Mistaken Goal: Where Student Affairs & Technology Meet

Next year’s NASPA conference is in Chicago which is only a few hours away. For that conference, I have proposed a panel discussion of student affairs and IT collaborations.  One of the (self-imposed) primary requirements for this panel is that the panelists should have a diverse set of experiences.  But how does one define that?  To put it another way, what am I looking for in these panelists when I say that they should be “diverse?”

When discussing diversity between institutions, several common measures or characteristics often arise (at my research shop we call these and other common characteristics “the usual suspects” since we use them in so many of our analyses): the various Carnegie Classifications, governance/sector (public or private), geographic region, urbanicity, and selectivity.  We could view our panel as diverse if they have experiences from a broad number of different categories listed above.  It stands to reason that many or all of those characteristics may have an impact on how student affairs staff collaborate with technology professionals.  For example, many of those characteristics are related to institutional wealth which surely affects how units on campus collaborate.  It may be easier for wealthier campuses to employ more specialized personnel (e.g. hire more technical staff in the student affairs units rather than depend on or collaborate with other technology units).

It might also be valuable to judge the diversity of the panel by their experiences.  This, of course, brings us further down the rabbit hole because now we have to define what we mean by “diverse experiences.”  One approach that seems to have been useful and practical was to ask what kind of collaborations potential panelists had experienced and categorize those experiences.  Some had experienced a collaboration focused on a single large project.  Others had regularly collaborated with technology professionals on projects large and small as part of their regular, assigned job responsibilities.  And others have experienced collaborations primarily as ad hoc adventures as the department’s most technology-savvy employee.

Similarly, it may also be worthwhile to consider the professional roles or job responsibilities of the potential panelists.  As mentioned above, some have little or no technology component in their formal job responsibilities.  Some have technology management, oversight, or planning as part of their job portfolio.  Finally, some are technology professionals with IT project management or implementation in their position description.

Finally, we might look at the technology professionals with whom the collaboration(s) occurred.  Collaborations with departmental colleagues, student affairs technology professionals, and central IT professionals likely differ in many interesting and important ways.

So what did I do?  It might be fun to say that I carefully analyzed the above dimensions and came up with a panel that represents as many of these dimensions as possible and practical.  But the reality is that I graciously accepted nearly all of the Technology Knowledge Community members who volunteered to assist in any way.  As we moved through the process of broadly brainstorming ideas through drafting the format of the program and finally to drafting the program proposal, volunteers bowed out, found other programs or projects to work on, or simply disappeared.  In the end I was left with a core group of dedicated and experienced professionals who will make an incredible panel.  When I looked at all of the above dimensions of diversity I was pleasantly surprised to see that the panel named in the proposal is indeed quite diverse.

I am very hopeful that this proposal will be accepted and you will be able to benefit from the experiences of these wonderful professionals.  The process of putting together the proposal was very useful and interesting as it forced me to consider all of the ideas above (and more!) as I sought to put together a diverse panel.  Student affairs professionals often speak of diversity as a value and desirable goal and it’s always worthwhile to consider that idea in different contexts.

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I’m traveling to Boston right now to attend the NASPA conference and bad weather in the midwest and northeast is making travel…interesting. I found myself with a few extra hours in Atlanta’s airport when I checked my e-mail and found the new copy of Leadership Exchange in my Inbox.

In the new (Spring 2008) issue of Leadership Exchange are two articles related to technology. One is in the regular Technology Tools column and it’s entitled “The Great Divide in Social Networking Sites.” I wrote the article and you’re welcome to download a copy of the article as it was when I originally submitted to the editors a month or two ago. The article discusses apparent differences between users of SNSes based on race and class. Such differences are always interesting to student affairs professionals as they are keen advocates of the less privileged (which you should not read as implying that there is necessarily an injustice involved here; many people simply like to congregate in and socialize with relatively homogeneous groups of people who resemble themselves).

The other article is the (regular?) “Web Sites to Watch” column. NASPA’s editors specifically solicited information about Social Networking Services from the Technology KC. Included in the list are Digg, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Ning. I’m very pleased to see the Technology KC continue to grow and gain exposure!

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Jakob Nielsen’s latest “Alertbox” article is entitled “Digital Divide: The Three Stages.” In this (very brief) article, Nielsen posits three types or stages of divides that “alienate huge population groups who miss out on the Internet’s potential:”

1. Economic Divide
2. Usability Divide
3. Empowerment Divide

Nielsen argues that the Economic Divide is largely a non-issue in modern America. His other two divides are very similar to Jenkins’ Participatory Divide. In short, both of these researchers believe that significant divides still exist between (a) Internet users and non-users and (b) different groups of Internet users. The two researchers differ in some ways on the exact form and causes of those differences but those differences appear to be more in point of view than significant and substantive differences. As a usability researcher, Nielsen concentrates largely on the user experience and how users interact with particular tools, suites of tools, and technologies. Thus his focus is often on how someone can or cannot use something to perform a particular task. Jenkins, on the other hand, is a communications researcher whose focus lies more on the sociological impact of technologies and societal changes or influences caused, aided, or disrupted by technologies.

One subtlety that is masked by the label “divide” is that these divides are more like continuums than binary, black-and-white issues. Whether one speaks of Nielsen’s Usability Divide or Empowerment Divide or Jenkins’ Participatory Divide, these are areas in which one can have more or less (understanding, power, or rates of participation). Even the seemingly-black-and-white issue of access is a continuum wherein no possible access and high-speed, always-available, unfiltered and uncensored access lie at the endpoints of a continuum with different levels of access in between (borrowed access, slow access, filtered or censored, etc.).

For us, it’s very important to remember that our students will come from both sides of these divides and all places in between. I don’t have good data at my fingertips but I have no doubt that traditional measures of diversity such as race, ethnicity, SES, age, gender, sexual orientation, etc. play huge roles in where one lies in these issues. The role of SES should be obvious. In his exploration of fan culture, Jenkins has noted the role of gender and the differences in how men and women interact with and use technology to interact and collaborate. danah boyd, herself a noted researcher in these areas, speaks of the role that communications technologies (specifically, IRC) played in her experiences as a young queer woman, technologies that may not been available to her had circumstances (location, finances, experiences, etc.) been different. It’s very important for us to begin to understand how (a) access or lack of access to, (b) understanding or lack of understanding of, and (c) use or non-use of these technologies – technologies ubiquitous and essential for many young people – is shaping and influencing youths in America (see the recent debate about DOPA for a great discussion of these issues). I assert that we don’t understand this right now as it’s complex and changing very rapidly. I further believe that applying what we know about young people (both through our experiences and through our research i.e. student development theory) we can uniquely contribute to this discussion and begin to understand its importance.

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