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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Google does not always create accessible products (GoogleWave). However, sometimes they do a good job of increasing the accessibility of an existing service. I hope that Vimeo gets the message that accessibility is important.

In the first major step toward making millions of videos on YouTube accessible to deaf and hearing-impaired people, Google unveiled new technologies that will automatically bring text captions to many videos on the site.

[Google] combined their automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions, or auto-caps for short. Auto-caps use the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice to automatically generate captions for video.

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 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.

A little while ago, one of my favorite web comics, XKCD, did the equivalent of talking about Fight Club. The secret of tech support is now public. I actually breathed a sigh of relief!

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.