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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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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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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NASPA and ASJA (the Association for Student Judicial Affairs) are presenting a webinar in October entitled “The First Amendment and Online Issues in Higher Education.”  The abstract:

College and university student use of online technologies and forums can present challenges for student affairs administrators at every level.  The expanding terrain of cyberspace brings forth questions about student conduct, attitudes and freedoms in online forums such as social networks.  Participants of this Webinar will explore how the law applies to administrators monitoring and responding to online student misconduct.

The event is scheduled for October 10 from 1:30 to 3:00 Eastern.  More info, including pricing, can be found on NASPA’s website.

I’m disappointed that the webinar costs as much as it does (early registration would cost me $75 as a student member of NASPA; that’s $75 for an hour-and-a-half webinar!) but I might try to fit this into my schedule and budget.  I would be interested not only in what the presenters have to say about the law but also in what they choose to discuss as a measure of what technology and legal issues are important to student affairs and higher education.

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I know that I’ve been neglecting this blog for quite some time.  I’ve spent my time blogging over at the NASPA Tech Tools program.  That program is now formally completed so my time and attention will now swing back over to this blog.

More importantly, we’ve opened up all of the material in that program (an 8-week series of blog posts introducing different technologies to student affairs professionals) to everyone; it was previously limited to NASPA members.  All of the original content is licensed under a Creative Commons license so we hope that others will be able to save time and energy by reusing some of the content we developed.

Overall, I am very pleased with how the program turned out.  I am most pleased with the support we received from NASPA throughout the entire program.  The format is a new approach for NASPA and I don’t know if it will be tried for other content but it seemed to make the most sense for this content, particularly as using a blog to present the material was a visible and ongoing demonstration of one of the technologies introduced.  It also fed right into other technologies we discussed such as RSS, tagging and folksonomies, and videos (God bless Lee LeFever and his “… in Plain English” videos!).  NASPA was also completely open when we told them that we wanted to register a new domain name and hosted service.  I was a bit apprehensive to ask to do that but the technical requirements dictated that approach.  It was the right move as it not only allowed us to easily conduct this program (mad props to Christina Dulude who wrote the custom WordPress plugin that made the blog accessible only to logged-in NASPA members!) but it also gives the Technology Knowledge Community a platform for continued experimentation.

I am also very pleased with the content and how it all turned out.  I am particularly fond of how we covered blogs and RSS and I hope participants got a lot out of those two topics as they seem to be the ones that can most immediately make their jobs and lives easier and more interesting.  There were some topics that were more difficult than others to cover because they’re a bit hard to cover in just one or two blog posts.  And, of course, there are topics that we couldn’t cover during the program.  I dearly wish we could have found some way to look at mobile technologies.  I also wish we could have spent more time exploring the cultural changes intertwined with many of these technologies.

In terms of how popular the program was, Awstats and Google Analytics both tell me that there were only a few hundred unique visitors.  I’m curious to see how and if that will change now that non-NASPA members can access the content.  And even “just a few hundred” participants is still a good turnout for such a unique kind of program and larger than many other programs!

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I’m doing at least three things with this blog post:

1. Participating in the NASPA Tech Tools program that asks participants to try out Flickr by creating an account and uploading a photo.
2. Discussing my current research.
3. Providing some hard-to-find information about the use of a digital camera and a copy stand to copy historical documents.

This is a photo of my new portable copy stand. The photo was uploaded to Flickr and it tagged with NASPATechTools; I hope others participating in the Tech Tools program will follow suit and upload some interesting photos.

This device is a copy stand. I would have liked to take the photo with the camera attached to the stand but I had to use the camera to take the photo. The stand that allows me to attach my new camera so the lens faces downwards. Why would I want to do that? The answer lies in the name of the stand – copy stand. I place documents on the table below the camera and take high quality photos of them. More on the specifics in a bit.

But let’s ask “why would I want to do that?” again: Why would I want a portable copy stand?  It’s so I can more easily and quickly conduct some of my current research. I have two strands of research that both focus on locating and analyzing the contents of historical documents. First, I am aiming to discover how American student affairs professionals have used and related to various technologies throughout the history of the profession. One way I’m doing that is by looking through documents in the National Student Affairs Archive at Bowling Green State University. Those documents include program guides from ACPA and NASPA conferences going back to the 1930s and other documents from those organizations related to technology. Second, I am continuing my research into student-used communications and entertainment technologies in American residence halls. To do that, I’m looking through various documents (building design specifications, housing regulations, meeting minutes, etc.) in Bowling Green’s university archives.

If I didn’t have a camera or if the wonderful people at Bowling Green were not letting me use it then I would be (a) carefully poring over each document to fully ingest it, (b) taking many, many notes, and (c) asking the archives staff to copy (probably for a fee) many, many documents. By using my camera to copy documents, I can work much more quickly and, in the long run, cheaply (since I don’t have to pay for copies). I still have to read everything but I am very liberal with what I copy since it’s quick and cheap. Of course, when I say “copy” here I mean “copy for personal research use.” These documents and photos are still copyrighted so I still need to seek permission before I can use these documents for some purposes.

The specific camera I am using is a Canon Powershot S5 IS. I could probably use a cheaper camera but I am very ignorant of photography. One reason I like this camera is that flash must be physically flipped up before it will work. That means that I can’t accidentally forget to turn the flash off before using it to take photos of old documents. Just as important, like many Canon cameras this one came with a USB cable and software that allows me to control the camera using my laptop. Among other things, that eliminates any possibility of me jiggling the camera when I press the button to take photos. The software also automatically sends the photos to my laptop so I can take as many as my hard drive will hold.

It’s not a perfect system. First, being unable to use a flash or external lights means that I am forced to rely on the light in the room. Second, I haven’t begun to figure out all of the settings and options and I know there is some automatic setting that is fouling up the color of the document photos. That’s okay because (a) I can correct that afterwards and (b) it’s not important to get the color correct when I just want to copy a text document.

The image to the right is a sample image. It’s a page from the Report of the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the American College Personnel Association; the meeting was held in Atlantic City on February 20-24, 1935. You can click on the image to view it full size. The only edit I made to this image was to rotate it 180 degrees and crop it. You can’t see the discoloration that I think is being introduced by some automatic setting in the software in this particular image as the pages in this book are already very yellowed with age.  But you can see the quality of the image and how it compares to a photocopy or scan.

With respect to content, this document is of interest to me because of the presentation of original research by AT&T. There are several examples in the early ACPA conferences where representatives from giant corporations – AT&T, General Electric, Westinghouse, and American Steel – gave presentations or read papers. I don’t yet know what to make of those presentations and papers. And that is part of the point: Because it was quick, easy, and cheap, I was able to copy this document so I and file it away so I can read it over in more detail later and continue to think about it and process what it might mean. Without my camera, I would have to weigh whether it would be worth the cost and time to either take very detailed notes or request this document be copied.

I’m finding all sorts of cool things in the National Student Affairs Archives: technology-related presentations from the early 1960s, ACPA and NASPA task forces and ad hoc organizations formed to analyze technology and dissolved within the space of a few years, and the sad story of a comprehensive student affairs information database system jointly created and funded (and then killed) by ACPA and NASPA in the early 1980s. I look forward to being able to digest all of this, make sense of it, and share it with everyone.

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