As many of you likely are aware, the Edublog Awards were launched in 2004 in response to concerns over a trend among schools, districts and educational institutions towards blocking access of student and teacher blog sites.

I’m happy to nominate ToughSledding in the category of “Best teacher blog.” Written by Bill Sledzik, associate professor in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication at Kent State University. Sledzik teaches courses in public relations, writing and ethics, and has been instrumental in designing the J-School’s new PR Online Master’s program. Prior to joining Kent State in 1992, Sledzik spent 16 years working as a PR professional.

You can nominate your favorite sites and bloggers for the Edublog Awards! Nominations close on Friday, December 2, and public voting will take place until December 13th, 2011. The award ceremony will take place live in Blackboard Collaborate at 7pm EST Wednesday, December 14th. Details on how to nominate below!

Here’s a note from Steve Hargadon, host of the awards:

The purpose of the Edublog Awards is promote and demonstrate the educational values of these social media. The best aspects include that it creates a fabulous resource for educators to use for ideas on how social media is used in different contexts, with a range of different learners while creating an invaluable resource of the best-of-the-best on the web!

How To Nominate

To nominate your favorites, we’re following the same approach as the last three years, namely asking you to:

• Write a post with your nominations for the different categories on your own blog (or a website – anywhere public)
• Send us the link to your nomination post via the form at the bottom of the Nominations Page

And we’ve made some changes to categories this year such as:

• Some categories have been combined together (Best ed tech / resource sharing blog and Best educational use of audio / video / visual /podcast)
• We’ve created two new categories (Best open PD / unconference / webinar series and Best free web tool)
• Virtual worlds are encouraged to be part of the expanded “social network” category

Here are the categories in full – nominations are open from now until Friday 2 December, and voting will then be up until Tuesday 13 December and the ceremony will be rocking on Wednesday 14 December!

So go nominate your favourite blogs, twitterers, community sites, videos, podcasts and more… for 2011:

• Best individual blog
• Best individual tweeter
• Best group blog
• Best new blog
• Best class blog
• Best student blog
• Best ed tech / resource sharing blog
• Most influential blog post
• Best twitter hashtag
• Best teacher blog
• Best librarian / library blog
• Best School Administrator blog
• Best free web tool
• Best educational use of audio / video / visual / podcast
• Best educational wiki
• Best open PD / unconference / webinar series
• Best educational use of a social network
• Lifetime achievement

Visit The Future of Education site: http://www.futureofeducation.com/?xg_source=msg_mes_network

Back in my heyday as an English major, I was somewhat notorious for waiting until the night before a paper was due before I began actually writing it. (Today, we call this procrastination.) I did it so often that I knew that, for whatever reason, once I’d completed the introduction — which always took me the longest to write — I averaged about one finished, final, typed page an hour. Applying the same formula, I see that this paper works out to more like two pages per year of experience. It’s been interesting to reflect on that.

When I graduated from college in 1984, there was no clear training or career path for someone interested in pursuing a career in development. I don’t even know if the term “development” was used back then the way it is today to refer to the fund raising function of non-profit administration. I do recall that these roles lived largely on the marketing side of the business, and that most fundraisers in those days seemed to have fallen into their roles, more than having arrived in them as some logical progression of an organized career path.

That certainly describes my own start down the path to becoming a career fundraiser. I graduated with a degree in English, and while I wanted to work in a profession that would allow me to employ my love of writing, I mostly wanted to get to work beginning to build my experience — and my own version of the American Dream. When I dreamed, I always saw myself on the creative side of the advertising biz — and this was decades before “Mad Men” captivated the attention of TV fans. So, a few days after my graduation in spring of 1984, I was thrilled to see a classified ad in the Cleveland Plain Dealer that read, “Marketing Representatives Sought for the Cleveland Orchestra.” It was perfect, I thought. I loved the orchestra, and this sounded like a great opportunity to get into the field. It seemed like destiny. Turns out, it was.

Not at first, though. I responded to the ad and was excited to almost immediately receive callback for an interview, but then just as immediately disappointed when I showed up for the interview and learned that the type of marketing representatives that were being sought were those who would make phone calls every night with a goal of selling season packages to the Orchestra’s performance season in Severance Hall. It wasn’t really what I was looking for at all, and certainly not what I’d been hoping for, but I needed a job and the hiring manager seemed to feel that I could be pretty successful at the work. I took the job.

I worked on the phones for the Orchestra for about 8 months, first selling subscriptions and then soliciting for donations. I won’t lie — I hated the job. I saw it as a means to an end. I needed to eat, and to pay my rent so I could keep my beloved apartment on legendary Hessler Road. It’s interesting what drives us forward. I would do it until I could land a full-time gig, and then I’d move on and forget it. When I wasn’t working, I spent my time typing cover letters and trying to get interviews for openings in public relations and advertising firms. I thought I’d done everything right — got accepted at a great school (Case Western Reserve University), earned my degree in 4 years, and hit the ground running after graduation. All I needed was an opportunity to show my stuff.

Persistence finally paid off, as it always does, when I landed a job as an abstractor for a firm then located up the road. I spent my days reading industry magazines, trade journals and major newspapers — things like the Wall Street Journal, Advertising Age and Waste Weekly — scanning them for items that could be of interest to market researchers (new product launches, R&D plans, mergers and acquisitions, leadership[ shake-ups). When I found them, I and the other roughly 100 abstractors would write concise summaries of the events, and code them so they could be searched online by customers — using then what would eventually become known to one and all as the internet.

At first, it was great — it was a full-time job, after all. Money wasn’t a problem for me anymore. We could even work overtime. Trouble was, after about a year, it got boring. It never changed, and management of the abstractors was entrusted to a handful of individuals with library science degrees, no background in personnel management and weak people skills, at best. I resumed my search, only to find that the advertising  and PR fields were kind of like private clubs. Mostly, no one looked twice at my resume. The few who did generally sent me a rejection letter. Apparently, all the hiring managers saw when they looked at my resume was an English major, fresh out of college, with no relevant work experience. It was a Catch-22 — to get into the advertising biz, I needed experience, but how could I get experience if no one would hire me without it?

[More to come…]

The purpose of this post wasn’t so much to promote the publication of my little paper, but to provide some background about how I arrived to this point — or how the paper came to be.

The title of the paper is “Scripting and Training for Effective Fundraising Calls,” and you can get it here. It’s published by the terrific folks at Academic Impressions, who are bright, smart, sharp, fantastic collaborators who I feel fortunate to work with, and to whom I am grateful for realizing the potential of this paper and for guiding me through the process of downloading two decades of accumulated experiences in an endeavor I truly came to love. (Special thanks to Amit Mrig and Naomi Nishi, who so graciously listened to me talk about how I’d like to get this stuff in writing, and to Daniel Fusch, my project manager and editor, who kept me on track throughout the writing process as the paper developed into more than we’d initially planned.)

I hope you find it helpful in your work, but mostly I hope you enjoy it.

There comes a time, it seems, in most people’s career lives, when they begin to feel certain indistinct yearnings…for what? Often, it’s for new experiences — which typically bring with them renewed excitement and, not uncommonly, the promise of greater compensation.

So, yeah — it’s normal. Most people seem to want to advance — they want to grow, personally and professionally. Maybe it’s for the status — new jobs come with new titles. Maybe its for positioning — it not a new job, a new title at the same employer can help set-up a candidate for being hired at the next level by a new employer. Makes sense.

What doesn’t make sense is how many people in leadership positions are in absolutely above their heads. Remember the Spiderman creed? — “With great power comes great responsibility.” It’s true.

Now, I’ve been a working stiff in one form or another for right around a quarter of a century. And one mistake that I have seen people make over and over again is to fall for the allure of “career advancement” when, really, if they took a good, clean objective look at themselves — at what really makes them tick — they’d realize that being a leader is the last thing they really want to do. I’m of the opinion that realizing such self-truths is the furthest thing from an admission of failure; in fact, if anything, it’s the opposite — a truly admirable acceptance of where one is not only most effective, but happiest.

That said, people will still think they want to be in charge. So, for those considering a jump to the next level, I offer the following advice, gathered from my years in the chair both as a troop and as a director of troops. Take it for what it’s worth, in the spirit in which it is intended.

“Melfo’s List”

1. Keep it real.

• Be genuine – be yourself. Don’t check your values – or personality – at the door.
• Don’t confuse your title with your importance.
• Always measure organizational aspirations against reality.

2. Your people are your most important asset. Value your people. Never forget that your staff is the group of people who count on you, and upon whom you rely. Never confuse their humanity with their defined organizational roles. Learn them as well as you learn your job.

3. Don’t make assumptions. Assumptions create arbitrary limitations. There are enough facts out there to get to the truth – when you have questions, go after the answers.

4. Critique yourself. Weigh the choices that you make against what added value they will bring to your organization. Most projects can always be better – what you are unable to accomplish this round try to accomplish in the next.

5. No one has all the answers. When that someone is you, don’t let it paralyze you. It’s always better to be doing something than nothing.

6. There are leaders and there are followers. Followers want to be led. Give them what they want.

7. Live and work in “active tense.”  Managers manage. Leaders lead. Otherwise, it’s just a label.

8. Your title does not turn you into a leader – your actions do. If you’re in a leadership position, and you don’t know what a leader is, find out. If it isn’t what you want to do, get out of it. People who prefer to follow don’t like to lead. And everyone sees it.

9. One of a leader’s primary roles is to identify and cultivate new leaders. The difference between leaders and supervisors is that leaders teach and mentor, while supervisors delegate and watch.

10. Keep your perspective. Know when you’re breaking new ground vs. maintaining. Your decisions need to be different depending on your positioning. Always know whether you are designing a house, putting on an addition, painting a wall, or replacing the roof.

11. Maintain objectivity. Sometimes really great ideas just aren’t the right thing to do (because of timing, resources, competing priorities, etc.). Do the best you can with what you have at the best time to do it for your organization.

12.  Assess your landscape. Your best colleagues can sometimes be individuals who you don’t necessarily work with directly.

13. Avoid paranoia. If you aren’t noticed for everything you contribute, it doesn’t mean you’re being ignored. Administrators pretty regularly “act out” when you do something they don’t know about – even if it’s a really good thing for the organization. Avoid internalizing their control issues.

14. Know your limitations.

• Only you know how much guidance you need to be effective. Ask for it.
• Likewise, only you know how much autonomy you need. Demand it. If you feel a strong need for guidance, and not much of a need for autonomy, you probably should avoid leadership roles.

15. “With great power comes great responsibility.” — Spiderman creed, Stan “The Man” Lee

Use your power wisely and responsibly. Do no harm. Accept that responsibility comes with obligations.

• Leaders make decisions. If you don’t like to make decisions, avoid leadership roles.
• Leaders must be comfortable with some degree of chaos. If you aren’t, avoid leadership roles.
• Leaders must be comfortable with conflict on many levels. If conflict makes you feel like pulling your hair out, or running away and hiding — avoid leadership roles.
• Leaders are not always right. If you’re afraid to make mistakes, or intolerant of your staff making mistakes, or unwilling to accept that mistakes are learning opportunities, avoid leadership roles.

16. Don’t project the organization’s internal issues onto your external audience. Organizations easily get caught up in their own drama. Remember that the people you are trying to reach – your customers, your audience and your constituencies – have full lives of their own, of which your organization’s mission is just a small part. For most of our customers, we are a mention in the credits of the movie of their lives. 

17. The “organization” is nothing without the individuals who make it work. You are the organization. While an organization may have a history, its history is no more than an accounting of the decisions made by the individuals who preceded you. Organizations do not have wills of their own – the “will” comes from the leaders. They go where their leaders decide they go.

18. America is a democracy; the workplace isn’t. Weigh your decisions carefully, but make sure you make the decision that is best for the organization vs. the decision that will be the most popular. They are rarely the same; when they are, count it as great day.

19. The importance of any decision is directly proportional to its impact on the lives of the people within the organization. An organization is only as strong as its people, and the loyalty of those people to its mission. You can’t say that “what’s best for the organization will be best for its people in the long-run” unless you make the best decisions.

20. Have fun. Find a way. “Make the train ride as interesting as you can.”

Here’s a great opportunity to promote and support “the achievements of edubloggers, twitterers, podcasters, video makers, online communities, wiki hosts and other web based users of educational technology.”

My nomination

Category:  Best teacher blog

Blog:         ToughSledding, http://toughsledding.com/

ToughSledding is written by Bill Sledzik, who is an associate professor in Kent State University’s School of Journalism & Mass Communication. Prof. Sledzik teaches courses in public relations, writing and ethics, and has been a member of the Kent State faculty for the past 17 years. His courses are informed by his previous life as a PR pro for 16 years, including five as head of Sledzik & Associates, which was located in Buffalo, NY.

Sledzik started his blog in 2006, and describes it thusly:

ToughSledding is a middle-aged professor’s attempt to learn about social media by doing social media. So far, so good. I was inspired to try it by Scoble & Israel’s book, but it has been sustained by a mix of ego and a desire to be part of the online discussions about public relations.

Always worth reading, imo.

To nominate your own faves, just go to the The Edublog Awards Homepage homepage and follow the directions.