Mistaken Goal: Where Higher Education & Technology Meet

Yesterday afternoon, I presented a 3-hour pre-conference workshop at this year’s SIGUCCS fall conference in Portland, Oregon. The conference is a rather small one with about 350 participants and it focuses on IT support in higher education. My workshop was entitled “Web 2.0: Social Software Foundations and Implications;” for this audience I think that my session fell more into the “professional development” category than the “help me solve an immediate problem” category. Attendance was light (9 signed up; 8 attended) but I know that my approach is a bit “out there” for this audience. There aren’t many workshops or programs at this and similar conferences that are as heavy on theory and history as mine but I view those as incredibly important and necessary, particularly in the context of pre-conference workshops as many of those are explicitly devoted to professional development topics.

The PowerPoint slides from the workshop can be found here. My speaker notes, good and bad, are there too. I removed the videos from the file due to both copyright concerns and to keep the file size manageable. The file is still a bit large (7.3 mb) probably because there are 70 slides and some of them have large images culled from Flickr. Of course, the original content I developed for the workshop is all available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License (I forgot to include that in the actual session) so if you’d like to use this for non-profit work then you’re free to do so.

The content of the workshop was broken into 3 sections:

1. Web 2.0: We discussed common perceptions of Web 2.0 and then worked to come to a common definition of Web 2.0. We then compared our ideas with those of Tim O’Reilly. I then presented John Suler’s ideas about Online Disinhibition as important ideas in understanding the draw and success of Web 2.0 tools.
2. Social Network Sites (SNSes): This section was an update and compression of a pre-conference session I presented last year at ResNet. This time, however, we had several new pieces of research upon which to draw: boyd and Ellison’s JCMC article Social Network Sites: Definition, history, and scholarship and the book Youth, Identity, and Digital Media, particularly boyd’s chapter. Older research that is still informative and used in this section of my workshop includes Brett Bumgarner’s research (first an undergraduate thesis and now a First Monday article) and Matthew Vanden Boogart’s 2006 Master’s thesis.
3. Technical Foundation and Examples: The final section was an attempt to extract some technical foundations from the previous discussions and present some examples. I’m afraid this section was the weakest of the three, particularly the “technical” part. The examples are okay and I know that attendees here at SIGUCCS will have the opportunity to see many more examples of much more recent vintage at presentations here at the conference. Some of the examples were drawn from NASPA’s Tech Tools program.

The pre-conference workshop itself went well. Although the group was small the discussions were great and we all interacted very well. It was particularly interesting that in this small group over one-third of the participants were from countries other than the United States; one attendee was Canadian and two were Norwegian. I felt bad that my perspective (shaped by my experiences, education, and attention) was so American but our Canadian and Norwegian colleagues were fantastic in helping us out and sharing their experiences and perspectives.

I’m hanging out in Portland for the next few days and attending some of the programs here at SIGUCCS in between reading, writing, and other classwork (no sight-seeing for me unless those sights are in or right next to the hotel). The topics of discussion here at SIGUCCS are not challenges I face in my current position but I am about to start performing some research on full-time higher ed staff who supervise student employees so there is still a lot here for me to pick up and absorb.

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Leslie Dare at NCSU and I are the National Co-Chairs of NASPA’s Technology Knowledge Community. We’re nearing the end of our term and new leadership is being sought. It’s been a very worthwhile experience for me although I am looking forward to regaining the time I am devoting to the KC. I’d be happy to discuss the position and its commitments with anyone who is interested.

The full text of the message sent to the current Technology KC membership:

Two years ago the NASPA Technology Knowledge Community was created to help us, as an organization, focus on the many ways in which technology helps us in the work we do with students.  Under the strong leadership of our founding co-chairs, Leslie Dare and Kevin Guidry, the knowledge community has become well-established. We are now at the point of a natural transition of leadership. This provides an excellent opportunity for interested individuals to continue the good work that has begun, and to bring new ideas and expertise to our group.

The Nominating Committee for the Technology Knowledge Community is soliciting nominations for the Co-Chair leadership positions. Online elections to select these two Co-Chairs will take place in January, 2009. The term will begin at the 2009 NASPA Annual Conference, in Seattle, and last for two years.

Procedure for nomination:

1. Nominations must be submitted by Wednesday, October 22, 2008. Please send nominations to Leslie Dare at: ladare@ncsu.edu

2. The nomination should include biographical information (name, title, institution, resume, and contact information), along with a statement of philosophy, purpose, or goal for serving as the Technology KC Chair or Co-Chair (maximum 700 words).

The Technology KC ballot is open in structure.  Nominations can be submitted in a “ticket” format with two individuals who would like to run together, or individually.

If you have questions, please send them to: ladare@ncsu.edu

Thank you,
Leslie Dare, Kirk Manning, and Gail Cole-Avent

I strongly encourage those who are interested and eligible (gotta be a NASPA member) to throw their hat in the ring. It’s a great way to greatly expand one’s professional network and connect with others who share similar interests and concerns.  Of course, it’s also a great way to give back to the community and NASPA in particular.

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This semester I’ll be teaching EDUC-U 212 Virtually Real: Myths and Realities of Online Identities. It’s a 2-credit class for undergraduates that is scheduled for the second half of the fall semester. I’m still finalizing the syllabus and I’ll make it available here when it’s finalized.

In the class, we’re going to explore how youths and young adults use online tools such as Facebook and MySpace to explore and exhibit personal identity. It’s a short course so it will be very focused on identity, mediated communication, and Social Network Sites (SNS). Although it will be firmly grounded in theory and current research, the class will have a very practical bent as students should leave the class better prepared to understand not only their own online actions but also some of the forces shaping those actions. At the end of the class, students should be able to:

• Recognize and describe ways in which people present themselves online
• Describe properties of online communication
• Describe and critically evaluate popular views and (mis)conceptions of online communication and behavior
• Make thoughtful, appropriate, and practical analysis of and recommendations regarding young adults’ use of online communication tools

For those interested in the gory details, we’ll be using Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life as the primary touchstone regarding identity and how identity is performed. We won’t have time to read more than a chapter or two but it’s a very insightful book with powerful but accessible ideas. We’ll also spend time looking at Suler’s Online Disinhibition Effect. Although I perceive some significant flaws in Suler’s ideas (there’s a strong feeling of determinism from which I instinctively cringe) it’s an accessible summary of some important ideas. We’ll also be looking at some of the current research regarding SNS use among youths and undergraduates.

Interested IU undergraduates should be able to sign up for the course using OneStart. If you have any trouble signing up for the course or if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at kguidry@indiana.edu.

Edit: I’ve received a few questions and it may be helpful to answer them here, too. The class is scheduled to meet on Mondays and Wednesdays from 5:00 until 6:15 in Foster SH021. The section number is 33403. And you don’t have to be an active user of Facebook or MySpace to enroll in and benefit from the class assuming that you have some knowledge of those tools and how others are using them.

Update: I’ve uploaded the syllabus.

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