You think you’re going to remember this tomorrow, but will you?
How much of what you are about to read is going to stick with you for the next day? Week? Month? Year? Do you think the way in which you engage in reading this pithy piece will impact your recall?
As far as buzzwords go, engagement may be the word du jour in education. And while it’s common to think of engagement as an important metric in fields like advertising and journalism, it’s important to note that engagement is also an important factor in measuring employee’s contribution to the financial well-being of a company and even in ensuring the impact of benefits on patient-centric initiatives .
But what IS engagement? And if we can agree on a definition, why does it matter? What does it look like in practice and when do we see it? When is engagement something useful to know and how do you measure it? What is the role of technology in growing, strengthening, and measuring engagement? And lastly, can we come to a consensus on a more accurate representation of engagement so that whatever it is we are measuring can be beneficial to the people who demonstrate this mystery trait?
In the interest of full disclosure I believe that by embracing the way people naturally communicate using cultural tools (hat tip to Vygotsky!) of the moment, we can begin to see emerging technologies as the tools they could be in both operationalizing this construct and more holistically providing ways to reach out and affect change across a variety of domains from education to healthcare and everywhere in between.
Over the next few weeks I hope to flesh out answers to the aforementioned questions, largely as they relate to education but also as a construct that is readily applicable to any industry. My goal is to share some ways in which together we can build a shared language of this mystery construct and ensure that it is not only measured accurately but shared in a way that benefits the people whose efforts are being documented.
I hope you’ll join me…
Lindsay Portnoy is a cognitive psychologist, co-Founder and Chief Learning Officer at Killer Snails. You can connect with her via LinkedIn, Twitter, or email.
