Mistaken Goal: Where Student Affairs & Technology Meet

In the current issue of Student Affairs On-Line, Frank Christ wrote a Letter to the Editor responding to my Summer 2008 article “Exploding a Myth: Student Affairs’ Historical Relationship with Technology.”  I’m writing my response here rather than printing it in Student Affairs On-Line as (a) such a response would take many months to be published and (b) I can use this as a springboard to discuss other interesting issues.

If I understand Frank’s letter correctly, he is pointing out some resources from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s that  describe student affairs’ use of technology during those years. Rather than in any way refuting my main point, these documents provide further evidence supporting my main point: student affairs staff made regular and often innovative use of technology throughout the 20th century. The documents and events described by Frank are valuable additions to our collective bank of resources and knowledge and it’s wonderful that he has described them for us!

I add two additional comments, one in response to Frank’s letter and one more general in nature. First, it’s not at all surprising or unusual that these particular sources were not included in my original article. Logistically, it sounds as if some of these documents are a bit off-the-beaten-path, particularly for research that was physically conducted in the Midwest (I’m at Indiana University and the bulk of this research was conducted at the National Student Affairs Archive in Bowling Green, Ohio). In addition, all researchers must place realistic and workable limits on their research. In historical research, this means that we specify from which documents and sources we are going to pull information when we tell our story. In this instance, I am satisfied with the sources selected to best tell this story (ACPA and NASPA conference proceedings and journal articles); there are certainly additional sources that could be added (I would particularly like to get into the conference proceedings for the Association Personnel and Guidance Association (APGA), the umbrella organization to which ACPA belonged for several decades) but I have to place limitations on the sources used if I am to make sense of them. In other words, I can only ready and synthesize so much and I must select my sources and use my time wisely. Of course, if there were sources that could really change, shape, or inform the story then I would be remiss to not include them even if they were not originally on my radar!  Based on the available evidence, I don’t think this is the case here as these documents seem to fully support the story as I already understand it.

Second, it’s also useful to know a little bit about the impetus for my article and the context in which it was published. For scholars, it’s often useful for us to “put our mark” on topics on which we are actively working to let others know what we’re doing and in what topics we consider ourselves to be knowledgeable. One of the ways in which we do this is by publishing shorter pieces when we’re not quite ready to publish longer, intensive pieces. In this instance, I was ready to make public that I’m doing this historical work while I continue to work on the longer detailed pieces in which I present my full arguments and supporting evidence. Student Affairs On-Line is not, in my opinion, the right place to publish a fully-developed and lengthy scholarly article but it’s a great place to publish shorter, more informal pieces. And one consequence of this being a shorter less formal piece is that I did not present all of my arguments and evidence; it’s a careful balance to present enough to be interesting, engaging, and accurate without going too far and making the piece too intricate and detailed for the medium and the stage at which I’m at with the research.

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Yesterday, my colleagues and I posted the following message to several higher education IT support listservs:

Earlier this year, the ResNet Applied Research Group solicited participation in the 2008 ResNet Survey. This comprehensive survey focused on residential technology support groups, their responsibilities in supporting technologies to residential students, the service issues they addressed, and their organizational structure. Over 100 institutions participated and we are pleased to inform you that we have publicly released data from the survey at http://resnetsymposium.org/wiki/index.php/RARG:2008_ResNet_Survey.

We are profoundly grateful to those who participated and we look forward to answering any questions you may have as we continue this and related research.

It’s taken us quite a bit longer to release these results that we hoped and anticipated. We’re a tiny (3-person) volunteer group so when life and work call it’s easy for our research projects to become lower priorities. And we have other things going on, too, within the group.

Despite releasing data from most of the survey, we still have some work to do with the open-ended questions. Making sense of that data is more involved than tossing data into SPSS and running some calculations. We’ve done some of that work but have more to do.

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Several days ago, I submitted (and then corrected) final grades for my undergraduate online identity course. I am planning to teach the course again next semester and I’ll certainly be making some changes based on this first semester of the class.

First, Clay Shirky’s right: the first challenge when working with young students in discussions about their use of the Internet and other technologies is to help them understand just how different their uses of these technologies are compared to previous generations’. For many of the youngest students, cell phones, MySpace, and wireless Internet access have almost always existed and they have always been part of their lives. While for many of us these technologies and the ideas underlying them – flexible and changing ideas of privacy, incredibly public and intimate expressions of identity, and indexable, searchable, and permanent artifacts – are new and world-changing, for these students these ideas are old-hat and completely non-notable. Next semester, I need to work harder at the very beginning of the class to help my students understand how new and unexplored all of these technologies are for all of us. I’m not quite sure how to do that and figuring that out is my homework during the holiday break.

The final assignment elicited some surprising insight and ideas from my students. In a nutshell, they were to make policy recommendations for the use of social networking services (SNSes) for either a college admissions office or a company hiring new college graduates. The recommendations spanned the entire range of potential recommendations from “they must investigate the profile of every applicant” to “they can never investigate the profiles of applicants” with varying levels of quality support and rationale for the recommendations.

The most surprising and interesting recommendation, submitted by a few students, was that applicants should be able to decide whether or not their SNS profiles are fair game. That is not a recommendation I had anticipated and the justifications were very interesting. Essentially, these students really grabbed hold of some of the ideas we discussed and read that related to the active role we can take in shaping and understanding how we are presented and described online. I haven’t quite figured out how practical the recommendation is when scaled up to institutions or corporations that have thousands of applicants but it’s a great answer for this final assignment and it shows a wonderful grasp of some very important ideas.

I wish I had more time to tackle ideas of privacy and context.  That’s something else I will see if I can work into the course next semester although I am not very hopeful. Given the length of the course, it’s impossible to even touch on every important and interesting topic. I hope to expand the course to a full semester and teach in one of our living-learning centers next year with the hope that will allow me to add these topics and have enough time to explore them.

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