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.

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.

I recently received an invite to the Google Wave beta. The day after I received my invite, I demoed Google Wave to some of the faculty at OSU. We started brainstorming ways in which we could use Google Wave. (It should be noted that the limitations of Blackboard were frequently mentioned in this conversation.) I immediately started pondering how Google Wave could be useful for Academic Advisors in academic advising.

The initial question after I showed my Google Wave account on the big screen was quite simple — what is it? The answer is very complicated. Google Wave is a new way of communicating and collaborating that uses a lot of the elements in current web tools.

Google Wave overview:

Google Wave has the potential to be an exciting new web tool for group advising, content repurposing via Wave embeds, classroom discussions, shared academic advising knowledge bases, collaborative document creation/sharing between advisors/students and distance advising.

The list of Google Wave possibilities is seemingly limited to one’s imagination and creativity.

I would love to have an academic advising system that is extremely functional, user-friendly and aesthetically appealing. Something like Survs, Flickr, or anything from 37signals, but for academic advisors.

At the recent NACADA National Conference, Joshua Barron, a super tech savvy advising colleague, debuted an open source academic advising management system. I wasn’t able to attend the conference, but it turns out that Joshua is looking for collaborators for this new system.

My dream academic advising system would include: integration with university student information system, note taking, built in credit articulation, appointment scheduling, assessment functionality, degree audits, future course planning/forecasting, and more!

Basically, I am fed up with paper-based advising systems. And, please note that document management is not the solution. Scanning in a bunch of paper files is not my idea of high-tech.

Here are some notes regarding the system that Joshua presented at NACADA:

On Saturday, Joshua Barron from Texas Tech presented a full advising management system that they wrote in PHP and MySQL that they are open sourcing under GPL.

Texas Tech University has an advising management system that they call AXIS. Joshua Barron demoed parts of the system and I was quite impressed. It has the following features currently:

• Check in system
• Set of questions that most advisors ask to every student
• Quality Assurance Checks
• Early Warning System
• Automated Email Communication to Students
• Referral System
• Automated Drop in Notes System (pre-written notes that can be dropped in when being asked general questions i.e. how do I drop a class?)
• Assigned Advisor
• Student View of their Records
• Advisor Dashboard with SIS data
• Scanned Documents
• Email Appointments Automated

They also have online scheduling coming soon. They also want to add the ability to suggest schedules and basically remove as much redundant and scriptable work from the advisor as possible so the advisor has as much time as possible to actually communicate with a student. The entire system is built from the ground up with an emphasis on assessment. Everything is a data point and can be queried. It was quite refreshing after seeing and using several companies’ solutions. They have recently decided to share their code with other universities and make the code open source. They are looking for partners to continue development of this tool.

Conference notes courtesy of Nathan Byrer

More than 30 attendees at the NACADA National Conference in San Antonio utilized the #nacada09 hashtag to maintain an active back channel. Check out the full list of NACADA 09 twitterers from this year’s conference at the NACADA Tech Seminar site.

My guess is that this was about 30 more people on Twitter than at last year’s event. Hopefully, the use of Twitter will continue at next year’s conference in Orlando. I would have liked to have seen a few more presentations on Slideshare as I was not able to attend the conference. However, the back channel conversations were quite good considering that this was the first time that this has happened at a NACADA Conference.