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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