Slightly hidden, due to a minuscule font size, within the recent ACPA eCommunity email update was an interesting question: “Are You Ready To Mingle?” Intrigued, I read the rest of the “mingle” text:

Are You Ready To Mingle?
Engage in real life social networking at the Boston 2010 Annual Convention. This new and innovative technology enables attendees to simply ‘click to connect’ at the event and then share their online profiles after the event.

With over 4,500 ACPA members expected to attend the Annual Convention in Boston, the MingleStick may provide an interesting means for folks to exchange contact information. Instead of business cards, attendees can use the MingleStick to exchange electronic profiles. This is slightly similar to the iPhone Bump app. I predict that there will be a lot of digital mingling at ACPA.

The MingleStick plugs in via USB to your computer, uploads its data to the MingleStick website and allows you to browse your recent connections. An individual’s profile information is dependent on what they have included in their public MingleStick profile.

I’m co-presenting a session titled “Wise and Connected - Demystifying Social Media for SSAOs and Directors.” I have a feeling that we will end up polling the room to see who is using a MingleStick and whether or not they are including their Facebook and Twitter accounts on their public MingleStick profiles.

What do you think? Will you engage in digital mingling at ACPA via a MingleStick?

The Student Affairs Collaborative blog is a popular multi-author Student Affairs site. The SA Blog, as it’s popularly referred to on Twitter, contains a lot of relevant student affairs reflections, polls and information from a variety of student affairs professionals. Yesterday, I was invited to be a member of the Student Affairs Collaborative blog. From now on, all of my posts that are tagged with “sachat” (short for Student Affairs Chat) will be auto-aggregated via RSS into the SA blog. This will be similar to how my current “higher-education” tagged posts get auto-magically posted to the Blog High Ed site.

Note, content repurposing via RSS will be a featured topic at the NACADA Technology Seminar in Seattle on January 24th.

Koichi, the Social Media Marketing Manager at eduFire and WordCamp PDX pal, recently sent me two free things: an eduFire t-shirt and a free month of eduFire SuperPass.

While I am definitely going to keep the t-shirt, I have decided to give the free month of eduFire SuperPass to a randomly selected commenter on this post.

All you have to do is post a comment. I will enter your name into a fancy random drawing Excel spreadsheet. Please note that commenting more than once will not increase your chance of winning the SuperPass. If you are a current eduFire student/instructor, I would love to read some user experience comments.

About eduFire:

What is eduFire?
eduFire is a community of people passionate about teaching and learning online. As a student you’ll find outstanding tutors from all around the world, all available at the click of a button. As a teacher you’ll be able to reach new students and teach from anywhere.

What will be offered on eduFire?
Our offerings are broken into three categories: Languages, Exam Prep, and Other. Our most popular languages are Spanish, Italian, French, German, Mandarin and Japanese. However you can teach or learn any language on eduFire! So if you’re just dying to teach or learn Pig Latin you’ve come to the right spot. You’ll be able to browse a list of languages that are offered on eduFire. As far as Exam Prep, we’re really just getting started here, but we’ve got teachers in place for all the major exams with more to come. If there’s something else you’re looking for, try searching for it in the search bar, or e-mail one of our team members to see what we can do.

The official OSU furlough numbers have arrived…here is the monthly furlough breakdown for 9-month and 12-month employees:

* Monthly base salary rate is derived by dividing the employee’s annual base salary rate by either 9 or 12 appointment basis.
** Furlough time off will be prorated for employees working less than 1.0 FTE.

via the Gazette-Times

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.

It was almost two weeks ago when the Oregon State University faculty senate voted for furloughs for all faculty (grant-supported salary is exempt) in 2010. It should be noted that the Oregon State University chapter of the American Association of University Professors “came out in support of furloughs provided that a number of important principles be included in the resolution.” I agree with the OSU AAUP’s suggestions. The top income tiers for furloughs need to be modified so that people who make more than $14,000 per month take more furlough days. If you make $168,000 pre-tax, I think you can handle a bit more of a cut. If you can’t make ends meet, then perhaps you should hire me to manage your finances.

Speaking of privilege…OSU Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship, Robert P. Garrett, decided that the best way to address the furlough situation was to attack Oregon State’s multicultural support programs via a letter in the Corvallis Gazette-Times. According to “Bobby,” OSU’s programs that support underrepresented and/or historically marginalized groups represent a redundant financial burden on our predominantly white campus. In summary, a white male professor on a mostly white campus says that there are just too many campus groups that support women, people of color, and LGBT folks. I wonder how many groups/organizations/offices at OSU are made up of a majority of straight white men. Anecdotally, I would offer that there are a lot…more in fact, than the “redundant” orgs of which Robert writes.

Here are few of the choicest bits from Robert P. Garrett’s letter with a few added thoughts from yours truly:

(continue reading…)

If you hover over the “All Sports” link on ESPN and click the “College Basketball” link, you are taken to ESPN’s coverage of Men’s College Basketball.

The link to “Women’s Basketball” takes you to ESPN’s coverage of Women’s College Basketball.

ESPN is placing one gender (Men) over another (Women) by placing Men’s Basketball as the normative or neutral “College Basketball”. It’s a not so subtle difference…

Google engages in this gender-preferential activity too…a search for “Texas basketball“* lists the most recent score for the men’s Texas Longhorns basketball team. You have to search for “Women’s Texas basketball” to get information on the women’s team.

Title IX may have increased funding and the number of teams in women’s collegiate athletics. However, the above examples illustrate that men’s collegiate sports are still quite overtly at the “center” of mainstream media. “Women’s basketball” is seen as outside the norm and “basketball” as the domain of men.

It’s also important to note that gender, a fluid social construct, as Dave Zirin and Sherry Wolf write, needs to be discussed at great length in the context of all sports.

*Please note that this is in no way limited to searches for Texas..unfortunately, this seems widespread for Google search queries.

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.

University of North Texas students, voting in an online referendum, have rejected the possibility of same-sex couples running for homecoming court in 2010.

The measure was defeated, 58 percent to 42 percent, after a record number of ballots for a student government election were cast in last week’s referendum.

Although most Student Government Association elections have garnered 4 percent or less of the student body vote, 13.5 percent, or 4,895 of the 36,206 students enrolled at UNT, cast ballots in the referendum.

That means that 2,839 students at the University of North Texas voted to uphold heterosexism and maintain homophobia. It also means that 2,056 students at the University of North Texas voted against the homophobic and heterosexist majority.

I hope that this referendum is reversed. However, I do not expect the University of North Texas to be listed in the The Advocate College Guide for LGBT Students: A Comprehensive Guide to Colleges and Universities with the Best Programs, Services, and Student Organizations for LGBT Students.

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.