ACPA/NASPA Joint Meeting: Student Cell Phone Use
The third session I attended today was entitled “Students and Cell Phones: Exploring Their Use and Crafting Our Response.” The presentation was an overview of preliminary research conducted by a doctoral candidate from Emory University. Her research is a qualitative analysis of traditional students’ use of wireless phones based on interviews, journals, and analysis of phone bills. While the sample size of the initial research was tiny (5 students), the results are interesting and the presentation was fantastic.
Given the tiny size of the sample, I am hesitant to delve into specifics on the results of the research. However, the findings are not terribly surprising and reflect the common uses of wireless phones as ubiquitous and useful communication tools. In fact, the presentation largely focused on how similar our own usage patterns are to our students’. Following the discussion of the research results, Molyneaux enumerated some concrete ideas for student affairs administrators:
- Students may need education and mentoring in particular skills that their uses of wireless phones show they lack or possess in inadequate measures. Such skills may include scheduling, patience, immediacy of expectations, and reflection.
- Parents, too, may need to be taught new skills or convinced to improve already-possessed skills such as the ability to sift through large volumes of data/conversations and letting one’s child handle problems on his or her own.
Discussion from and among attendees was also interesting.
- Although one attendee emphasized the need to “meet [students] where they are,” another stressed that her students were adamant that administrators must not too actively pursue SMS or other use of wireless phones as students perceive it as too personal or “theirs;” compare with the same sentiments and issues surrounding Facebook.
- An idea with significant potential (it’s unclear if this idea has actually been put into practice or is merely an idea) is to use e-mail distribution lists with an SMS gateway to send mass SMS messages to groups of students. I’m pretty sure this has been done as it’s too simple and cheap to not have been done already.
- When the question of “Does your institution have a policy regarding student use of phones when in 1:1 meeting with administrators or faculty?” arose, one attendee shared that she makes it a point to leave the room when students answer their phones in these situations. Before leaving, she tells them that “I know this call is important so I’ll leave you alone” and when she returns in 5-10 minutes she not only makes sure they know that their appointment will end at the scheduled time but also works the incident into the educational process as appropriate (the classic “teachable moment”). A different attendee followed up with the observation that staff members must also uphold respectful ethics of phone use and model proper behavior to which a faculty member replied that the most effective way to get his class to turn off their phones is to turn off his own phone in a very conspicious and noticeable manner.
- During a discussion about the ethics of phone use (perhaps following the above discussion of phone use during meetings), an attendee described a student-initiated effort to make part of the library a “quiet zone” where wireless phone discussion are not allowed.
Comments(5)
Hey Kevin, glad to see you are enjoying your time at the ACPA/NASPA joint conference. We were supposed to be there this year, but timing didn’t work out. I’m working through all your post from the conference and so expect some more comments.
As far as this blog I have a few thoughts.
- “meet [students] where they are,” We’ve said that it’s similar to a house party where the parents are gone, so if the parents come home, the kids (students) are going to move on to the next house (secondlife?). The parents have to learn how to come home and not be the elephant in the corner yelling to not drink or smoke inside.
- “send mass SMS messages to groups of students” A popular one among college students is Mozes. We actually partnered with them to do some work with colleges as they are spam free and cost nothing. Our #1 fear is for the admin to burn this channel of communication and mass text every day about some even coming up, and that’s why we educate them on proper use.
I think education on new technology is a must for every institution to keep the staff current with their students and for the students to understand effective use.
Ok till next time. Tom Krieglstein.
Thanks Tom! I’ve fallen a bit behind in posting about the other technology-related sessions I attended but I hope to get to them today. There was an interesting discussion about the common “meet them where they are” comment/attitude in the very last session that has changed my own attitude (or perhaps affirmed an attitude I was starting to embrace).
With respect to the SMS “stuff” – I’m afraid that I’m very weak on wireless phone technology. Part of it is that it’s taken us Americans several years to catch up to what the rest of the world is doing in this area so I’ve felt safe relegating the technology to the back burner. I think it’s safe to say that we’ve caught up enough that I can’t do that any more and now I really do need to pay attention, locate the research, and stay current.
Thanks for the mention of Mozes! I’m sure that SMS, like almost any other medium, can be overused and diluted so it’s great to see that you’re concerned about educating folks. It seems that some people are still looking for a panacea, whether that be Facebook, SMS, or some other “new” technology, but we’ve got to help them remember that there is no such thing. There will always be a strong need for multiple media, often requiring different skill sets, approaches, etc.
Kevin,
We’ve found it helps the conversation to start with a distinction between content and channel.
Content is good or not, based on quality, freshness, and most importantly for education, relevancy.
Technology is providing new channels, Social Networking, Text Msg, e-mail, RSS feed, etc. Many of the schools we talk to confuse the content with the channel – and want to shove the same poor, not targeted / irrelevant, content down the new channel, thinking the channel makes the difference. (They think, as you mentioned, that the new channel is the panacea, and this results, as Tom said, in channel burnout, where students cut off the school.)
Students tell us all the time they don’t read the school’s e-mail, because “most of it is junk.” (Sad, isn’t it, that many students see their schools as spammers?)
There’s another layer of technology needed around the content, to improve it’s speed and relevancy. This will reduce the friction in any channel, and maybe then we can get into intrinsic benefits of one channel over another for different types of information.
The current excitement and focus around the new channel(s) misses the real issue.
Relevancy, btw, is the ultimate meeting them where they are at. I think this is step one. I would love to hear how your thoughts changed on this aspect of the conversation.
Kevin P. – Separating content from style or medium is a very difficult thing for many people to do. One of the roles I perform at my institution (it’s a small institution so many of us wear multiple hats) is web support and I encounter this when working with departments who can’t seem to understand that the web is a different medium with different properties than print media. More specifically, I perceive that the difficulty seems to lie in the nature of abstraction. That’s a very foreign concept for many people and one that takes time and experience to understand and grasp. As one with a degree in mathematics and experience working in information technology, it comes second nature to me. But not so for many others.
That’s a very long way of saying: I agree with you. Simply jumping from medium to medium or shifting content (complete with form and structure, however difficult or inappropriate) to new media without critically analyzing the properties of the new medium, the essential character and content of the intended message, and essential properties of the intended audience is foolhardy and likely damaging in many ways. This certainly is not a problem or difficulty limited to student affairs professionals.
The “how my thoughts changed” comment refers to a brief discussion held during the last session I attended. I haven’t gotten around to posting my notes from that session but I hope to do so shortly. Briefly, an attendee rebelled a bit at the standard “meet them where they’re at” line by reminding us that there are indeed places where we know students are at that we do not go (such as bars or clubs) because we know that there are important contextual and cultural lines that we can not or should not cross. That’s a very important point and one that we may lose sometimes when dealing with this new medium and these new places.
You are taking it a level deeper than we do in presentations (or than I intended in my comment). We don’t talk at all about need to modulate content based on channel. This is too subtle / advanced for a two hour presentation. You are right, it’s a critical skill, let me know if you have a good fast way to teach it : )
We’re starting a step back. We say, if the content is crappy, it doesn’t matter what pipe you push it down (assuming, for a moment of discussion, that all pipes work the same, which they clearly don’t). So look at the content while you build / learn new pipes.
If the school forces “come to a comedian” content to someone that hates comedians, it doesn’t help to use Facebook, or text messaging, or e-mail. It’s mass marketing trucks to Manhattan, annoying waste of time for (almost) everyone.
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On the “meet them where they are” . . . that’s a fun conversation. I don’t believe in kicking down doors or hanging out uninvited, but I do believe in relationships in education. With the right set up, visiting a student’s “home” can be an incredibly powerful bridge.
And it’s funny that clubs were brought up as an example. Our leadership training is called Dance Floor Theory. Turns out a dance floor is a terrific metaphor for involvement, engagement, delegation, network theory and all kinds of other highfalutin concepts. Dance floors as a metaphor make it an easy and fun way to learn all of it. We don’t usually actually go to clubs, though we have and it is really fun and cements the learning experientially, but we do visit their “world” in conversation and metaphor.
The difference is that we take our values into their world. We re-label and re-frame their experiences with our values and this changes how they participate.
If we did not “visit” their world, at least in thought if not physically, we would not know how to bridge their experiences and our values.
If we don’t build this bridge, many students will never figure out the connection on their own.
I think schools have to “know” Facebook.