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Washington Executive Leadership Institute Candidate Letter of Application Candidate Name: Richard S. McKinnon, Ph.D. Current College: South Puget Sound Community College Current Position: eLearning Support Manager Using this form (or format), in a maximum of four pages, address the following questions.

1.

What are your long-term career goals? What level of position are you interested in and why?

Technological advances over the last decade have reshaped such sectors as publishing, television, and music distribution; these same advances are poised to disrupt and transform higher education. Indeed, with the advent of open content projects such as MITx, Coursera, iTunes U, the Khan Academy, Udacity, and TEDEd, these changes have already begun to occur. This means that the community and technical college system will have to adjust to several new realities concerning the range of educational options that students have access to, the relevance of our programs, and the pedagogical challenges that digitization of content present. In short, when students become “free-range learners,” it’s crucial to have leaders who understand how to leverage technology to create an educational model that works best with what students need in a rapidly changing economy. My career goal is to be part of the team that leads our system through these challenges. In order to do so, I’ll need to be part of the senior administration such as a Dean of Instructional Support or Vice President of Instruction.

2.

Describe your current position, responsibilities and achievements over the last two years.

My present role at SPSCC is best described as a change manager-- I facilitate a process through which faculty adapt to some of the technological changes have begun to filter into higher education. The process is not simple, often requiring deep conversations about teaching goals and practice. Another function I serve for our campus is to survey the web for new technologies that allow instructors to create natural and compelling learning environments. I also administer and train faculty on a variety of platforms that support instruction, e.g., the Learning Management System (LMS), the lecture capture system, webinar tools, faculty websites, and mobile devices. More recently, I’m supporting faculty who want to employ open educational resources (such as materials from the Open Course Library) in their pedagogy. I participate in many committees and workgroups on campus; for example, I chair the eLearning advisory group; this group consists primarily of faculty, and is an important body for guiding decisions that affect the use of technology in instruction on campus. I’ve also been appointed to the Innovation Committee tasked with identifying opportunities driven by technology. From an external perspective, I am

the representative for the college on the eLearning Council of the CTC system, and participate in the ANGEL Admin group. I'm also the campus representative for the Quality Matters, and have achieved "Master Reviewer" status within that system.

In addition to generally increasing the strategic use of technology on campus, the specific project I’m most proud of over the last two years is my participation in the design of our new Library/eLearning/Student Services building on campus. As a member of this team from the beginning, I feel that I’ve made a significantly positive impact on the design, and I’m excited to see the building in action. I believe that the careful work we’ve done on this design will reach beyond the building itself, integrating the campus into a more unified whole, and making technology accessible to students in a variety of learning spaces.

3.

Briefly describe your background and experience and how it has prepared you to assume your desired position.

My training is in Linguistics and Communication. My dissertation focused on the way in which the brain represents complex words (e.g., in-form-ation). Are words stored as whole forms (information) or as separable parts (in-, -form-, -ation)? In my research I collected brain waves in response to words and non-words containing word parts; my results supported the notion that the brain is in a constant process of analyzing and synthesizing word parts, rather than storing them in a static form. My training as a scientist forged a great respect for primary data in any decision process; but at a deeper level, my graduate experience brought home the importance and power of designing learning environments that engage students through interdisciplinary, project-based activities that motivate them to take responsibility for their own learning process. This bias has been reinforced over the past 15 years during which I’ve taught at a variety of colleges and universities, ranging from the traditional (e.g., UW, UMASS, Elms College), to the more innovative (e.g., Hampshire College, The Evergreen State College), where students have greater autonomy in defining their learning pathways. One of the great strengths of technology-mediated learning is the degree to which it allows faculty to teach in the world itself, sending students outside the bounds that presently enclose disciplines to find pertinent resources wherever they exist, and facilitating learning through active engagement with the issue and with each other.

4.

Describe your management style.

Everyone has a deep need for recognition and respect, and managing people (either individually or in groups) often boils down to finding ways to make sure that these values are communicated clearly and frequently. When communication fails, organizations fall into dysfunction because people no longer feel valued or respected.

Very often, then, the work of leadership consists of (re)establishing channels for communication, allowing signals of recognition and respect to flow, thus creating an environment in which to (re)build successful and productive relationships. There are many models for organizational communication. I have a strong affinity for the

dispute resolution model. I'm a senior mediator at the Thurston County Dispute Resolution Center, and have worked professionally as a mediator for the State of Washington (Special Education Mediation Cadre). I have a lot of experience using the tools are at the center of the mediation model (values clarification, interest-based bargaining, intentional communication), and I've found them to be effective in a wide variety of contexts.

Even organizations with good internal communication require leadership when faced with external challenges. Ronold Heifitz defines leadership as helping groups do things they would not be able to achieve on their own, and again, the dispute resolution model, with its emphasis on procedural satisfaction (not just outcomes), provides a powerful tool for building the coalitions required within an organization to address the challenges that await. It is impossible to overemphasize the importance of building buy-in for solutions through a group process. The solution may be clear, and the path forward obvious, but unless stakeholders are able to play a substantive role in arriving at that solution, movement in that direction will invariably be difficult. Solutions are rarely clear, and pathways are usually not obvious, which means that creating a valid decision-making process that accesses all the skills and knowledge available within an organization is absolutely crucial to successfully meeting any significant challenge.

5.

What is your educational philosophy?

I've always found this question to be highly ambiguous: is it about the ends we hope to achieve through education, or about the means by which we do this? In either case, I’m hopeful that we are transitioning into a period when the conversation involves more input from science and less philosophy. There is now substantial evidence not only about how humans learn, but also the benefits that education brings with respect to participation in civil society, standards of living, and human fulfillment. For example, we know that people learn differently, and thus educational content should be accessible in as many ways as we experience the world. We also know that facts, unconnected to relevance or meaning, are terribly hard to learn. (This is what Joi Ito calls the “reading from the dictionary� mode if education.) Finally, learning should reflect how the world is: an interconnected, undifferentiated tangle of information that requires as much work to define the problem as it takes technical knowledge to solve it.

The easiest way to make learning fit better with our human ecology is to make it collaborative -- social connection is what we find motivating and it is simple to design learning activities that engage the social brain. For example, Kearsley & Shneiderman argue that project-based group work that has an authentic, external focus is the optimal context within which to learn new skills. I can think of no better description of what Community and Technical Colleges strive to do, and rapid increase in the sophistication of technology over the last decade has provided educators with a wonderful opportunity to re-think how they teach, moving toward a more process-oriented, collaborative, learner-centric model. Because the emphasis is

on "group work," there is less reliance on the instructor, and students gain by interacting with a wider set of humans during their learning process.

6.

Why are you a good candidate for this program, and what would you like to gain from it?

I’m a relative newcomer to the community and technical colleges and during the few years I’ve been working in the system, I’ve been focused almost entirely on issues around instruction and technology. Also, entering the role of administrator as I have from a background in teaching and practice, I lack the essential knowledge and relationships that would help me contribute at a wider level. For these reasons, I suggest that I’m a perfect candidate for WELA. Mentorship through WELA would give me the intensive experience that would otherwise take many years to achieve.

Not only would I benefit from a better understanding of the community and technical college system in general, but in particular about aspects of the system that I am least familiar with such as Student Services, Enrollment Services, and the financial operations of the system and my campus.

7.

What would you be able to contribute to the candidate group?

One of the things that I bring to the table for this group is a good sense of what’s possible with respect to how pedagogy and technology can work to the advantage of students, faculty, and institutions. As access to knowledge becomes more direct via the internet (i.e., disintermediated), the role of instructors can actually expand to include many activities that were difficult or impossible in traditional models of education. Rather than increasing isolation, I believe that the intentional application of technology can create new environments for teaching and learning that are more ecologically valid, and that facilitate more interaction in face-to-face contexts, thereby increasing human contact. I think this is an important message for new leaders to hear because the question isn’t whether change will affect our campuses, but rather, how much control we’ll have over the process as it occurs.