Do you know a Chief Underpants Officer?

I heard about a study that was done in Australia (sorry, I can’t remember the source) that predicts that 65% of kids in kindergarten today will be employed in jobs and have job titles that don’t even exist yet. Here is something fun -- some job titles that actually exist today:

How comfortable would you be with a title like Reality Facilitator? Would you apply for a job called Queen for a Day?  Would you even know where to begin? What kind of skills and competencies do you think are required for a Chief Underpants Officer?

Now, think for a second about your favorite twelve-year old kid…a son, daughter, niece, nephew, or neighbor, whatever. How many of you already know a Minister of Comedy, or a Raging, Inexorable Thunder Lizard? I live with one.

And have you heard about this? Ketchup.  

What’s going on with ketchup is kind of important.

In 1869, HJ Heinz started making Ketchup. After 137 years making ketchup, you can assume that the recipe is pretty well perfected. I mean, how much latitude do you really have in a ketchup recipe? Somewhere along the line, other companies started making ketchup too and I would venture to say that their recipes are not appreciably different than the Heinz recipe.

People want ketchup to taste like…ketchup, right? So how do you distinguish, as a consumer, what kind or what brand of ketchup you’re going to buy?

Is it thickness, price or packaging? Packaging.

We are witnessing today, even if you aren’t aware, is massive innovation in the packaging field. These companies are looking at their products and figuring out what they can do differentiate and to innovate. Again, the ketchup recipe -- not a whole lot of latitude, but the container -- oh yeah.

Market share. This is how we can win business from our competitors. How do you add more value to the basic product? Make it safer, healthier, more colorful, lighter, faster, stronger, more durable, ergonomic, accessible, understandable, convenient, student-centered, modular, active, significant, and connected. See what I did there?

Look at what the ketchup company did. They put the cap on the bottom of the container. Now this just makes perfect sense. No more shaking and waiting like the old television commercial and song.

You just hold it there, pop the cap and the ketchup practically falls out onto your burger or corn flakes, or whatever you put ketchup on. Great innovation!

Big deal. It’s just ketchup, right? Let’s put this new ketchup bottle into a generational context.

My Dad is 80. Every time I see him take the ketchup bottle out of the refrigerator, I notice that he stores it with the cap pointing up. And he carries it around with the cap pointing up. After he uses it, he sets it back on the table with the cap pointing up. What’s up with that? It defeats the whole purpose of having the cap on bottom. Come on, Dad!

Now my 16 year old son, on the other hand, he can just deal with it. He naturally goes and takes the bottle and carries it with the cap down. I know there are two possible reasons for this. One, he just doesn't care if that lid pops open accidentally and spills ketchup all over the floor. The reason I prefer is that it’s generational.

Dad is so accustomed to a ketchup bottle that has the lid on the top and it’s so ingrained that he has to work harder to carry it in a way that he thinks is “upside down”. But Colin, because he has to deal with change constantly, adapts in about 7 seconds and will have to keep adapting for his whole life, probably more so than my father did in his lifetime.

Even for Colin, who has seen and used the bottle with the cap on top most of his life, this new package makes complete sense in his mind and his adaptation is immediate. I think a lot of us in between my father and my son’s age have trouble not in accepting an innovation, but incorporating the innovation into our thinking -- into our subconscious where it lives.

It’s all about packaging.

Who are the people that walk through our hallways and sit in your classrooms?

Well, 62.5% them will have been born right around 1990, give or take 3 years. They are expert multi-taskers, “hypertext minds” and fluent with cutting-edge, network-based communication tools. And by the way, those tools aren’t computers anymore.

They are cell phones and the playing field includes text messages, GPS, digital music, movies and pictures. If they don’t know something, big deal. The answer is only a few keystrokes away.

The classic community college mission of access is illustrated in technological terms on our campuses every day. Our students expect robust bandwidth to power their netbooks, iPhones and iPads, and laptops. iMamazed.

They expect wireless signals (both Internet and cellular and near good coffee) to reach into every nook and corner of the college. They expect far more than a simple syllabus with the email address of the professor. At Parkland, significant investment in both faculty development, course re-design, and the required support systems began fifteen years ago.

Administration, at the time, wisely invested resources into the creation of one of the first student and course management portals and engaged faculty in the selection and management of hardware and software. Today, the vast majority of the sections we offer blur the lines between traditional on-campus courses and those labeled as online or hybrid sections.

Our online students now make up well over 10% of all enrollments at Parkland. Last spring, over 5000 seats in online courses were filled. If you saw the article about our online courses in the News Gazette a while back,  you know that the reason they come is because we do this with our hands:

So, our faculty and staff have grown accustomed to electronic class rosters with student pictures and email addresses, automatic population of the learning management system, online grading, and the ability to generate a multitude of reports on-the-fly.

Our students insist upon networked access to their class schedule, financial aid portfolio, degree audit systems, and “live chat” with student services professionals, even at 1 am. Especially at 1 am. Packaging…

We attract students from all over the country as well as concurrently enrolled students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, just five miles away. Access and convenience in conjunction with quality and transferability are imperatives.

My point is that awareness and understanding of what might be important to our students and consideration of the differences in the ways we acquire and process information and construct knowledge…is not only important, its critical. 

As these devices become inextricably linked to our lives, our families, our friends, and our students, not only in this country, but around the world, we are connected like never before.

I was at a wedding a while back, and I met up with two of my nieces (16 and 19 years old) that I haven’t seen in quite a while. All the time we were at this very admittedly boring wedding reception, they were glued to their cell phones, but they didn’t have them up to their ear like you might expect.

They had them in front of them, their faces softly lit by the glow of the high resolution, thin film transistor color screen with built-in 5.2 megapixel camera and 270 hours of battery life and 3D graphics engine, while their thumbs were moving at 100 miles an hour over the keypad as they composed text messages to their friends back home in Michigan.

I guess that old-fashioned email system just isn’t fast enough anymore.

So yes, now it’s possible for even the most insulated of Americans to keep in touch and even have friends from all over the world. For instance, I recently received an e-mail asking me to help a deposed Nigerian prince who is looking for a business partner to recapture his fortune.

Thanks to the flexibility of global banking, a Swiss bank account is ready and waiting for my share of his money. I know, because I just e-mailed him my Social Security number.

And pharmaceuticals! I’m getting emails on a daily basis from people I have never met that somehow say they know that I need all kinds of drugs for conditions that I didn’t even know I had. Talk about amazing!

Our students are changing and so is the College.  

Today, we speak in terms of terabyte storage when it seems like just last semester it was merely gigabytes. Yet at the very same time, employers in the community college districts that we serve lament the very real deficits in our graduate’s ability to communicate effectively, work in teams, and think critically.

It seems as though we, in the community college especially, are squeezed between the dichotomy of understanding this rapid change with respect to curriculum, equipment, and labs, while watching our students stumble over the very basic work ethic skills instilled by our parents a generation before. What happens to our Raging, Inexorable Thunder Lizard Evangelists along the way?

We need not be futurists to come to the conclusion that the whole endeavor of higher education has been forever changed by these forces – jobs, technology, etc.

As our systems evolve and students’ expectations around access drive us, likewise, their insatiable appetite for quick and easy access to information drives our system designs. 

Today, I am sure of one thing: change is constant and its rate is accelerating exponentially. 

Hang on!


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