Mistaken Goal: Where Higher Education & Technology Meet

The second program I attended today was a public policy session entitled “The Future of Higher Education: A National Perpsective.” The program focused on the Spellings Commission and its reports and activities. While the topic is very important to the future of higher education in America, it falls a bit outside the realms of student affairs and technology so I defer to others more knowledgable and experienced to comment on and discuss the topic. However, I do perceive a few areas where this blog’s topics tie in with the Spellings Commission’s topics:

• Many of the initiatives proposed by the Spellings Commission, including Huge IPEDS, the Consumer Information Pilot studies, FAFSA4Caster, and many of the accountability and transparency measures, are driven by and only possible because of readily-available and familiar technologies and technological tools. That so many of these initiatives, particularly those intended for the public, are intended to live online as websites speaks volumes for the acceptance of the web as a universally-accessible and -usable medium. Of course, that acceptance is a bit naive: the digital divide still exists and those close to that divide do not possess familiarity and comfort with web-based tools.
• One of the original findings of the Spellings Commission was that American has failed to sustain and nurture innovation. Is Congress’ apparent insistence that we employ ineffective and restrictive tools to filter content on our networks to fight unlawful exhanges of copyrighted material at odds with that finding?
• I’ve just finished re-reading “The Social Life of Information,” an excellent book by PARC researchers John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid. It’s rare that non-academics discuss accreditation and it’s even rarer that non-academics would make an explicit connection between accreditation and IT. In a discussion of how accreditation allows institutions to offer courses that are extremely important but difficult to justify when analyzed on their own and out of context, the authors write that “For information technology to lead to such micromanaging would be a paradoxical and unfortunate result. An extraordinary amount of the creative outburst that has generated this technology has come from people who used the slack of a university to explore new avenues.”

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The first presentation I attended today was entitled “Instant Access: Using Technology to Reach Students.” Despite the grand title and some mentions of multiple technologies, the real content was rather focused. Three ladies in career services at two different institutions, LSU and Florida State University, described how their offices employ Instant Messaging in serving students. Their use of the technology sounded rather simple (but that’s how most things start and the best way to start!) but the process by which they analyzed their options and presented their proposals to their departmental leadership is very interesting and worth examining and possibly replicating.

Other interesting highlights of this presentation and related discussions include:

• Neither institution had pre-existing policies regarding institutional use of IM, despite the fact that one of the institutions already had multiple departments employing IM in official support capacities. Some of the policy-related issues mentioned by the presenters included dealing with inappropriate comments (rude or too personal, including psychological crises), security, and privacy. In addition to the “The Effect of Instant Messaging on the Social Lives of Students Within a College Dorm” article mentioned by the presenters, I can’t resist plugging my 2004 article outlining some policy considerations for student affairs units employing IM.
• When asked about potential security implications, the respondents replied that at one institution the IT help desk uses the same software and the central IT group is unaware of the product at the other institution. An attendee also referred to the “IT security nazis” on her campus. While I’m sure there are some issues with some IT and security groups, I don’t think any student affairs professional would ever accept an IT or other professional referring to the “counseling nazis” or the “FERPA nazis” who religiously protect students’ privacy. Further, I don’t think that many student affairs professionals are adequately qualified to analyze the security of software or systems of software and merely ignoring the issue because “IT doesn’t know about it!” is a very poor way to protect the confidentiality and privacy of our students and staff.
• A question from an attendee about the presenters’ use of “canned responses” was really a question about the use of chat bots, a topic that was very briefly raised in yesterday’s Net Generation pre-conference session. Unfortunately, the topic was not pursued or even fleshed out today.
• Another question from an attendee focused on the logging capabilities of the IM software employed by the presenters. Specifically, he asked if the logs were being analyzed and that analysis used to create FAQs. I would suggest that the logs can not only be used to create FAQs but also answer other questions and provide other useful data but the general idea of mining logs for useful data is an excellent one and another echo of an idea mentioned yesterday. None of the presenters answered in the affirmative but their initiatives are relatively young so they may have simply not gotten to that stage yet.

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The first educational session I’ve attended at the ACPA/NASPA 2007 Joint Conference was this morning’s half-day “Reaching the Net Generation” session presented by Dr. Rey Junco of Lock Haven University and Dr, Jeanna Mastrodicasa of the University of Florida. Much of the session was focused or at least derived from their 2006-2007 Net Generation research and the subsequent (and just released) book.

In general, the content and the discussion were both informative, helpful, and heartening. The topic was pretty broad but there were some common and interesting themes. Without transcribing my notes or giving you too much information from their book, some of the highlights of the discussion included:

• A brief discussion of the shifting culture of students and the necessity for us “old people” to also shift our own culture and perspectives. To me, this is summed in one of the quotes in the recent New York Magazine article “Say Everything“: “The future belongs to the uninhibited.” It’s not just that we need to educate students to think about what they say and do online since most of it is archived and very widely available, we also need to shift our own expectations of what we find online. When someone mentioned Brandeis University’s motto of “Share only what you be comfortable sharing with your grandmother,” someone else added, “and your grandkids.”
• Based on his own experiences and the existing research, Junco opined that students who use the Internet for communicative purposes are less likely to suffer negative consequences than those who use it for non-communicative uses. Men use the Internet more for non-communicative uses and thus are more likely to suffer negative consequences. At this point I don’t offer any further opinions or commentary on this proposed hypothesis other than to say that it does sound plausible.
• A brief discussion ensued about Instant Messaging and its beneficial uses by students who are normally socially inhibited. I related that discussion to some of our earlier discussions about the perceived-negative effects of online communication. The tie between the two discussions and the positive and negative effects seems to be the concept of disinhibition (Warning: pdf document). Both the positive and negative effects seem to be two sides of the same coin: the same things that allow people to express feelings and commit acts that we perceive as negative are the things that allow more introverted people to easily communicate with others online.
• A brief discussion also related to the use of web use statistics and the need to continually improve websites based on those usage stats in an iterative fashion.
• Junco repeated several times that they are open to collaboration with other researchers in further analysis of their survey results. He also extended an invitation to add institutions to the survey. I hope others will take him up on those invitations as Junco and Mastrodicasa are engaged in important and interesting research.

There were many other smaller discussions and pieces of data presented in the discussion. I hope that much of it is in the book.

The presenters and attendees both were awesome and if the rest of the conference is half as good as this first session then it’s going to be one hell of a conference!

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