Week 11: Winners Never Quit?

"Quitters never win and winners never quit." Often attributed to football coach Vince Lombardi, this quote has circulated through youth sports leagues, high school algebra classrooms and various locker rooms for years. But have we stopped to consider an upside of quitting?

Freakonomics Radio occasionally produces special hour-long podcasts, twice the length of the typical weekly podcasts presented by Stephen Dubner and Steve Levitt.  "The Upside of Quitting" originally aired in 2011, but it's continued to garner hits and attention, and earlier this spring, it was re-broadcast.

In this podcast, Levitt and Dubner rely on a plethora of experts to help debug the "winners never quit" idiom and propose "sometimes quitting is strategic, and sometimes it can be your best possible plan."

Listen to the full podcast (or download it for your MP3 player) HERE. Or, read the transcripts HERE.

Things to Think About
Levitt and Dubner's podcasts are rooted in economics. In this podcast we are introduced to two economic concepts: “sunk cost” and “opportunity cost.” According to Dubner:

“Sunk cost” is about the past — it’s the time, or money, or sweat equity that you’ve put into something, which makes it hard to abandon. “Opportunity cost” is about the future. It means that for every hour or dollar you spend on one thing, you’re giving up the opportunity to spend that hour or dollar on something else — something that might make your life better. If only you weren’t so worried about the sunk cost. If only you could quit."

For this podcast, the crew called upon Hal Arkes, among many experts. He’s a psychology professor at Ohio State University and expands upon the "sunk cost fallacy." This is when one you tell yourself you can't quit because you've spent too much time or money already. Arkes claims this is an adult syndrome; children are experts at dumping the "sunk costs" and moving on.

Ponderings

Are you on board? Is it better sometimes to quit and cut the losses? How do you decide when to stick it out and when to throw in the towel?

Can you think of an example when you've come out ahead by quitting? Or a situation when you wish you'd had not quit?

What lessons can we take from this podcast for our students? 

Week 10: Everybody's got one!

Everybody's got one of what? A mobile phone! In the Student Tech Survey conducted by Computer Services last fall, 97% of respondents indicated they had a mobile phone with them on campus.

While there are benefits and disadvantages to the proliferation of student mobile phones and devices, I'm going to approach this week's post with a few positive ways to take advantage of the ever-connected student body.

Texting:
Have you had an instance where sending a text to students would be extremely convenient, but you simply don't want to give out your mobile phone number to the class? Enter remind.  Remind is a web-based texting tool. You create an account or login using your Google account, then create a class. You'll get a URL to email to your class. The students in your class subscribe to your messages by supplying their mobile numbers. You can then type a message to send to all students. You can remove people from your class list, and you can schedule text messages for future delivery. Check it out at www.remind.com
  
Polling/Surveying/Quizzing
You can create on-the-fly poll questions, quiz questions or in-class surveys using Poll Everywhere.  When you create a question, the site provides a unique number and code for texting results. Students follow the directions for submitting a response, and answers are immediately recorded. You can embed the questions into a PowerPoint or you can simply present them from the Poll Everywhere interface.

Sharing/Capturing
Dropbox is "a place for all your stuff, wherever you are." It's a cloud-based file storage system. Dropbox also has the option of sharing all or some of your stuff. "What does this have to do with my students bringing mobile phones to class?" you ask. Well, let's say you're an avid user of the white boards in your classroom. And let's say you just spent the last 50 minutes composing the most incredibly brilliant collection of notes on that white board. Instead of simply erasing it before the next class starts, you could set up a shared folder on Dropbox for class notes, then ask a student to capture the notes with a mobile phone and put the image in the shared Dropbox folder. It's quick and immediate.

How do you use your own phone for productivity? Do you have a policy regarding mobile phones in your classroom? Do you have other tips to share regarding students and their mobile phones?

Week 9: The Happy Secret to Better Work

Do you work to be happy or are you happy to work? Are you a glass-half full sort of a person, or are you frequently looking for the tap, worried the half that's left is disappearing too quickly? According to studies led by Shawn Achor, your optimism levels, your social support structure and your ability to see stress as a challenge instead of a threat, are three times as likely as your I.Q. to predict your job success. Achor, a former distinguished educator at Harvard University, and now CEO of Good Think, Inc.,  researches positive outliers, or in other words, studies Positive Psychology.

Positive psychology is the scientific study of what makes life most worth living. It is a call for psychological science and practice to be as concerned with strength as with weakness; as interested in building the best things in life as in repairing the worst; and as concerned with making the lives of normal people fulfilling as with healing pathology. [published in Psychology Today: "What Is Positive Psychology, and What Is It Not?" May 16, 2008 by Christopher Peterson, Ph.D.]

Transcript can be read HERE.

I found this quote in the video to be particularly thought provoking as I thought about my interactions with our own students on campus:

"And what I found in my research and my teaching is that these students, no matter how happy they were with their original success of getting into the school, two weeks later their brains were focused, not on the privilege of being there, nor on their philosophy or their physics. Their brain was focused on the competition, the workload, the hassles, the stresses, the complaints."

Achor suggests ways to 'retrain' our brains to focus on the positive. Do you believe this is possible? Do you practice any positive psychology, yourself? In our data-driven world, where students are worried about transcripts, GPAs and what's on the next test, how do we encourage a positive approach? How do you do so in your own life?

Challenge: as suggested by Achor in this talk, recount something positive that has happened to you in the past 24 hours. Share in comments if you'd like, or just jot it down on a piece of paper on your desk. Put it where you'll see it for the next few days (Achor says this allows us to relive the positive moment).

Read more: Harvard Business Review: Positive Intelligence, published in January-February 2012.

Week 8: Random Tools You Can Use

For the post-holiday weekend I'm presenting some basic tips & tools, revisited. I've mentioned some of these tools in a previous Lunch & Learn. Their simplicity is worth repeating.

Tools:

Print Friendly: do you find yourself printing webpages for your files (analog files) or to pass along to an analog reader or for some other paper-based purpose? Or, do you wish you could just save a webpage to come back and read later? PrintFriendly is a website that will create a print friendly version of almost any website. Just copy and paste the link from your desired website into the PrintFriendly site. You can have the PDF mailed to you, download it immediately or sent it right to the printer. No login required.

Unfriendly file types. Have you ever received a document attachment that you couldn't open because you didn't have the right application? Zamzar is a file conversion site. You upload the file you want to convert (100MB limit), select the file type you want to end up with, enter your email address and click 'convert.' You'll get an email when the conversion is completed, with a link to the file for downloading.

Pump up the volume. Have you ever wished you could listen to a web-based story instead of read it? Perhaps you're also cleaning out your office, shredding old student exams or perhaps getting a pedicure? SoundGecko converts web based content into audio-based stories. A paid version allows you to convert PDF content to audio, too.

Share files? Look to the Google! Google Drive that is. You may already know you have Google Drive, but have you really used it? Google Drive operates like your f:drive, except it's available everywhere you can get to the internet. The next time you need to give someone a file, don't email the attachment. Instead it, share it via Google Drive. Upload to your own Drive, then share with your mate. You'll both maintain access to the file "in the cloud." If the file needs to be edited, you can either convert a Word document to a Google document, or just create one from scratch. Both you and your collaborator can edit without losing track of who is making changes. Bonus: did you know you can connect a file from your Google Drive to your Moodle site? When you are adding files to a Moodle course, check out the options OTHER than upload on the add file page. One of the options on the left-hand side is "Google Doc"

What's your favorite tech tool?