What Inspires You?

Gerry Bayne: Welcome to the EDUCAUSE Exchange, where we focus on a single question from the higher ed IT community and hear advice, anecdotes, best practices, and more. Inspiration, motivation, and admiration are all qualities that help us either get to the next step in our career, our personal lives, or simply help us get up in the morning and get started. This episode of EDUCAUSE Exchange features a question we put to several higher ed IT professionals. What inspires you and why? Originally, when we wrote the question, it was what artists writers and music inspires you? But as we began to ask that we realized that inspiration comes in many more forms. So we're going to have a little bit of fun on this episode and hear what inspires our community

Mark Hakkinen: Without a doubt. Stevie Wonder. I've had the opportunity to meet him a few times and to demonstrate some of the technologies we've worked on.

Gerry Bayne: Mark Hakkinen is Director of Digital Accessibility for Educational Testing Service. His interaction with Stevie Wonder shed light on his own advocacy for accessibility tools.

Mark Hakkinen: It's inspiring to hear how these technologies can impact students with disabilities from his perspective. Music education, we demonstrated some technology for synchronizing music with braille, so musical lyrics with braille, and he just went all over the place with ideas of how this could be used in education or even onstage. And so, being able to interact with artists like a Stevie Wonder teaches us that we may have some concepts of what accessibility means to us or in our domain of education. But when we talk to others who bring these unique experiences it's just fascinating and inspiring to us.

Debbie Carraway: So I'll give you a little context. I went to a Quaker high school and my first years of college were at a Quaker college at Guilford College. One of the fundamental tenets of Quakerism is a deep respect for the inherent value of every person. My mother was a university librarian for many years. She was the collections development librarian and women's studies bibliographer at Wake Forest University.

Gerry Bayne: Debbie Carraway is Director of Information Technology for the College of Sciences at North Carolina State University.

Debbie Carraway: So when I went to college and realized that I wasn't straight and tried to figure out what that meant, my first instinct was go to the library. I'm sure my mother's very proud of this, and the remarkable thing about Guilford College, and I was so lucky, is that when you go to the library and you're looking for books on homosexuality, they're in the HQ section of Library of Congress system, and they were largely about ... they were psychiatric literature about the neurosis of homosexuality and the general view of the '70s.

Guilford had received a donation of these remarkable books, this collection of gay-positive, lesbian feminist literature that were on the same shelf. So I picked up a book called Lesbian/Woman by Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, and it was transformational because when I read that book, I was learning about what it meant for me in society, what culture, how it impacted me, but not only me, but I was thinking about and reading about what it was like for women of color and what the impact of racism and sexism were in homophobia. It was intersectionalism before intersectionalism was cool, right? So that was remarkable. It led me to read Audre Lorde and Barbara Smith and all of these things where it came together to help me have more of an appreciation for the value of every person.

And so, in my work, I bring that with me and it's helped me understand the value of some people that I found difficult, and I think everybody has some of those, and to see sort of the beauty in what we're doing in facilitating students moving forward, going through their academic career and becoming who they were becoming.

I also encountered an album, it's released by Olivia records and also in the '70s when Anita Bryant had the Save Our Children crusade, to save our children from the evil homosexuals. These women musicians made an album called Lesbian Concentrate, which was a play because Anita Bryant was the Minute Maid orange juice spokesperson. So there was orange juice concentrate, then there was lesbian concentrate. These wonderful songs from these great artists and they were funny. Some of them were just hilarious. I mean, anything named Leaping Lesbians is going to be funny. But it had like Judy Grahn giving history of lesbianism. It had just rich vocals, and it was just a beautiful combination of art and humor and history and that richness of humanity. That was the other piece that fit in with the value of every person was the richness of everyone's experience.

Linda Jorn: For me, I live in Madison, Wisconsin. It's just a beautiful city with a lot of lakes and you can get out in the prairie and ride your bike in five minutes.

Gerry Bayne: Linda Jorn is Associate Vice Provost for Learning Technologies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She says, getting out into the outdoors is a big inspiration for her.

Linda Jorn: So I think Mother Nature is really what inspires me. We have a lot of sandhill cranes, ducks, hawks, eagles around our areas. So for me to get outside and enjoy Mother Nature and kind of forget about work a little bit will often inspire me and it's where some of those good ideas come from.

John Campbell: You know, I'm actually an avid woodworker. So I looked at people like Greg Paolini, John Garrison, people that I've actually taken classes with to learn to become a better woodworker.

Gerry Bayne: John Campbell is Vice Provost for Western Virginia University.

John Campbell: People ask, "Well, that's kind of odd." But for me, it's about how do you go about taking different views, being able to actually see incremental progress? So I can go home and spend a couple of hours and see progress. It may be firewood in the end, may be sawdust in the end, but it is progress. Usually, I do a lot around toys and I can make good progress and produce something.

But as you look at things like student success, it's also about these incremental progress. You're never going to do one project that's going to solve everything. You're going to take incremental steps. You're going to make experiments. You're going to try rearranging things in different perspectives. Some of these things will work out and some of them will become firewood. You know, that's what I enjoy to do. That's what inspires me to keep going and looking at the small successes as we improve the larger numbers.

Sara Collins: So when I went to Georgetown Law, I worked in the alumni affairs office and I got to meet Renee Grosshandler Baum. She was the first woman to ever graduate Georgetown's Law School.

Gerry Bayne: Sara Collins is Policy Counsel for Public Knowledge, a nonprofit advocacy group in Washington, DC that promotes freedom of expression and open internet and access to affordable communications tools.

Sara Collins: One thing I've noticed in my career, I wouldn't be where I am without those women who had taken those really hard steps, who fought through from institutions that didn't want them. And so, I just want to say, I owe a debt of gratitude to them for the work that they did. When I'm working, I want to make sure that I'm paying it forward, that I am paving the way for other people who may not have as easy of a time or who may have a harder time getting into the law profession or getting into higher ed that they can get there, that I'm not blocking the way, but paving.

Gerry Bayne: Another piece of inspiration comes in the form of delayed satisfaction for Tonya Bennett who's director of educational technology at PennVet at the University of Pennsylvania.

Tonya Bennett: So I love musicals. I have Disney+, so I was just able to see Hamilton, which was really fascinating. I was actually shocked because I knew it was a big deal. I knew the tickets were expensive. I knew that Lin Manuel Miranda actually came and was like a speaker and it was a big deal, but I didn't have the ability to get to see the show but watching the show at home on Disney+, it was really a good show and I learned way more about Alexander Hamilton than I ever would have known in my entire life. Even had to like ... so I'm going to follow up with Wiki, if that makes sense? So anything I watch, I have to like go to the Wiki to make sure that I didn't miss like stuff about it or that I got the full picture because I'm also a full picture person. Really, it was fascinating and I really enjoyed watching it and I really enjoyed learning that way. I learn better to music. So anything to music that's educational is pretty much good.

Eden Dahlstrom: I find inspiration when I quiet my mind. I'm not talking about being silent. I'm talking about those opportunities that we find to take a step away from our desk, go for a walk, stopping thinking about the problem that we're trying to solve at that moment. And really giving ourselves space to sort of absorb the world around us. Be present in the moment.

Gerry Bayne: Eden Dahlstrom is Vice President for Professional Learning at EDUCAUSE.

Eden Dahlstrom: There's an analogy here for me and it has to do with being an owner and rider of a motorcycle. It's really important to me that I understand how the engine functions and to do some of the basic mechanical work. And so, I learned something recently about bikes. It's always been sort of common knowledge for my understanding of a basic combustion engine you need three basic components for it to run. You need a spark, you need oxygen and you need a source of fuel. That's pretty basic.

But something that I learned recently is something called the stoichiometric ratio and that's the ratio of oxygen and fuel that your engine needs to run efficiently. With a machine like a motorcycle engine you actually have really specific metrics for your air to fuel ratio. At sea level it's 14.7:1 for air to fuel. This really got me thinking about, gosh, when you have too much fuel your engine runs rich, and when you don't have enough fuel your engine runs a little bit lean and you can hear and feel and see this.

When it comes to ourselves, I really feel like there needs to be a ratio that we need to find where we give ourselves enough fuel and enough oxygen in whatever proportion that works for us in order for us to run efficiently. For me, if it's work, work, work, meeting to meeting, to meeting, kid homework to kid homework, dinner, take the garbage out, no time for breaks, no oxygen, I run too rich and I'm not an efficient engine, but if I give myself that time, if I actually take a lunch break, walk away from my desk for a few minutes, it took me a long time to realize there needed to be a balance there and it will be an ongoing pursuit to find what the balance is.

Gerry Bayne: Inspiration comes in as many forms as there are people. And it's interesting to see how some of the folks use their inspiration to inform their attitudes towards career challenges and higher ed IT. If you'd like help getting inspired and explore new opportunities to advance your career, check out the EDUCAUSE professional development opportunities @ educause.edu/careers. I'm Gerry Bayne for EDUCAUSE. Thanks for listening.