As we thought about our organizational goals, one of the things we wanted to emphasize was how, Library and Technology Services should strive to be one of the best learning organizations. Taken from Wikipedia – “a learning organization is a company that facilitates the learning of its members and continuously transforms itself” Which organization doesn’t want to do this, right? But, as an organization, are we facilitating the learning process enough? that is the big question. In order for this to be successful, both the leadership and the staff must be committed to it.
I just want to make sure that some of the underlying characteristics described in the Wikipedia article as quoted from The Fifth Discipline written by Peter Senge are not directly applicable to an organization like ours. But true to being a learning organization, we should study them and distill from them what we can take away!
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Today was the first day of classes and Convocation at the College. It was great to see all our students back. I saw a couple of our Helpdesk students working hard to clear the tickets even after we closed! I wanted to write about a few things with no particular connections to each other…
Social Media Problems
A student applied and was admitted to Univ of Rochester. Then, like all teenagers, she wrote about it in Facebook! It turns out that someone from the private high school she attended who saw this information on Facebook found this to be a little disconcerting, because the administrators do not remember the student asking for grades or recommendations be sent to Univ of Rochester. Anyways, upon further investigation, the University Admissions officers revealed that she claimed that she was home schooled and used a transcript service that helps home schooled children to send transcripts and sent in recommendation letters too. Once they found the real scoop, they rescinded her admission!
Along the same lines, in June, Harvard rescinded admissions to 10 students for a “a group exchange of racist and sexually offensive Facebook messages”.
One way to look at it is that Social Media brought out the true colors of people that are otherwise hard to gauge! Tough luck for those students whose admissions were rescinded!
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