Category: Technology

Blogging Student Affairs and Technology

Inside Higher Ed - blogging about student affairs and technology - Eric Stoller

I am thrilled to announce that I’m going to be blogging about Student Affairs and Technology for Inside Higher Ed (IHE). As an avid reader of IHE, I am very excited to join the IHE blogging team. I think that my posts on student affairs + technology will complement Joshua Kim’s blog on Technology and Learning.

Recently, I held a contest via Twitter to name my new blog. The incentive — a $100 Amazon gift card — courtesy of Inside Higher Ed. Several folks came up with interesting/creative blog names. I think the #SAChat Community provided the majority of ideas. Student Affairs folks are uber creative.

Here are my 3 favorite submissions:

  • Jeff Jackson: The Stoller Strikes Back, Return of the Blogosphere, Student Affairs….I am Your Blogger
  • Zack Ford: Challenge and Tech Support
  • ACUHO-I (sent via DM): Binary Code of Conduct

Choosing a winner from these 3 has been extremely challenging. Star Wars references, Sanford, and an entire Association…how cool is that?!! After more than a week of deliberate (intentional ;-) ) deliberating I have decided that the winner of the gift card is:

eric-stoller-challenge-and-tech-support

Zack Ford’s submission made me laugh. It’s subtle….and I love subtlety. The obvious nod / homage to Nevitt Sanford warms the heart. Challenge and Support is one of my all-time favorite, and oft-used, student development theories.

It should be noted that Julie Larsen was correct…the official name of my new blog is going to be: Student Affairs and Technology. The name needed to be something that would be simple enough that any IHE reader would know exactly what it was about. The blog also needed to be search engine friendly…”Students Affairs + Technology” is simple and searchable.

Stay tuned for my first official post on Inside Higher Ed!

Honorable mention:

Julie P-Kirchmeier: Stoller: Resistance is Futile

Niki Rudolph: Epic Stoller

Justine Carpenter: Tech Tips for SAPs

Christopher Conzen: The Stoller Coaster

Student Affairs + Jobs + RSS + Email

Using RSS to conduct a student affairs job search

Conducting a successful student affairs job search requires patience, networking, and technology. That’s right, technology. One particular tech tool that is extremely useful for conducting a search is RSS. Job postings delivered to your feed reader via RSS means that new job announcements are efficiently delivered to your virtual doorstep.

If you aren’t familiar with using RSS, please watch this video for more information:

If you need an RSS feed reader, I would highly recommend using Google Reader:

There are a few student affairs websites that offer job postings via RSS feeds, including:

Remember to look for the RSS symbol – RSS Symbol – or for a link to RSS data. Ideally, all student affairs job sites will offer RSS feeds in the near future as this makes conducting a search ultra-convenient.

An alternative to RSS feeds for job postings is the “Email Alert.” Several sites offer email alerts based on a variety of search queries. ACPA, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Placement Exchange, and the Higher Education Recruitment Consortium all offer student affairs job search updates via email alerts.

In addition to the RSS and Email solutions mentioned above, most student affairs associations / higher education news sites offer job listings on their websites. Here are direct links to the student affairs job listings for the following associations / resource sites.

Student Affairs jobs via professional associations:

Student Affairs jobs via higher education publications / job sites:

Academic Advising & Social Media

NACADA Tech in Advising Recommendations for Use of Online Social Communication in Academic Advising

The purpose of these recommendations is to provide guidance to Academic Advisors contemplating the inclusion of on-line social communication tools in their personal or programmatic advising design.

For the purposes of this discussion, Online Social Communications will be understood as externally hosted Web environments, sometimes referred to as Social Media Environments, in which information is aggregated, presented and shared. Further, where functionality exist, the environments allow you to document and filter connections between individuals, maintain profiles, support multimedia, and facilitate communication with a time shift supporting response at user-defined times. On-Line Social Communication environments include Facebook and other Online Social Networks, Twitter, YouTube, personal blogs and wiki pages. Since Facebook’s introduction in 2004, an ever-increasing number of advisors, student services specialists, academic units and universities have been leveraging the benefits of an on-line presence.

The expanding use of on-line social communication by advisors and advising offices, evidenced by numerous publications and presentations over the past five years, encouraged the NACADA Commission for Technology in Advising to proffer the following recommendations when considering inclusion of Social Communication tools in the delivery of advising information:

Continue reading Academic Advising & Social Media

NACADA Region 8 is on Twitter

NACADA Technology Seminars

The NACADA Technology Seminar at the NACADA Region 8 Conference resulted in a lot of Twitter activity. As the lead faculty at the technology seminar I was very pleased with the level of professional engagement that occurred on Twitter. Participants used Twitter hashtags (#NACADATech or #NACADAR8) to create a back channel of connectivity. It was inspiring to see so many of the technology seminar participants using their Twitter skills during the conference. Hundreds of NACADA-related tweets were generated!

Here are the top contributors:

#NACADATECH:
@ericstoller (24)
@oakvich (23)
@UOAdvDir (15)
@sally_garner (14)
@laurapasquini (13)
@mavet (7)
@yojpoj (5)
@OSUMary (4)
@tbump (4)
@dmmoos (3)
@OSU_UESP (3)
@stephaniehambli (3)

#NACADAR8:
@ericstoller (25)
@kurtxyst (23)
@cschwenn (15)
@oakvich (15)
@sally_garner (13)
@UOAdvDir (7)
@ReaAdvising (5)
@laurapasquini (3)
@OSU_UESP (3)
@AdvisorLoftis (2)
@BilOregon (2)
@carmenincalgary (2)
@OGPY (2)

PS: Thanks to Julie Meloni for providing me with the NACADA hashtag stats.

ACPA + NASPA + Student Affairs Technology

ACPA and NASPA and Student Affairs Technology

ACPA recently sent out an email announcement calling for applications for the ACPA Technology Advisory Committee:

The ACPA Technology Advisory Committee (TAC) is a member-driven advisory committee charged by the Executive Director of ACPA with developing the association’s long term Information Technology strategic plan and evaluating and recommending technology initiatives aimed at furthering the association’s strategic initiatives. In addition, the TAC is tasked with evaluating large-scale IT project requests to determine their applicability to long- and short-term association goals and, when necessary, to priority rank IT initiatives.

The TAC description made me feel quite hopeful about the state of student affairs technology…and then I read the following:

“You don’t have to be a technology expert to apply. We are looking for committed ACPA members with an interest in technology who are not afraid to voice their thoughts.”

Why, oh why, does membership in the TAC, which will drive the long term information technology strategic plan for ACPA, not require that someone be a technology expert? How can you evaluate IT projects, further strategic initiatives, and recommend technologies if you are not an expert? Is ACPA saying that there are not student affairs practitioners who are technology experts?

Not to be outdone by the ACPA Technology Advisory Committee notice, NASPA Tech Tools recently posted a word-for-word copy of a 2 month-old article about Google Wave from the Chronicle of Higher Education without really attributing the article. The NASPA Tech Tools site was created to “bridge the gap between student affairs and technology.” Unfortunately, it seems like a chasm at the moment…

What is going on with the state of student affairs and technology? 3 years have passed since I last wrote about ACPA, NASPA, and technology and it’s hard to tell if anything substantial has happened.

Academic Advising + Technology

Excerpt from an interview that I just participated in…a few thoughts on technology and academic advising:

I have heard a number of advisors at conferences, who attend a session about technology in advising, and say something to the effect of This is nice, but how much time is this going to take up? I don’t have enough time as it is!” How do you answer that?

I really hope that we start redefining the paradigms of technology use in advising…it’s part of our toolkit, we need to embed a high level of use/competency in our positions.The time issue/question is interesting as it conflates increased technology use with decreased amounts of time. I always say that technology and its use actually increases our time…makes us better connected, more efficient, etc. It’s that initial learning curve that people confuse as time wasting when it is really just a small part of increasing their overall time. Folks in our profession (academic advising) seem to have been conditioned that learning new technology is somehow a burden or something that is “in addition” to the norm…we really need to re-define this or our future is not looking very good.

A bad day for the OSU web

Oregon State University web space hacked

I almost forgot to post this… A few weeks ago, I was meeting with one of my advisees. I wanted to show them something on the OSU Registrar’s web site. When I arrived on the Registrar’s URL, the “Reported Attack Site!” warning appeared in Firefox. It turns out that several high-level OSU sites were hacked and that several were still suffering from residual hack effects.

Regarding sites being designated as containing malware, many sites will still show up as being malware until the services that browsers use to detect malware sites rescan and update oregonstate.edu sites.

Central Web Services web servers were subject to an attack this weekend. Due to this, a number of services have been temporarily disabled to CWS sites, including ssh and ftp access. Personnel are currently working to clean up this incident. Central Web Services hosts oregonstate.edu and many other sites in the oregonstate.edu domain.

For users accessing a web page, you may receive a message that states something similar to: “Warning: Visiting this site may harm your computer…site contains malware”. If you see this visiting oregonstate.edu (the Home Page), the calendar, or the campus map the issue is resolved.

2010 NACADA Technology Seminars

NACADA Technology Seminars

Last year I participated in the NACADA Technology Seminar. This year, the NACADA Technology Seminar will be offered in conjunction with 3 NACADA Regional Conferences. I’ll be leading the technology seminar at the Region 8 conference in Seattle. Laura Pasquini, University of North Texas and Clay Schwenn, University of Washington, will also be facilitating sessions during the 2 day event.

The NACADA Region 8 Conference Technology Seminar will be a hands on, interactive advising technology experience with a focus on utilizing the latest web-based technologies including: Blogs, Wikis, Twitter, Facebook Pages, RSS/Content Re-purposing, MS Outlook Enhancements, Web Statistics/Assessment, Online Surveys/Forms, Web Video/Audio and Social Bookmarking. In addition to learning how to use these tools, attendees will be given the tools to implement an academic advising oriented social media communications planning framework.

This seminar is for advisors who identify as having an intermediate to advanced comfort level with technology. Participants will be expected to bring a wi-fi capable laptop. This seminar is for advisors who want to go beyond signing up for a Facebook profile and boldly go forward with expanding their technology implementations/expertise.

Google Wave and Accessibility

Google Wave is “totally inaccessible.” According to Web Accessibility in Mind’s (Web AIM) Jared Smith.

Smith’s list of Google Wave’s inaccessible aspects is quite disappointing:

  • Alternative text is not provided for any images.
  • Background images are used to convey content.
  • Roles, states, and other accessibility properties are not defined.
  • There is no document or heading structure or semantics. None! Not even a list!
  • Form elements do not have labels or titles.
  • Keyboard focus indication is hidden, making keyboard navigation nearly impossible.
  • Most interactive elements are not in the tab order or do not respond to keyboard activation.
  • Keyboard focus is often trapped, requiring the page or browser to be closed to resume keyboard navigation.
  • The application becomes unusable and unreadable when text size is increased only slightly.

I concur with Smith’s hope that Google Wave will be made into an accessible product. It’s too bad that accessibility was not part of the initial framework of Google Wave. How many times do we have to experience something built with either brick/mortar or “1’s and 0’s” that is not accessible for all users? Ableism is so pervasive. C’mon Google…you can’t really be “great” if you’re not making great things for everyone to use.