Mistaken Goal: Where Student Affairs & Technology Meet

Although I arrived in Chicago on Saturday, yesterday (Sunday) was my first day at NASPA.  I spent most of the day at the Doctoral Student Seminar, an event hosted annually by NASPA members to help doctoral students connect with one another and experienced faculty members.  There was not any technology focus for this event so I won’t write much about it here.

During this event, my primary technology-related thoughts were about how students could use technology to remain connected to one another to network and provide support.  Several students expressed frustrations about how (dis)connected they feel at their institution, particularly those from small programs or in unique situations like those who commute or take primarily distance ed courses.  It seems that we could find ways for those who attended this seminar to remain connected to provide that support for those students and open up new opportunities for one another.  Maybe it’s as simple as a Facebook group?  I don’t know if such an effort is sustainable or would be used by many participants but it might be worth a shot…

Unrelated to the doc student seminar: NASPA is making a big push to get attendees and members to use tools like Twitter and blogs.  NASPA has a blog set up for the conference and they are pushing – hard – for people to use the #NASPA10 hashtag for their Twitter posts.  And the #sachat folks are very active, too, with a demo planned for tonight at 6:00 Central followed by a physical meetup (a “tweetup”).

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From my vantage point as someone who is deeply interested in student affairs and technology but not currently immersed in them (my classwork, research, and assistantship keep me quite busy!), here are some “current events” that are on my radar:

1. The Twitter group using the #sachat hashtag continues to grow in size and popularity.  What began as a once-weekly discussion among a few dozen folks has now expanded to two weekly discussions among over a hundred folks and significant activity outside of the scheduled hours.  They’re a very friendly and resourceful group and even if you don’t actively participate you should check in on them periodically to learn from them.  I am not participating in these discussions as I am formally analyzing the group’s discussions and I don’t want to “contaminate” the data by actively participating.  But you should jump in and join the discussions!  The group has even provided an introduction and instructions if you’re new to Twitter.
2. NASPA’s Technology Knowledge Community has put together a list of all of the technology-related programs at the upcoming NASPA Annual Conference.  There are many interesting sessions on the program and it’s unfortunate that so many are scheduled at the same time forcing us to choose between them.  I’ll be at many of the programs so please say hello if you see me!
3. On Sunday, March 9, NASPA’s Technology Knowledge Community and Administrators in Graduate and Professional Student Services Knowledge Community are presenting a pre-conference session entitled “Tweet: Point-Click-Connect to Graduate Student and Adult Learners.”  The program description:
   

   This full day workshop at Northwestern University will focus on the ways student affairs professionals can communicate with graduate students and adult learners using technology.Workshop attendees will review the various social networking sites students are utilizing, learn more about the impact of these communication tools on adult learners, and discuss ways to maintain a personal connection in light of automation.Participants will also have the opportunity to discuss hot topics and share best practices from their own campuses.

   Not only does the content sound exciting but the format is also exciting as this program will be offered simultaneously online.  I think this is the first time that NASPA has done this and it’s wonderful to see their willingness to try something new that will give non-attendees a chance to participate and learn.  More information, including the costs and registration instructions, are on the Technology KC’s website.

I wish that:

1. There were a listing of technology-related sessions at ACPA.  (I really wish we would get this unification started and over with so I could stop splitting my attention and money between two nearly-identical organizations but that’s off-topic.)  I know, I know – I could put together such a listing myself.  But I’m not going to ACPA this year and I’m not terribly keen on diving that deeply into the program of a conference I’m not attending.  It would be very depressing to read about all of the really cool things that will occur that I can not attend. :)
2. NASPA’s Technology Knowledge Community and the #sachat folks would link up.  It would give them both some excellent resources and energy.  It would give #sachat an immediate formal link to NASPA and access to some its resources.  And it would give the Technology KC access to a group of very excited, experienced, and knowledgeable student affairs professionals who are actively using technology in an exciting and innovative way.  This seems like a very obvious and easy connection to make and I am a bit confused why it hasn’t already occurred.

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I just received IRB approval to begin conducting research on the weekly student affairs-related discussions being held on Twitter.  The initial round of research is being conducted for Susan Herring’s Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis class but I plan to expand the research and present and publish it more broadly once I’m done with the class.

For those who are unfamiliar with #sachat, here is how I described it in my first paper for this class:

Beginning in the fall of 2009, a group of American higher education administrators began using the micro-blogging tool Twitter to communicate, collaborate, and connect with one another.  Each week for at least one hour, these professionals employ Twitter as a public synchronous mass communication medium by marking each of their messages with the #sachat hashtag and discussing a predetermined topic of professional interest.

Each Wednesday, student affairs professionals use Twitter to vote on a topic of discussion.  On Thursday, these same professionals discuss this topic (and others) for at least one hour.  These discussions are loosely coordinated and moderated by one user associated with the TheSABloggers.org website.  Although the participants are highly-educated professionals and many of the topics are related to their professional interests, the tone of the discussions is informal and often playful.

Using Twitter for these conversations imposes particular properties and restrictions.  First, Twitter is nominally an asynchronous medium; by collectively participating at a prearranged time, these users are effectively using Twitter as if it were synchronous.  Second, to coordinate all of their discussions, including the voting and discussion outside of the established hours, participants must include in their messages the phrase “#sachat.”  This phrase – a Twitter “hashtag” – allows Twitter users to search for and categorize these messages.  Third, Twitter restricts messages to 140 characters.  Finally, although Twitter users can address particular users in their messages there is no threading or other advanced addressing functionality.

Since this class is focused on computer-mediated discourse, I’ll be analyzing patterns in these online conversations in terms of features such as participation, message complexity, speech acts, topic development, and politeness. I’m initially focusing on the discussion that occurred on January 21 so I can learn and begin to understand these methods used in discourse analysis.  Later in the semester, I’ll expand my analysis to also include January 14 and January 28 (daytime only; I can’t seem to locate an archive of the evening conversation) for my final paper in this class.  Eventually I would like to expand the analysis to include more discussions and to include content analysis in addition to discourse analysis so I can write a fully-formed paper for publication or presentation (I’m thinking maybe AERA 2011 if I can meet their submission deadline in late summer).

I am interested in conducting this research not because it focuses on Twitter but because it focuses on a grassroots community that has found a unique way to connect and communicate with one another.  It’s especially interesting because their method of communication is free and this is a time of financial stress with reductions to or eliminations of professional development budgets prominent at many institutions.

Many of the methods I’ll be using have been pioneered or extensively used by Susan Herring.  It’s terribly exciting to learn from and with her as she is probably the world’s foremost expert in these methods!  This is the second class I’ve taken with her and it’s a lot of fun to learn from someone who not only intimately knows the topic but is also still really excited about it and super supportive of new, young researchers.

If any #sachat participants have questions, concerns, or suggestions, please share them with me!  Although the data are all publicly-available, I will be using pseudonyms in all of my public presentations and papers so hopefully that will allay any privacy concerns.  Additionally, I imagine that I’ll eventually file an IRB amendment so I can officially talk to you about your experiences and opinions (because a study on this topic seems incomplete without actually talking to the participants).  But in the meantime I’m definitely open to informal discussion, especially if you have concerns about this research.

(And can someone throw a link to this post out there in Twitter and tag it with #sachat?  I would do so myself but I am trying to retain some distance as I study this phenomenon.  More importantly, I just don’t have time right now to jump into Twitter, at least not this month as I prepare for quals and begin preliminary work on my dissertation.  There are only so many hours in the day…)

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A few weeks ago, I spent a few days just outside of Chicago attending the NASPA Region IV-E Regional Conference. I was there primarily as the regional representative of the Technology Knowledge Community.  As the regional representative, I had two primary duties:

1. Attend the Knowledge Community Gala before the opening dinner.  At this event, each KC has a table where he or she places information about the KC, augmented by a poster, candy, giveaways, or whatever else he or she deems necessary (a determination that seems to widely vary from KC to KC).  The KC rep then hangs out near the table to answer questions, encourage new members to join, etc.  I thought that I had a decent spread this year with much of it focusing on our new website (go check it out; it’s pretty snazzy).
2. (Co-)Host a table at Monday morning’s breakfast.  Many tables were specifically designated as being focused on topical discussions and most (all?) of the topics were germane to two or more KCs.  Each table therefore had one or more KC representatives to help run the discussions.  I was partnered with our representative from the Sustainability KC and our topic was “Economy – sustainability and technology.”

My table at the Gala was sparsely attended and my breakfast table even less so.  Nationally, the Technology KC is a niche KC that only appeals to a small percentage of NASPA members.  When you get down to the regional level, the number of NASPA members interested in the KC and its topics is even smaller.  When you go all the way down to the number of people who attend regional conferences, that number is very small indeed.  And when you factor in the type of people likely to attend the regional conferences (i.e. it’s not a random sample of the regional membership), the number appears to virtually disappear altogether.  So it’s not surprising (although it is disappointing) that very, very few people indicated an interest in the KC and its topics at this year’s Region IV-E conference.

I’m not particularly bothered by the lack of interest in the Technology KC at this conference.  But I am very bothered by the lack of full-time faculty members and researchers at the regional conference.  I am bothered by the fact that the practitioners and scholars inhabit such radically different worlds that they have completely separate conferences (e.g. I can’t imagine there is much overlap between the attendees of NASPA and ACPA conferences on the one hand and ASHE and AERA on the other).  At this particular conference, the attendees seemed to be predominantly Master’s students, entry-level practitioners, and some mid- and senior-level practitioners.  I am particularly bothered by the fact that so many younger practitioners were being professionalized and implicitly and explicitly taught the norms of the profession at this conference, norms that now include the absence of “serious scholarship” (I place that in quotes out of deference to the quality research carried out by many dedicated practitioners but I think you get my point).

I don’t want to to go to this conference next year.  I don’t think there is much I can get out of it given the lack of overlap with the topics and approaches that interest me.  But I also feel guilty, knowing that I have a lot that I could contribute to the conference and its attendees; I only attended two sessions but I was honest-to-God complimented on and thanked for the comments I made and the insights I shared.  In this instance, I don’t know how to marry my interest in linking practice with research and my need for professional growth, particularly on my very limited (financial and temporal) budget.  And that tears at me and challenges me in a way that I don’t quite know how to match.

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Several of our professional organizations are continuing to innovate, spurred in part by the economy.

EDUCAUSE, the 900 pound gorilla of higher education technology organizations, has created an online component of their annual conference to be held in November in Denver.  Not only are several events in Denver being simulcast online but they’ve created several events exclusive to the online conference.  This is a wonderful option for those whose travel budgets have been adversely impacted by the economy.  I wish that many other organizations would make similar offerings but I also recognize the infrastructure and expertise necessary to put this together, resources that EDUCAUSE has but many other organizations do not.  However, many of the necessary technical resources are cheap and easily available so hopefully other smaller and less-technically-inclined organizations will pursue similar creative options.

NASPA is changing its official journal from the NASPA Journal to the Journal of Student Affairs Research and Practice.  I’m not privy to all of the details of the change and the reasons for it.  But one of the changes is that they are broadening the scope of the review section to include resources other than just books.  Specifically:

Media Reviews summarize and analyze the full range of resources (e.g., blogs, websites, video, books, reports) available to student affairs educators. Media Review manuscripts, informative and critical, allow student affairs educators to learn of media useful to their work. Media reviews, invited and solicited by the Editor, should not exceed 1,200 words, and are to be discussed with the Associate Editor for Media Reviews in advance of submission. NASPA members are invited to suggest cutting edge and novel media to be reviewed in JSARP.

The new editors are actively soliciting reviews so feel free to submit one.

Finally, ACUHO-I is also changing its journal.  As with the change at NASPA, I’m not privy to all of the details but I’m excited about what I know.  The changes being made by ACUHO-I, however, are not near as big the changes made by NASPA.  The Journal of College and University Student Housing has previously been published twice a year but beginning next year it will only be published once a year.  Content won’t be reduced, however, so each issue will be twice as large as previous issues.  Most interesting is that the editors will be including a “study guide” aimed at helping practitioners make use of each article.  Research conducted by my colleagues in the ResNet Applied Research Group should be included in the next issue of this journal.

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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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This weekend, Leslie Dare and I are stepping down as co-chairs of NASPA’s Technology Knowledge Community. It’s a relief for me as the overwhelming emotion I feel is guilt: guilt that I didn’t do more, didn’t involve more people, and didn’t give more to the community. However, we certainly did some neat things and I know that Candace and Chris, our new co-chairs, have a solid foundation upon which to build.

To the best of my knowledge, this organization is unique in its composition and focus. There have been and continue to be ad hoc groups formed to examine issues related to student affairs and technology and some of the more specialized professional organizations like ACUHO-I have an ongoing focus on technology (although their focus is changing as they recently decided to discontinue their annual IT conference and merge it into a Business Operations conference).  But this Knowledge Community appears to be the only standing organization that transcends the specialties and focuses on the student affairs community as a whole.

But that broad focus brings unique challenges. For example, there appear to be (at least) three groups of NASPA members interested in technology:

• Technology managers and implementers: Those who are tasked with doing technology by maintaining webpages, administering databases, providing various levels of technical support, and supervising others who perform these tasks. This group is probably a small group within the entire NASPA membership but may be highly concentrated or interested in this KC.
• Technology hobbyists: Those who are interested in technology but don’t have significant professional responsibilities related to technology. This group is certainly the largest of these three groups within the broad NASPA membership and likely the KC.
• Technology scholars: Those who study technology in student affairs. This group is certainly the smallest of the three and likely includes faculty, practitioner-scholars, and graduate students. The majority of these persons appear to be more interested in how students use technology (with a disproportionate amount of time and energy still being spent on research related to Facebook) than in how student affairs professionals and organizations are using technology.

There’s certainly a significant amount of overlap between these groups in both their compositions and interests. The challenge for the KC is figuring out how – or if – to meet the needs of each group. In my opinion, identifying the members of these groups in the KC and figuring out how to meet their varied interests are the biggest challenges facing the KC. The previous incarnation of the KC dissolved because it couldn’t adequately address these challenges and I sincerely hope that this KC won’t follow the same path.

There’s hope. We’re on the right track with our ongoing membership assessment survey (if you’re a KC member and you haven’t participated yet, please do so!). There may be an opportunity for this KC to shine during our economic troubles as technology is perceived to be a cost-saving measure by many universities and colleges.

I must acknowledge and thank some of the wonderful people with whom I worked in and out of the KC. Leslie, before stepping into this role I didn’t know you or what I was getting myself into but I’ll jump off other cliffs with you any time. Sandra and Joey, your calmness and patience with me as I grew in this role helped immeasurably; I hoped that when I pushed back I did so without pushing you around and further I hope you know that I only did so because I know that you’re both as passionate about what we do as I am. Stephanie, Zafer, and the rest of the NASPA staff: I appreciate your forbearance as I know that occasionally strange requests made their way from our KC to you and you always bore them with grace and never failed to provide us with support and encouragement. Christina, Suzanne, Kirk, Elahe, Gail, and all of the other KC volunteers too numerous to mention: You made and continue to make the KC a community and I’m forever in your debt.

I’m ready to step down and eager to move into the background of the KC to continue working. I wish I had done more but we have intelligent, experienced, and very motivated members stepping up to lead us now. I look forward to seeing this community grow and evolve under Candace and Chris’s leadership. I know they’ll do wonderful things as they’ll have the support of many of the same people that helped Leslie and I and you can’t help but do great things with those wonderful people behind you.

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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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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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In the current issue of Student Affairs Online, I have an article titled “Exploding a Myth: Student Affairs’ Historical Relationship with Technology.” The contents and premise of the article should not be a surprise to anyone who is reading this blog. I’m very appreciative to Stu Brown, StudentAffairs.com’s head honcho, for inviting me to publish a regular article in Student Affairs Online.

I’d like to 2 points make about the article recently published:

1. Del Suggs pointed out to me that I made at least one mistake in the article. In the article I write:
   

   Radio has also seen use as an civic engagement tool as demonstrated by a program hosted by Furman University’s Dean of Women where women students were given explicit permission to “stay up late” to watch and listen to returns from the 1970 presidential election (Furman University, 1970).

   Del correctly notes that “there was no presidential election in 1970, at least not in the United States. The election of 1968 pitted Richard Nixon against Hubert Humphrey, and the election of 1972 was Richard Nixon against George McGovern.”

   Guilty as charged, Del; that is definitely a mistake on my part. The document was in a folder labeled “1970″ but the document itself is not necessarily from that year. The document explicitly says that the event was held on Tuesday, November 7, which seems to point to it actually being from 1972, and I should have caught that. The joy of working with undated primary sources, eh?

2. In the article I also write:
   

   Many campuses began student-operated radio stations in the late 1940s but these stations were typically associated with academic units, primarily electrical engineering or broadcasting and journalism programs (Bryant, 1981).

   As I continue my research, I am becoming less sure of this conclusion. I’m not yet sure if I am running into a difficulty caused by a gap in the existing literature or merely my own ignorance. What is causing me to become unsure of this conclusion is that I have come across a number of documents from the 1960s and 1970s that indicate that, at least on some campuses, the student government organizations in residence halls played significant roles in creating and funding student-run radio stations.

   In the 1960s, students at several institutions began radio stations, typically serving only one residence hall by transmitting over the electrical wiring (“carrier current”), including the University of Missouri (NACURH, 1963), Kansas State University (NACURH, 1966), Long Beach State College (NACURH, 1965), the University of Missouri-Columbia (NACURH, 1974). The radio station begun in the residence halls at the University of Missouri-Columbia later became “the first totally student owned and operated FM station in the country” (p. 4, NACURH, 1997).

   These radio stations were owned and funded by student groups or associations (often the Residence Hall Association) and run during limited hours. These stations were described by students as important parts of their communication strategies (NACURH, 1965). A 1966 report of a NACURH group discussion of radio stations in residence halls concluded that “[radio stations] could be an excellent way of improving communication and publicity on residence hall projects and people” (p. 1, NACURH, 1966). At least one institution, Georgia Institute of Technology, began using sub-carrier and carrier current radio in residence halls in 1978, ostensibly with an academic focus (“any student who can afford an AM radio can have a language lab in his own Residence Hall room” (p. 3, NACURH, 1978)).

The work in these areas – student-used technologies in residence halls and the broader topic of student affairs’ relationship with technology – continues. The documents referenced in this post and in the article illustrate one approach I am taking to get at these topics. Right now, much of my work in these areas is focused on locating and analyzing primary historical documents located in various archives. The NACURH documents referenced above are one particularly rich as they are all student-written documents and I haven’t found many of those in the traditional archives I’ve visited.

References

Brant, B. G. (1981). The college radio handbook. Blue Ridge Summit, PA: TAB Books.

Furman University. (1970). Potpourri [newsletter]. Greenville, SC: Furman University. Furman University Special Collections and Archives, Assistance Vice President for Student Affairs 1974 & Before, Box 1, Communications with Student 1970 folder.

NACURH. (1963). Residence hall communication at the University of Missouri. NACURH Nation Information Center document 63.41. National Student Affairs Archives. NACURH box, folder 6-89 Radio Station.

NACURH. (1965). Communications – Where & why do they break down. NACURH National Information Center document 65.37. Bowling Green State University Center for Archival Collections National Student Affairs Archives. NACURH box, folder 6-11 RH Communication.

NACURH. (1966). Group discussion report: The campus radio station and the residence hall. NACURH National Information Center document 66.22. Bowling Green State University Center for Archival Collections National Student Affairs Archives. NACURH box, folder 6-11 RH Communication.

NACURH. (1974). KCOU 88.3 FM. NACURH National Information Center document N25G-74-006-02.

NACURH. (1978). Uses of sub-carrier radio in residence hall. NACURH National Information Center document N25G-78-003-04.

NACURH. (1997). KCOU and RHA – How poor communications helped members re-evaluate their needs University of Missouri-Columbia 22 May 1997. NACURH National Information Center N16-181.

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