Student Affairs and Technology

My own answer to the question posed in this post's title varies. As with anything related to the overall picture of Student Affairs, nuance abounds. Initially, I would say that if I were to generalize, I would vehemently say that we actively discourage large scale innovation in Student Affairs. However, because we exist in "the gray," I feel compelled to mention that there are pockets of innovation … although, finding them isn't easy. You know who you are.

Social media are not technology. Please, for the sake of dialog, think about that statement for a minute or two. Now, think about this: Communications is not just social media. And finally, ruminate on this for a while: Technology assists, enables, and provides a platform for communications.

Campus ID cards aren't sexy. It's true. However, campus ID cards provide access to a variety of both on-campus and off-campus services. The number of services that cards provide is astounding when you start to look at all of the ways in which students, staff, and faculty can use them.

When I search for "social media guidelines," sans quotes on Google, there are 41,200,000 results. Corporate sites, blog posts, higher education institutions, and more provide a rich amount of social media guideline examples. When I'm out on the road working with schools or conference attendees, I am often asked to provide social media guideline resources.

Job descriptions for Student Affairs professionals frequently list technology proficiency requirements. Most of the time, those requirements include fairly banal things like email or MS Office. In 2012, those items feel like they are equivalent to making fire. We've been making fire for a long time folks. What's the next standard technology-related item that we should include on position descriptions? I think that one of the next items is going to be fluency with conducting conversations via voice/video over the web.

Twitter has been the catalyst for so many of my professional connections. The platform's simplicity belies its complexity. If you've never tried it, you won't easily get it. Having said that, a consistent occurrence takes place almost every time after I post something on this blog. A friend, colleague, or acquaintance will send me a direct message (Twitter's version of private messaging) with advice on what I should have written.

Magazines aren't something that I generally purchase. However, when I'm at 30,000 feet jet-setting off to my next consulting engagement, or heading home to Boston, magazines are one of my favorite ways to pass the time. On a whim, I recently picked up the April edition of the outrageously priced Harvard Business Review. While reading an article about data and good decisions, one of the headlines made me immediately dog-ear a page and pop open my laptop. Part of the focus of the article was that businesses need to develop "more informed skeptics." My brain immediately leapt over to my "radical student affairs" post and connected skepticism to being a more radical practitioner. Questioning is learning, innovating, and being an agent for change.

Google releases innovative ideas and projects seemingly on a daily basis. With their commitment to creativity (and not being evil), Google supplies a steady stream of new tech. Recently, I came across a couple of Google projects that caught my eye.