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During an afternoon of presentations on April 30 designed to enhance the leadership styles of faculty and staff, special guest Dr. Kathy Kegley, founder and principal consultant of Synchlora LLC, presented "Creative Thinking in Leadership." Creativity comes in all shapes and forms, Kegley, who has a doctorate in computer engineering, said. After being told she wasn't creative as a teenager because she didn't possess traditional artistic skills, it took some time to "reclaim my sense of creativity," she said. Kegley, also a business adjunct at Clemson University, operates an agency to help people grow their unique natural talents and abilities in creative thinking, which is essential to creativity, she told the audience at the April 30 Leadership Development Retreat in the Library Technology Center. "One insight that I took away from the creative thinking session reinforced some recent thoughts of mine about how it is okay to make mistakes," Anita Prince, a mathematics instructor, said. "You learn from your mistakes, so you have to keep trying, but just apply a different angle to the problem." The audience of more than 50 faculty and staff spent most of the session guided by Kegley in an exercise called "mind mapping." The technique involved organizing solutions to the selected topic — how to show appreciation — by creating a diagram of ideas structured into categories. The categories were represented by words and pictures, both essential to the mind-mapping process, Kegley said. Imagery is powerful and symbols are an essential part to the creative process, she told the audience.
Among some of the more interesting solutions the groups came up with on showing appreciation were giving out better parking spaces, having access to the business dean's car for an afternoon, and continuing free employee access to the Rec Center. Through mind mapping, Prince said she now has a tangible way to find the means to implement innovative ideas by creating a logical visual display of her thoughts. The overall goal of the session was to help leaders use creative thinking to deal with open-ended problems, which today's leaders often face, Kegley said. "Creative thinking is the process of searching for new connections between existing concepts," she said. Leaders need to know their environments and take calculated risks, Kegley said afterward. Fostering that risk-taking in others was also a topic of discussion. "The act of leadership is limited without drawing on the creative resources and contributions of the entire team," Dr. Stuart Batchelder, professor of criminal justice, said. "The secret to effective leadership is figuring out how to extract multiple ideas from your team members for the purpose of exploring creative alternatives to formulate effective strategies." The leadership retreat also included two sessions presented by faculty members. Maj. Greg Killeen from military science focused on "Tailored Leadership — Getting the Best from your Organization," and Col. Mike Pyott, head of ROTC, and Dr. Max Burns, business dean, closed the retreat with "Leadership Applied in Different Worlds but with the Same Skill." The retreat was the culmination of a year-long university endeavor to provide faculty and staff with opportunities for professional leadership development. Previous events included informal, themed coffee-talks that explored a variety of issues, including integrity, gender differences and communication styles.
Plans are unfolding for a year-long focus on community engagement at North Georgia College & State University, during which a special effort will be made to encourage and recognize activities that contribute to that important aspect of the institution's mission.
In 2010, North Georgia plans to apply for an elective classification in Community Engagement from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and the upcoming academic year — endorsed as the Year of Engagement by President David Potter and the university's Leadership Council — will serve as a period to document engagement activities. Dr. Donna Gessell, executive director of regional engagement for the university, has spent many months educating the campus community about the forms of engagement, which include academic service learning, co-curricular service-learning and volunteerism. "North Georgia is already very active in terms of community engagement," Gessell said. "We're really striving to call attention to what we're already doing as an institution. The Carnegie classification demonstrates that we have institutionalized engagement and that it is an integral part of our campus culture." The late Ernest Boyer, esteemed educator and former president of the Carnegie Foundation, was among the first to propose that colleges and universities broaden the definition of scholarly work. In his 1990 publication, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, Boyer suggested that four general areas of endeavor — discovery, integration of knowledge, teaching, and service — should be viewed as scholarship. The classification is voluntary, but provides schools a mechanism to recognize important aspects of institutional mission that are not part of typical national assessments. As such, the effort is gaining ground: to-date, nearly 200 colleges and universities have successfully earned Carnegie's Community Engagement classification. There were 76 schools recognized in 2006, the first year for the classification, and 120 schools successfully completed classification in 2008. "To demonstrate curricular engagement, institutions were asked to describe teaching, learning, and scholarly activities that engage faculty, students, and the community in mutually beneficial and respectful collaboration, address community-identified needs, deepen students' civic and academic learning, enhance the well-being of the community, and enrich the scholarship of the institution," said Amy Driscoll, coordinator of the classification for community engagement, in "Carnegie's Community Engagement Classification: Intentions and Insights," Change (January/February 2008). For the purposes of the classification, community engagement is defined as "the collaboration between the institution and its larger communities for the mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources in a context of partnership and reciprocity." "Because of North Georgia's efforts to educate students to live and lead in a global society, the meaning of ‘larger communities' in the definition easily expands from the campus here in Dahlonega and North Georgia region to countries and opportunities in other parts of the world," Gessell said. Marketing students in Dr. Martin Izzo's Experiential Marketing: Strategy for the Performing Arts and Sport course, experienced service learning first-hand this spring, when they staged two community events that netted more than $2,700 to benefit the local PAWS Humane Society. In-kind contributions of pet food and supplies brought the total donation to more than $3,000. The two projects included a 5K Run at Yahoola Creek Recreation Complex and a Battle of the Bands at the Holly Theater. Izzo, working in collaboration with leaders of the PAWS Humane Society, explored how the students could meet course outcomes for event marketing and benefit PAWS. In addition to staging the fundraising events, Izzo's students toured the PAWS shelter to learn about its mission and volunteered more than 150 hours of service at the facility. The students also volunteered at the Holly Theatre and learned the importance of giving service to their community. Looking ahead to next year, a group of faculty and staff are exploring how to make the university's regional research and service impact even more powerful through a more systemic approach. The effort, currently led by Drs. Robert Fuller and Tom Nelson, proposes a "Headwaters Engagement" model, a way of considering the region in its watersheds. "The rationale is that watershed areas have similar biological cultures, and therefore share social and political issues that are also interrelated," Gessell said. "Their idea is to explore ways that North Georgia can interface in these regions in interdisciplinary, integrated ways. The framework for this initiative has truly captured the imagination of many on campus." The university's
service learning Web site provides details on current projects
and opportunities that exist in the community for future projects.
A large segment of North Georgia's job applicants will experience a markedly improved process for finding employment opportunities starting this summer through a Web site that will post all jobs open to them. With the new centralized online system, job seekers will be able to conveniently find income opportunities on campus while they are concurrently pursuing their first line of work — earning a college degree. Undergraduate and graduate students, who constitute roughly a third of all employees on campus and about 25 percent of the university's full-time equivalent workforce, will be able to use the one-stop Web resource, instead of searching multiple locations on campus for jobs. The Saint Job Board, which went live in February with off-campus job opportunities, will now be the single portal that students will use to find and apply for all campus positions and that employees may use to create and post job descriptions for students. The virtual job board will include institutionally paid, federal work-study, and on-campus internship positions. Students are an essential part of maintaining the university's day-to-day business, with more than 320 working part-time in various administrative offices and academic departments during the current school year and some being used as graduate assistants by faculty members. The Saint Job Board, maintained through Career Services, will increase access to detailed job information and allow for a broader pool of applicants to apply for campus positions. Students will gain valuable job-search skills by going through an application and interview process, said Dora Ditchfield, director of Career Services, and hiring departments will be able to select students who they feel will be the best fit for their offices. Campus administrators are also seeking to add value to the collegiate experience by aligning students' interests with campus jobs posted on the Saint Job Board. "This past academic year we had 399 students come into the office looking for part-time or full-time job opportunities," Ditchfield said. The Offices of Financial Aid, Human Resources, and Career Services worked together to implement a recommendation from a University System of Georgia Board of Regents' taskforce for all campuses to consolidate their respective student employment listings into a single student employment center.
NGCSU Web page provides updates on
H1N1 virus Currently, public health officials believe that, in most cases, symptoms of the H1N1 virus are very similar in nature to typical flu strains and present no immediate danger that would cause the university to close, should someone in the community contract the virus.
Personal
prevention and hygiene continue to
be the most effective health and
safety measure individuals can take.
Those steps and information about
what students, faculty and staff
should do if they are sick are
listed on the university's
emergency
information Web page,
which also provides easy access and
links to the latest information we
have available.
HR offers
new Employee Assistance Program
NGCSU to
play host to softball championships
April issue
of System Supplement available
Herbert selected for advising award
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