me think­ing, from Chat­tanooga State Pres­i­dent Jim Catan­zaro:

Cre­at­ing more pro­grams geared directly at prepar­ing stu­dents for jobs, such as Chat­tanooga State’s new Build­ing and Con­struc­tion Insti­tute of the South­east, is one way to lure more older male adult stu­dents back to the col­lege, he said.

“Now the spe­cial­iza­tion of the work force is such that we shouldn’t be turn­ing out so many peo­ple with gen­eral degrees,” Dr. Catan­zaro said.

For years, we’ve gone round and round with tra­di­tional edu­ca­tion about the value of the prac­ti­tioner degree. Par­tic­u­larly appar­ent in our doc­toral pro­grams, prac­ti­tioner degrees have come under fire for — as far as I can tell — not being Ph.D., churned out of tra­di­tional academe.

But Catan­zaro has a good point here. The gist of a prac­ti­tioner edu­ca­tion at all lev­els of higher educ­tion is prepa­ra­tion. Our own research tells us that peo­ple are chang­ing careers three and four times in a life­time. We’re not talk­ing about job changes here — mov­ing from sell­ing wid­gets to sell­ing gad­gets, or trucks to trac­tors — we’re talk­ing about whole­sale life changes: you were a nurse, now you’re a plumber, next you might be an accountant.

With this change in our social econ­omy, edu­ca­tion has to play a new role. I’m a firm believer in tra­di­tional educ­tion, the tra­di­tional col­lege envi­ron­ment, for those who can take advan­tage of it at the right point in their lives. I was 18, I went to col­lege, I did the five-year plan and grad­u­ated with just shy of 200 cred­its. It was a won­der­fully pow­er­ful expe­ri­ence for far more than the aca­d­e­mic per­spec­tives; Col­lege was my oppor­tu­nity to develop socially, to learn how to inter­act with the world, to live with peo­ple that were not my par­ents and do develop the skills I’d later need to man­age a pro­duc­tive life.

But that group, that selec­tion of teens able to afford to take the time and money and put it to a ded­i­cated edu­ca­tional expe­ri­ence for four or five years is shrink­ing. If you’re one of the grow­ing cadre of adults who missed col­lege for some rea­son, you have very dif­fer­ent needs from your edu­ca­tion provider. You need to know that what you’re get­ting out of the class­room is what you’ll need to func­tion in the world, in your career, in your life. And since you’ll prob­a­bly change careers a few more times for retire­ment, you also need to know that you can count on your insti­tu­tion to change with you.

The future of edu­ca­tion is far more like “The Matrix” than it is “Ani­mal House”. It’s a future in which you’ll come to school for appro­pri­ate and timely pro­gram­ming, to acquire the skills you’ll need to suc­ceed at that moment. You’ll move on to mas­ter them through appli­ca­tion and then come back, when you’re ready for more.

Ten years ago, I worked with a fel­low who’d grad­u­ated with his MBA from Har­vard in 1968. He was a pow­er­ful guy — high-dollar con­sul­tant — and I was is his pitch­man. I used to think of him as the role model I’d always wanted to be, pol­ished and pro­fes­sional and wear­ing that alumni sta­tus right out on his sleeve.

But the MBA has changed in the last 30 years and today his skills are stale, and a degree (even from a pres­ti­gious insti­tu­tion) has a shelf-life of applic­a­bil­ity. Those who get it know that life long learn­ing is less about the lat­est buzz-words than it is about sur­vival. Those who don’t get it are liv­ing through the grey­ing pages of a yearbook.