Posts Tagged ‘MICA’
A-school, B-school
As the semester draws to a close, I’ve been inspired by the many similarities between business school and the fine arts college where I received my undergraduate degree. Like Loyola, the end of the school year at MICA is a time filled with excitement, activity and celebration. Both colleges go the extra mile to honor and support students and take pride in their accomplishments.
A big distinction between a visual arts college and business school is the way that student talent and work is shared. At MICA’s senior exhibition every graduating student is given a space on campus to display her work. A special preview event provides the opportunity for the general public to tour the studios and meet the artists. I can’t think of a better way to showcase talent and provide students with an opportunity to share the culmination of their learning.
In b-school, this opportunity for sharing our knowledge and experience in the program is more private. Our semester ended with a series of team presentations which brought together much of the learning from the last module. What could b-school learn from an art school about making the learning experience more transparent and accessible to other students, family and community members? And what can business learn from the art traditions of critique and feedback?
As John Maeda wrote in this post, individuals and organizations that are open to models of critique indicate that “…you are open to asking bigger questions about your work and its validity within your organization.” Some colleges in Finland are bringing the worlds of business and design together and I am very interested to follow their progress.
Critique @MICA (www.mica.edu)
Inspired by Greatness
Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling
One of the things I love about working in higher education is the community of sharing. This week, MICA had the good fortune to host visitors from Brandeis University who shared their experiences around on-line admission applications and course evaluations. Brandeis and MICA are very different in how we manage our enterprise systems. At MICA we’re very lightly staffed and therefore must follow a very vanilla, low customization model. Brandeis a larger investment in ERP technology staffing and utilizes these resources to extend functionality of their systems in ways that, well, make some of us at MICA drool.
We also attended the University System of Maryland Oracle PeopleSoft conference where Gettysburg College did a terrific presentation about connecting technology projects with institutional strategy through a student leadership initiative. During his introduction, Steve Lewis commented on one of my favorite themes of 2008 — aligning technology goals with organizational planning. I’ve participated in many conversations where technologists wonder about how we can get leadership buy-in for technology projects. The Gettysburg approach was to focus on the goals set by the leadership in the college’s long term plan and use this is as the basis for technology iniatives.
Brandeis, Gettysburg and MICA couldn’t be more different in terms of our staffing, acadmic programs and approach to technology. But at the end of the day, we’re all trying to accomplish the same things: support the education of our students. While it’s not likely that MICA will be able to implement the exact solutions that work so successfully at these institutions, our dialog and learning will lead us to providing better services for our students in our own great MICA way.
