And to be honest students, high school students, are very media savvy today.

But what about students not pretending to do radio but actually doing it for real?

How often to we hear students on our local commercial or national radio networks DOING RADIO?

Never really!

And that never is exactly why every other week the students from Wellington International School in Dubai come on my show, Nightline, and take over the broadcast.

Risky? WC Fields said never work with pets and children.

Challenge? You bet!

Worth it? 200%

These students are doing a live broadcast every other week for an hour and doing well!

Imagine this program in 2 months time!

Why don’t more stations and presenters do what I am doing?

No clue!

The experience has become a hands off exercise where we point at fish that is packed on ice and wait for the sales associate to pull on gloves and grab the critter for us.

Not that I don’t like the modern consumer experience, but for the most part what is missing is the experience.

Shopping has become a standardized activity that we do and do fast.

Like most people I also hit the big box store and jump into the freezer section to grab a few fish fillets now and then.

But when I venture to the fish marhet in Dubai I wonder why I don’t come more often.

The sound, the smell, the people all says you are living!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Funny how fast we will give up experience for convenience.

The 1st question people ask is why am I leaving Zayed University after 12 years?

Zayed University has been a great place to work and a fantastic personal innovation incubator for me.

But how often are you given the opportunity to not only dream about how you might teach journalism, public relations and advertising for the world we live in but actually do it? In this world almost never.

Well, I have been asked to join the faculty of CUD and not only dream but do.

Very soon I am going to find myself with my feet in 3 places.

I will be a teacher.

I will be an administrator.

I will be an innovation lab leader.

In all 3 scenarios there is going to be a need for extreme motivation.

New programs have very particular emotional ups and downs for everyone making motivation job #1 for me.

As would happen Inc.com has an excellent set of tips on just that, motivation!

Every one of the 14 Inc suggestions are great.

Here are my top 5 picks.

 Avoid negative people. They drain your energy and waste your time, so hanging with them is like shooting yourself in the foot.

Stretch past your limits on a daily basis. Walking the old, familiar paths is how you grow old. Stretching makes you grow and evolve.

Avoid weak goals.  Goals are the soul of achievement, so never begin them with “I’ll try …”  Always start with “I will” or “I must.”

Treat inaction as the only real failure.  If you don’t take action, you fail by default and can’t even learn from the experience.

Take responsibility for your own results. If you blame (or credit) luck, fate or divine intervention, you’ll always have an excuse.

There is a lot to be learned from the business world today and I contend you can learn most of it by listening to what those who are in it are saying.

Of course trying your hand at something is also mandated.

And of course there are groups and organizations in Canada, the USA and Australia who are doing some amazing work.

The question I am always left asking is how do we engage the youth the primary targets of media literacy?

Here is a great example that makes me wonder why every library on the planet is not doing something like this!

First you want to look at the pictures.

What is this all about?

Once a storage room at the Harold Washington Library Center, the high-ceiling, 5,500-square-foot space, dubbed “YOUmedia — a Digital Library Space for Teens,” has become a magnet for young people citywide, so popular and influential that the library plans to replicate it citywide.

What does it mean to be literate today?

Are our youth prepared?

Technology?

Old school vs new school?

Many questions and as many answers.

But maybe the learning process takes place in other ways?

“We are in one of these rare moments in time where what it means to be literate today, what it meant for us, is going to be different from what it means to be literate for our kids,” says DePaul University’s Nichole Pinkard, who first envisioned the space.

It is all bout play I think and that term has changed dramatically in the last 20 years.

YOUmedia owes much of its basic ideology to Mizuko Ito, a cultural anthropologist at the University of California-Irvine who in 2006 studied how teens use “new media.” After three years, her team concluded that most kids shift between three stages of consumption and creation, informally dubbed “hanging out,” “messing around” and “geeking out.”

What I would love to see is this YOUmedia idea rolled around the UAE in a motor home with push out sides so students can come and play and experiment and learn.

Maybe this is something the KHDA would be interested in?

Maybe this is something the Dubai Media Office would be interested in?

Maybe this could be a tool in the recasting of education?

One thing is for certain the role of the media and our youth today is developing at a speed that is changing everything.

There has been exceptional growth and there has been an exceptional reset.

But there is no question in my mind that Dubai is a very interesting case study of success.

Of course the term success is open to many different definitions.

And of course there are imperfections, blemishes, with any success story.

But when I sit down and look at Dubai I still marvel at the change that has taken place and the ability of the public policy process to very quickly adapt and change with the evolving circumstances.

It was interesting to sit down and have a conversation with Mark Beer the Registrar of DIFC courts and the former Chairman of the British Dusiness Group.

It was interesting to hear Mark’s take on the success of Dubai as a brand and as an idea.

What I found particularly interesting, in my conversation with Mark Beer, was the idea that Dubai really needs to embrace the knowledge economy.

Yes there are free zones dedicated to ideas and yes there are many government and private universities in Dubai, but does that equate to an investment in an knowledge economy?

And if a knowledge economy is to be successful, in the long-term, it is going to have to be locally anchored.

But the question of local is problematic in a country with 80% of the population originating from elsewhere.

It is my feeling that if the knowledge economy is to be championed definition of local has to be expanded to include those expatriate that are here as well.

If you are working on ideas for Dubai but are the citizen of Canada, in my case, my ideas are local to Dubai not Canada.

Yet there are segments of society that would suggest my ideas are not local even thought they are fueled by the local experience.

Mark and I had an interesting discussion that I think frames Dubai in a different light to that we are becoming accustom to reading about in the broadsheets.

And the idea of the knowledge economy is particularly interesting.

More and more I am basing my judgement on whether the way a PR firm presents itself is an example of what it can do for me.

You know what?

Most PR firms, and I mean the big boys, are terrifying when it comes to their own personal self branding.

How can any self respecting PR firm claim they are going to work magic for me if they cannot even do it for themselves?

Maybe the big boys need to go back to school?

Maybe the big boys need the help of the little boys, or girls, playing in the sandbox!

Here is a perfect example of what I am talking about.

This is the PLUG design hospital.

I love the idea.

But what really catches my attention is the fact that they are doing for themselves what they can do for you!

There is a lesson here.

We spend our days sitting in relatively well furnished buildings dispensing the building blocks of information to the generation that is going to fix the mess we have made.

But as a rule we academics do very little when it comes to actually practicing what we teach!

Do we get beyond a dusty journal when it comes to sharing what we are doing with the greater community?

Do we take our ideas to the street or only to obscure conferences?

Do we even practice what it is we are teaching?

The sad and sorry truth is not usually.

Sure there are exceptions to the rule and so far an between that you can probably name the culprits who are breaking the pattern on one hand.

That is the sad thing about the evolution of modern academia, we are not asked to actually get out there and do.

PUT UP OR SHUT UP!

I live by that mantra.

I teach communication by day at Zayed University and by night I am a broadcast journalist on Dubai Eye 103.8FM.

My hope is that my students see, well hear, me not only teaching ideas but putting them into practice.

This year I was offered a rare opportunity to put my classroom exercises to the ultimate test, I also teach public speaking and presentation courses, to present at TEDxDubai.

Giorgio Ungania and Natascia Radice, the curators of TEDxDubai, presented me with the ultimate challenge do what I do in the classroom to a critical public audience and in only 18 minutes.

Put up or shut up in the real.

I agonized over my presentation.

Hours were invested in formatting the story and practicing the pitch, because my talk was a pitch to think about ideas.

And I will confess here and now I was more nervous than I have ever been, mostly because several of my students volunteered at TEDxDubai and made a point of telling me that it was their turn to grade me!

Well, I am here to report that the talk happened.

The story worked and I think people took home a nugget or 2.

You be the judge.

Click here to view the embedded video.

One thing is for sure what I did was exactly what I teach my students and a shining example of putting up and eventually leaving the stage!

Sure there are the vacations and the very nice working hours, but is that enough?

Then about this time of the year I get my answer to why I stick around.

This is the time of the year when the students who I met in the introduction to communication class are now graduating and doing their final projects. Those things that will show the world that their education has some application to things outside the classroom.

This is when I see the fruit of what I have been teaching, some students suggest it is more like torture, all the same it has been in the classroom.

Here are 2 examples being spoken about by 2 groups of students.

One example is a guide book to Dubai.

And the other is a cultural magazine for Emiraties to learn more about their own culture, today.

Sure I would like more money, who wouldn’t? But I get to watch emirate students go from being a bit nervous and tentative about media and communication to something amazing, becoming part of the media of the nation.

I think a MasterCard commercial could be made of my teaching year.

If you get a chance to work with students don’t even think twice! You get more than you give every time.

There is something  about watching a person work who just loves their job!

Here is a perfect example of just that.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I watched this Shawarma Chef for a good 30 minutes.

His hand movement, the description of sauces, the sharpening of knives, the cleanup… everything was like a poetic dance.

It was as much fun to eat his shawarma as it was to watch him make them.

I really do think if you love what you do it takes your work product to a whole new level.