Student Success, Retention, and Employability – Getting Digital in a High Tech, High Touch Environment

Sometimes it’s worthwhile to create a post that spans a variety of inter-related topics as a way of sharing a collection of ideas. When I was outlining this piece, I was struck by the seemingly disparate lens in which these topics are often looked at from an institutional perspective. However, with a deeper glance, it’s the connections between these areas that are the strands that form essential aspects of the student experience.

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The Mobile Campus Revolution: It’s Not Rocket Science, It’s Star Wars

Mobile-Eric-Stoller

In addition to writing a couple of blog posts for InsideHigherEd while at Blackboard World, I also managed to put on a session about “The Mobile Campus Revolution.”

The fine folk from echo360 were on hand to record my talk with their lecture capture tech.

In order to embed the lecture capture content, I had to embed it in a separate page:
The Mobile Campus Revolution: It’s Not Rocket Science, It’s Star Wars

*Amazing sketchnote art courtesy of Gerren Lamson

**Sadly, there wasn’t any Red Bull available at the New Orleans Convention Center…an alternative energy beverage was consumed during the taping of this talk.

How I’m Powered by Orange

Eric Stoller is Powered by Orange

My last day at Oregon State University (OSU) is September 30th. I think it’s fitting as my first day at OSU was also in September. Six years ago I moved out to Oregon from Chicago, IL. It was a tremendous life transition. I had been working at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and the decision to leave UIC/Chicago was a big one for a young professional from the Midwest.

When I first started looking at graduate programs in higher education/student affairs I had no idea that I would end up moving to Oregon. I remember checking up on about 5 or 6 programs. I kept coming back to OSU as my first choice. Eventually, I decided to apply for the College Student Services Administration (CSSA) program at OSU. It was the only grad program that I submitted an application to. In hindsight, I probably should have applied to more than one school just in case OSU didn’t accept me. However, sometimes you have to put all of your eggs in a single basket and hope for the best. Concentrating on a single application made my process extremely focused. I was going to get into grad school at Oregon State. There wasn’t a “plan B.”

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When you don’t have all the answers

My office at OSU

A friend and I were talking about being vulnerable. How it is okay to be vulnerable even when we have very public personas and that sometimes we have to admit that things can be difficult. Today, with 16 days left at OSU, I had an academic advising appointment that really shook my soul.

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Academic Advisors and Versatility

Academic Advisors are versatile

Full disclosure: I am currently an academic advisor. It’s my first full-time academic advising experience. I actually was quite pro-active about avoiding academic advising experiences when I was in graduate school. I never thought that I would be an academic advisor. I’ve been in my current advising position for 3 years. It’s been an incredible experience. Having said that, this post is not about me. It’s for anyone who has ever been an academic advisor who has dealt with the subject matter of this post.

A friend of mine is an academic advisor. She’s currently looking for a new position within student affairs. Having applied for several positions that have not yielded an offer. She came to the conclusion that having “academic advisor” at the top of her most recent experiences on her resume was resulting in her application being ignored or devalued. We chatted about how her resume could be re-worked to be more of a skills-based document. While I wasn’t happy about the apparent devaluing of academic advising that seemed to be occurring, I could empathize with both my friend and prospective hiring departments.

The state of academic advising in higher education is that it is a field that is predominantly seen as being in academic affairs. What this means is that while academic advisors may do exactly the same kinds of work as their student affairs colleagues, they might not be recognized for this due to the “silo effect” in higher education.

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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

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:

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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.

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.