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.

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.

I will be giving the keynote speech for the Oklahoma ACademic ADvising Association (OACADA) Fall Conference in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma next month. The conference theme is “Using Technology to Navigate Student Success” and I think that it provides a terrific continuation to the academic advising technology conversations that came out of the NACADA Technology Seminar. In addition to the keynote address, I will be facilitating a question and answer session in the afternoon.

One of the most successful components of the NACADA Technology Seminar was the use of Twitter amongst the seminar attendees. Every tweet for the event was tagged with this hashtag: #nacadatech09. The hashtag allowed us to aggregate all tagged tweets into the NACADA Tech website via a widget from monitter.com.

This year, due to a multitude of financial issues, a lot of NACADA members will most likely not be able to attend the NACADA Annual Conference in San Antonio, Texas.

The following hashtag has been “created” to enable non-attendees the opportunity to virtually follow the action in San Antonio: #nacada09

How can you participate as either a NACADA Annual Conference Tweeter or as a virtual follower?

NACADA Tweeters:

• Step 1: Sign up for a Twitter account.
• Step 2: Take your laptop or web-ready cellphone to San Antonio and hope that WiFi is available.
• Step 3: Post updates on Twitter about the conference: session pointers, take-aways, best practices, key issues, etc.
• Step 4: In every 140 character post, include “#nacada09″ (without quotes and a space in front of and after the tag)

Virtual followers:

• Step 1: Follow the virtual conference action via a Twitter search for #nacada09
• Step 2: Repeat step 1.

Student Affairs Online has published an article that I wrote on Student Affairs and Twitter. The focus of the article is framed around student affairs practitioners who are new to Twitter and microblogging. Content repurposing via RSS and professional networking are the primary topics in the piece:

Tweet, tweet, tweet: Student Affairs is on Twitter
A microblogging phenomenon known as Twitter has recently rocketed into popular consciousness. In existence for 3 years, Twitter is not exactly the newest social networking site. However, it was in 2009 that Twitter’s mainstream notoriety occurred. Twitter users in Iran produced thousands of microblog posts informing the world of post-election protests. Ashton Kutcher and CNN held a contest to see which of their popular accounts could garner the most followers. Oprah and Ellen began tweeting this year. Even President Obama utilized Twitter as part of a successful election communications strategy. Twitter provides a content platform that can be used for personal tweets, organizing, event updates, networking, content syndication and research.

What does Twitter have to do with Student Affairs and its practitioners?
The answer to how Twitter is relevant to Student Affairs practitioners is stunningly simple: communication. Hundreds of higher education institutions, senior leaders within those organizations, and social media savvy faculty/staff/students are posting 140 character microblog updates to Twitter on a daily basis. Twitter provides a conduit for a wide variety of communication-based applications that Student Affairs professionals can utilize.

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I’m one of 4 faculty members for the upcoming NACADA Technology Seminar in Clearwater, Florida. The seminar is geared toward academic advisors with varying technology skills. We’re expecting about 200 attendees at “NACADA Tech”. This should be a paradigm-changing event. We hope to have wi-fi access for all participants during our sessions. This sounds simple, but it turns out that free, in-session internet access is fairly rare in student affairs / academic affairs conferences. We want to ensure that participants have a hands-on experience with a lot of back channel conversations/connections.

I’ll be facilitating three sessions:
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Student Affairs Technology: To Boldly Go

“They should have explained the basic concepts at the beginning (e.g.: podcasts, blogs, wikis, etc.).”

“Helping me to boldly go where I’ve never been before.”

One of these statements is not like the other two. I’m sure you can guess which one gives me hope as a student affairs techie that we as a profession have not lost our willingness to learn, to explore and to stay positive about new technologies. This article represents a call to action for student affairs practitioners. The microblogging site, Twitter, has a feature that lets you “nudge” someone that you are following. This is me providing a gentle nudge to my fellow higher education administrators. I hope that you nudge me back. Let’s push the envelope. Let’s shift our professional paradigms. Let’s make technology (and learning about new technologies) a part of our daily practices.

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The following videos were not created specifically for student affairs practitioners. However, due to their extreme awesomeness, I feel that they are must-watch for anyone who is interested in technology and student affairs.

What is a podcast?

What is social media?

What is Twitter?

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Recently, the head space that I am devoting to various Web 2.0 sites and applications has begun to feel quite cumbersome. I decided to create a post on my “Web 2.0 footprint.” My usage of each of these sites ebbs and flows. This list represents Web 2.0 services that I use at least once per month. Without further ado, here is a list in no particular order (with links to my personal profiles) of the Web 2.0 sites and services that I currently engage with on the interwebs:

WordPress.org: It runs my blog. I’ve tried Blogger and heard a lot about Movable Type, but WordPress has my blogging heart in its php basket.

Twitter: I’m still not sure what it’s good for . My virtual journal consists of my blog, my live journal account and my twitter account. Sometimes I just need a few words in the Twitterspace to get something out of my head.

LiveJournal: Everything that does not get posted on my blog or on Twitter is posted on my LiveJournal account. Private groups get treated to spectacular rants and it serves as a space for me and my local friends to share all sorts of thoughts and feelings.

Flickr: Only a few of the gigabytes of photographs that I have taken are on my Flickr account. I really need to upload more when I get some spare time.

Facebook: I use Facebook on a daily basis. It’s a great place to connect with friends. It enables me to stay connected with a lot more people than I probably would be able to in the “real” world. Facebook isn’t perfect, but in my opinion, it is the only show in town for my social networking needs.

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