Thursday, March 30, 2006

How to cultivate an uberstudent population

First of all, I'm working on a new website, www.melchua.com. Before you get all "Oh god, she's trying to look professional and stuff!" let me reassure you that I'm still completely just messing around with no coherent goal, structure, or overarching plan. I figured that I've never had a domain name, never played with wordpress, never tried to write about a coherent topic on a regular basis - hey, why not?

This blog will remain as a personal blog on Planet Olin; the other one will be a... non personal blog. (earth-shattering, yes.) If there's something on the second one that I think Oliners would get a kick out of seeing, I'll cross-post it here.

Like this one: how to cultivate an uberstudent population

It comes from the NCCI (National Consortium for Continuous Improvement in Higher Education) conference at MIT this Monday. Thanks to the awesomeness of the conference organizers and Sherra Kerns and Ann Schaffner, I was able to attend; it was an eye-opening experience that got my brain to spinning. At the end of Sherra Kerns’s presentation, “Creating a culture of continuous improvement with students as partners,” the following question was posed to me (the only student in the room):

How do you get students interested in changing a school?

In other words, how do you create Oliners? Are we just hyperactive overinvolved freaks that would try to change whatever worlds we were put in anyhow, or is there a way to make more people do what we do? In my case, I believe I was made an Oliner, not born one. I was such a scared little kid in high school that if I hadn't come to this kind of environment, I would probably be a dutiful Asian engineering student doing what they were told to do very, very well somewhere else.

In any case, I'd like to hear people's thoughts (please comment on the article in the comments of the actual article and not on this blog, by the way.)

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