Blogging about blogging

When we started this blog for the 2011 regional conference, one of its goals was to introduce the region to various web 2.0 technologies and technology applications you might make use of as academic advisors.  We've introduced you to RSS feeds, Twitter, online document sharing/collaboration and facebook so far, but I knew the time would come to introduce you to blogging.  So this is it--I'm writing a blog post about blogging.

Contribute to the discussion

First, let's go ahead and identify the elephant in the room.  There are some bad blogs out there.  There, I said it.  Blogs evolved from online journals and as they became more popular and easy to use, more people started to use them.  In fact, there are over 150 million blogs in existence now and some of them are riddled with enough grammatical errors, typos and personal rants to set your teeth on edge.  However, I want to bring you over to wonderful side of blogging; the side where people write to inform others and contribute to the shared pool of professional knowledge.

by cobannon (license)

Blogs are a great way for people to communicate their ideas and programs in "real time" format.  To me, they're an easy way to increase my knowledge about academic advising and student affairs in general, providing another avenue for professional development.  Each day, using my handy RSS reader, I have news and information on topics that I care about brought to me and, because most blogs are personal, I'm usualy provided with varying viewpoints, especially regarding current or "hot" topics.

If you're ready to dip your toe in the blog waters, I would suggest beginning your blog reading adventure with the variety of blogs offered by Inside Higher Ed or The Chronicle of Higher Education.  Because these blogs come from recognized and reputable sources in our field, I feel better knowing that their authors have been vetted and usually have good, pertinent things to say.  Of course, if you're already reading those blogs and are ready to expand your blog diet, the Student Affairs Collaborative has done a good job of creating a list of blogs (divided by category) related to higher education and student affairs.  I encourage you to check it out when you have some free time and, if you already have a blog, add it to the list.  I do want to point out a couple of the ones specific to academic advising.

Both the Advising Centers at the University at Buffalo and the University of Oregon have student focused blogs, a type of blog of blog that is becoming more popular.  In fact, the University of Oregon presented on their blog at their regional conference (winning best of region) and the annual conference in Orlando. These types of blogs provide us another way to reach out to students to notify them of important information in an environment where they are more comfortable.  Because you drive the blog and control the content, it's usually a good way to discuss timely information with students.  Some advisors also have blogs whose audience is other advisors.  Our very own Art Esposito has a blog that straddles the line between being student and professionally focused and Sarah Howard's (an academic advisor at UNC) blog is primarily professionally focused.

The big two

by Rosaura Ochoa (license)

If you want to give blogging a try yourself, go ahead.  There's no hard and fast rule about how often it has to be updated.  The only advice I offer is make sure you have something to say before you commit it to the web.  When it comes to free blogging platforms, there are 2 big players: Blogger (Google operated) and Wordpress.  I use WordPress for my personal blog to share information with friends and family but we chose to use Blogger for Region 2 blog.  Each platform has its pluses and minuses and you can find a pretty good comparison of the services offered here.  I would recommend just taking a few minutes with each one to find the one you are comfortable with.  Once you do, you'll be set to start blogging.

There's a lot more detail I could go into about blogging and you've seen some of the extra functions we've been using on this site (like RSS feeds, subscribe by email, tagging, etc).  If you have additional questions about blogging, join the discussion and post those questions in comments box below.

Want to blog?

I hope everyone is enjoying the NACADA Region 2 blog and conference companion site and has found the information presented to be helpful and entertaining. We've had a fun time sharing with all of you and now we think it's time for you to join the party.  We're looking for guest writers who'd like to give blogging a shot.  We're hoping that you'll be willing to tell your conference story with a few short posts before, during and after the conference. This is a great way to share with your colleagues how you're preparing for the conference, what you're up to in C-Ville and your closing thoughts about your overall conference experience and what you learned.  Newcomers and seasoned conference attendees are welcome.  No blogging experience necessary; all training provided.  =0)

If you think this is something you'd be interested in trying, just complete the form below before next Tuesday's Tech Talk on March 15.

Creating your own advising social networks

So, when Allen asked me to write something about Facebook, I got kind of excited as I haven’t really presented solely on the topic in some time. A colleague and I just had a chapter published in a book on Social Media in Higher Education—we spent much of last spring writing it, but that’s the last time I really intellectualized on the topic.

by MrTopf (license)

I’m atypical, I think, amongst advisors on Facebook in that I go out of my way to initiate the on-line friendship with my students. It’s a deliberate relationship I’m interested in forging with my students and I do so with some key qualities of that relationship in mind, as encouraged by an author my co-author introduced to me—Laurent Daloz—who has rapidly become one of my all-time favorites. Daloz writes most frequently from the perspective of a mentor to adult learners—the same perspective my co-authors holds—but we quickly found the transitions we advise our respective populations through were remarkably similar. You’ll have to read the chapter to find out how, but let me move on to the qualities of good mentoring/advising that I think are easily fostered in on-line environments.

“Trust between people is the key to learning and development. Our students need to trust us – to know that we are present to support their growth and not to play "gotcha"; that we will push them, many times, to places that are uncomfortable, but that we will be there to support them as well. With great intention we strive to engender trust with our students, see their movement, give them a voice, carefully introduce conflict, challenge their taken-for-granted ideas, watch for their growth, and emphasize their positive movements (Daloz, 1999, pp. 123-124). In doing so, we are also careful, as Daloz suggested, to monitor and reflect on our relationships with students. As we have gradually implemented Web 2.0 tools into our daily work, we have been even more highly reflective about our practices. “

I’m a dedicatee to the act of face-to-face (f2f) advising and truly believe it’s where I do my best work, but my use of Facebook, YouTube, and my blog extends my opportunities to engage and build trust with my student population. Social Media, and Facebook in particular, supports my f2f relationship-building activities.

“Daloz’s (1999) concern about technology: “More, faster, and farther seem to be the driving values. Thus entangled in the Internet, spun about at hyperspeed, drowning in information, starved by virtual reality, should we wonder that we hunger for real reality? Can such technology nourish our need for community, intimacy, contemplative time, wisdom?” (p. xxv). Daloz sincerely questioned if technology could in fact support “good mentoring.” A mere eleven years later, we answer with a resounding "Yes!"

“Pedagogy 2.0," coined by McLoughlin & Lee in 2008, refers to the use of social media to "enable the development of dynamic communities of learning through connectivity, communication, and participation" (p. 3). Pedagogy 2.0 is situated in connectivism (Siemens, 2004), by which learning is a process "of creating a network of personal knowledge, a view that is congruent with the ways in which people engage in socialization and interaction in the Web 2.0 world – a world that links minds, communities, and ideas while promoting personalization, collaboration, and creativity" (McLoughlin & Lee, 2008, p. 2). My co-author and I use the term "Mentoring 2.0" -- an educational approach that we also ground in connectivism.

“Leslie and Landon (2008) contended that when Web 2.0 technologies work, "it is often because the right conditions that allow networks to grow exist" (p. 4). We propose that many of the conditions that allow these technologies to work and grow are similar conditions that allow good learning to work and students to "grow" in higher educational settings. Conditions such as trust, dialogue, motivation, collaboration, input, guidance, and a sense of connectedness and community that support learning and growth for students in higher education are conditions that social media can enable and, in fact, promote. In essence, these are the conditions provided by good educational mentors (Daloz, 1999; Nakamura & Shernff, 2009).”

Finally, there’s the concept of ambient intimacy, proffered by Reichelt in 2007. Ambient intimacy facilitates “being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible” (para. 3). Social media has always afforded me ways to have “regularity and intimacy” with my students, to be conversational and dialogical with them, to engage in collaboration, to have openness, connectedness, and community with and among them. These tools can be used to extend face-to-face relationships and can make them more meaningful and impactful. These tools also help you shift the power relationship that is typically found between instructors or advisors and students in higher education—my goal is to foster a trust-based relationship that keeps me out of the “parent group” and “teacher group” in the eyes of my advisees.

My personal advising style is such that I only manage a personal profile on Facebook. I initiate "friendship" with my students in the network and behave myself as though I'm a guest in their environment. The internet is about choice, and when my students chose to trust I'm not there to spy on them or list prohibited behavior, they're investing large amounts of Social Capitol (or whuffie) in me. And being in their environments isn't as frightening as many of you might be thinking. Being Facebook Friends with my students merely requires me to set up friend lists, direct whatever content I'm pushing to appropriate audiences, and remember that I'm the professional in control of conversations with students no matter where that conversation is taking place--"face to face to Facebook to Facebook" as our Keynote Speaker Peter Hagen once said to me.

Facebook, social networks and other social media applications feature prominently in the Applied Technology Pre Conference Workshop and two follow up Concurrent Sessions (Thursday at 3:45 and Friday at 10:30), so if this stuff really interests you, attend any or all of them. Or catch me at the conference and ask me about Whuffie!

Æ

---

Daloz, L. A. (1999). Mentor: Guiding the journey of adult learners. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Leslie, S. & Landon, B. (2008). Social software for learning: What is it, why use it? Report for the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education, OBHE, London.

Nakamura, J., & Shernoff, D.J. (2009). Good mentoring: Fostering excellent practice in higher education. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

McLoughlin, C. & Lee, M.J.W. (2008). Future learning landscapes: Transforming pedagogy through social software. Innovate Online, 4. Retrieved from http://www.innovateonline.info/pdf/vol4_issue5/Future_Learning_Landscapes

__Transforming_Pedagogy_through_Social_Software.pdf Siemens, G. (2004). Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age. Retrieved from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm

A cure for CEA

by jonwatson (license)

I have a confession to make.  A few years ago, I had an illness...an affliction really. You see, I was a chronic e-mail attacher (CEA).  Gasp.  I know.  Me, one of your tech co-chairs, an inbox clutterer...a space exceeding, quota maximizer.  I just couldn’t help myself.  Working on a file at work that I need to work on at home?  Attach it to an e-mail to myself.    Need that same file at work the next day? Yep, another e-mail to me.  I doubt a day went by when you couldn’t find an e-mail in Allen Taylor’s inbox from Allen Taylor.  Of course, being a CEA, I didn’t just limit those attachments to myself.  Need feedback on a form I was creating?  E-mail attachment to my colleagues who then sent me more e-mails with more attachments back with their comments that I then had to combine into one document.  And guess what followed that...yep, that’s right; another e-mail back to my colleagues with the changes.  When would the madness end?!  But then I found hope...my salvation really, and I want to tell you about them in case you too find yourself afflicted as a CEA.

Ga-ga about goo-gle

Okay, I’ll admit it.  I’m a Google nerd.  I signed up for a gmail account and never looked back. The large amounts of free storage and the suite of applications (Google Docs, Picasa, Reader, Blogger, etc.)  that come with a Google account have kept me hooked ever since.  Now you can see why Calley recommended signing up for a free Google account with any e-mail address; gmail not required.  Let me now tell you how Google Docs helped me lessen my CEA affliction.

To start, Google Docs has a wide range of possible applications. Contained within the Google Docs suite are word-processing, spreadsheet and presentation programs.  Full disclaimer right at the beginning--these programs are not as fully featured as Microsoft Word, Excel or Powerpoint.  Google Docs and online document creation programs are fairly new in the overall history of the web and they're not the only options out there.  Just to name a few, Microsoft makes a version of Office online called Office Web Apps, and there's Zoho and ThinkFree as well.  If you're ready to give this a try (and I hope you are), you can give the various applications a look to see which one your most comfortable with.  However, to prevent you from being overwhelmed by its usefulness (and to keep this blog post from being too long), we're going to specifically focus on real-time document collaboration in the word processing program in Google Docs. I recommend watching the short video below to get an idea of what I'm talking about.  You might consider it cute or cheesy depending on your stance but it is still a pretty good illustration of online document collaboration.

So that's online document collaboration in a nutshell.  The best part of Google Docs is you can share a doc with anyone for collaboration, even if they don't have a Google Account.  You just need to send them the link.  I hope you can begin to see just how useful this might be for collaborating on a document.  Just as an example, I was working on a proposal for the NACADA 2011 Annual conference with advisors across the country.  Instead of e-mailing ideas and changes to the proposal back and forth, we collaborated on it in a Google Doc.  This let individuals work on it on their own time in their own time zone and left me and everyone else all on the same page about our session.  It was great!  If you're presenting with others at our regional conference, you should consider giving this a try.

PS--later this week, you'll see another feature of Google Docs right here on our very own blog.  We're pretty excited about it.  Stay tuned.

My online hard drive

So Google Docs takes care of e-mail attachments for collaboration but what about the chronic e-mailing of files back and forth to myself.  Of course, I could use a USB drive, but I'm just a likely to forget to bring that with me as I am to lose it so that's a "no go" for me.  I could also just upload my files to Google Docs, but what if I have some specific formatting that Google Docs isn't equipped to deal with just yet?  Yes, Google Docs does have a feature that allows me to upload documents in their original format unchanged for download later, but again, after I save a document on my computer and make changes to it, I might forget to upload the new one.  I just wish my hard drive was online somewhere. That's where Dropbox comes in.

Dropbox lets me open a document from the Dropbox folder on my computer, make changes and then, when I click save, it saves the changes back to the document in my Dropbox folder.  But here's the really great part-my Dropbfox folder is online! The latest version of my document is available through my Dropbox folder from anywhere, anytime. And since it's web-based, you have the option to access your Dropbox folder from the web is you're working at a computer where you can't install the Dropbox software (like those pesky business center computers at conference hotels). The video below does a great job extolling the virtues of Dropbox (even better than I can).

So that's it.  Those are my two cures for being a chronicle e-mail attacher.  I hope you'll give them a try; they're free after all.  I think, maybe, after you do, you'll wonder how you functioned without them.  You can thank me in Charlottesville.  =0)

Twitter (or, I can do it, so can you)

Last week I was in a meeting when the topic of Twitter came up and I found myself getting a little defensive. Not because I felt like I was getting pressure to use Twitter, but because I felt like I needed to defend Twitter, and it was an odd role to find myself in. It was odd, maybe even a little uncomfortable, for a few reasons:

1. I’m not “connected”. I don’t have a smart phone and I definitely don’t want my car to connect to my facebook page.
2. This is the first time I’ve really been ahead of my colleagues in technology usage. Example: my students created my facebook page several years ago and it was at least 6 months before I logged in and did anything with it.
3. I’ve spent the last year coming up with reasons not to use Twitter.

But there I was, trying to explain, specifically, the professional benefits of Twitter to some people who clearly believe that Twitter is a social tool only to be used socially. How did I end up there? Well, in November of 2009, my husband got a smart phone. It was fun, but I didn’t think it was really any more useful than a traditional phone. Then the storm hit. Literally. We lost water, power, and heat in a snowstorm and the only thing that kept us sane over the next 5 days was the regular Twitter updates from the power company regarding their progress in restoring utilities. “Hmmmm”, I thought, “maybe this Twitter thing isn’t so bad”.

From Rosaura Ochoa (license)

In April 2010, I went to a conference in San Francisco where attendees could sign up to receive announcements through Twitter about schedule changes, weather updates, and travel issues. I thought that sounded kind of helpful, but since I didn’t have a smart phone, I didn’t bother to sign up. Looking back, I should have. Other conference attendees were having conversations throughout, and even after the conference, that I missed out on because I hadn't really thought about the fact that I could use Twitter without a smart phone.

Then in Fall 2010 I learned about the SA Blog and its weekly chat. It sounded exactly like something I would love-a weekly chat with other student affairs professionals on a variety of topics (#sachat). The only problem was that the chat was on Twitter and I wasn’t. “Maybe it’s time” I said, and created a Twitter account. I’ll admit I probably agonized a little too long about my user name (Should it be professional? Fun? Silly? Simple?) and my profile (Should I have one at all? What should it say? How much should I share?), but it was easy and the next day I logged in to participate in the chat. It was great! SA professionals from all over the country, talking about one agreed-upon topic for an hour on Thursday. I learned so much from that one chat that I blocked my calendar for 1pm EST every Thursday and every week I look forward to connecting to other professionals through #sachat and other conversations about student affairs, advising, community colleges, and other relevant topics. I even got connected as a mentor to a new student affairs professional through Twitter. If you’re willing to give it a try, and I hope you are, follow the steps below to learn the basics and get started.

Vocabulary

Like so many things in technology, there’s some lingo you should know:

Tweet = a message sent through Twitter. Think of it as an instant message (remember those?) or facebook status update limited to 140 characters but not necessarily sent to any one person.

@ = a person/organization. If someone wants to send me a tweet, they send it to @cstevenstaylor. An easy way to remember this is that an email addresses uses “@” in it too.

# = a topic (pronounced “hashtag”). Any user can include these in a tweet. When I tweet about an advising experience and include #acadv in the tweet, anyone searching for "#acadv" or "academic advising" will find what I said.  Don't worry-they're not mysterious (although I thought they were when I started); you can find them just by looking around. I found #SAgrow (student affairs mentoring), #SAgrad (student affairs graduate students) and #SAtech (student affairs technology), just by noticing them in others’ tweets and clicking on them to see what they were about.

Follow = exactly what it sounds like. When you follow someone on Twitter, anything they tweet automatically shows up on your page.

Create your account

As I mentioned before, it’s easy!

1. Go to Twitter and click on the big orange Sign Up! button on the right.
2. Enter your information, create a user name, and create your account! I’d recommend creating a user name similar to the user name you might create for a personal email address to be used during a job search.  Choose something that identifies you in a simple, professional way (I don’t want to see anyone choose hot_advisor24!)

Set up your profile

If you’re using Twitter to connect with colleagues like I do, you’re going to want to include something in your Bio so people can learn a little about you and upload a picture. Your bio doesn’t have to be detailed, but using keywords like “academic advisor”, “student affairs”, or including your institution name in your profile will help people decide if they want to connect with you. I went a little goofy with mine-it was late at night-but do whatever you feel comfortable with. You’ll want to upload a picture too. You can upload a picture of you, your favorite sports team, your alma mater logo, whatever, but if you don’t, Twitter will default to a picture of an egg.

Start engaging!

That’s really what this is all about right? So here’s what you need to know:

To follow a person:

1. Open Twitter in a new window and log in. You’ll see your “home” page, which probably looks pretty empty right now.
2. Click on “Who to follow” in the top menu bar
3. Type NACADA in the search box, click search.
4. Click the green plus sign “follow” button next to NACADA. Now, every time NACADA tweets, you’ll see it right away.

Want more practice following people? Trying following the members of the conference committee who are on Twitter.

To follow a conversation:

1. Go back to your Twitter home page.
2. Click on the “search” box in the top menu bar.
3. Type #NACADAR2 and click the little magnifying glass to search
4. Now you’ll see all the tweets that have been sent that related to NACADA Region 2, regardless of who sent them.
5. Click “Save search” to find this conversation again easily.

Want more practice following conversations? Try searching for #acadv, #sachat, or #highered. Any searches you save will be quickly available from the “searches” tab under the “What’s Happening” box on your home page.

Now the exciting part-tweeting! This is fun:

1. Go back to your Twitter home page
2. Type “Hi #nacadaR2, I’m on Twitter now #acadv”, and as soon as you click “tweet”, you’ll have introduced yourself to everyone else who reads tweets related to NACADA Region 2 and advising, and we’ll say hi back!

Twitter management
Twitter.com works best as a way to keep up with people you’re following (anything that starts with @) but keeping up with lots of topics (anything that begins with #) can be tricky. As a result, there are many people who prefer to use options that allow you to follow both people and topics at a glance. You can download Tweetdeck or Hootsuite, which notify you every time there’s an update from the people or hashtags you’re following. I can’t download anything at work, so I use Seesmic, which is entirely web-based and lets me keep each topic I’m following separate and easy to follow.

Now what?

So, now you’re on Twitter, and before you know it, you’ll be an old pro. Congratulations! However, if I could leave you with one thought, it would be this: Twitter is what you make of it. If you don’t actively participate in # conversations, you won’t benefit from all the great information other colleagues are putting out into the Twitterverse. Check it a few times a day, and try to find at least one interesting thing to respond to or share through Twitter, and you’ll be amazed at the response you get and what you’ll learn.

RSS Feeds = EZ Reading

By riekhavoc (license)

About a year ago, I made a commitment to myself to spend more time on professional reading. At first, this seemed like a daunting idea. Sure, I had stacks of unread journals and books in the office, but reading them every day was out—I have to close the office door and set aside chunks of time that I don’t always have in order to really focus on that kind of material. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that internet reading was the way to go—I could go online to get short articles to peruse between advising appointments, maybe grab the odd podcast between meetings. But where would I find these things, and how could I figure out how to spend less time searching the internet, wading through junk to find the things I really wanted to read so I could spend more time actually reading? How could I avoid subscribing by email to lots of websites without bogging down my inbox? RSS!

RSS (really simple syndication) is a feature built into many websites. Basically, RSS feeds are like the ticker across the bottom of your favorite news program, pushing little notes out whenever the website is updated. As long as you can catch those notes somehow, you can know when a site has something new on it without having to actually go to every site you want to monitor. Now, I’m notorious for bookmarking websites I want to monitor and either promptly forgetting about them or checking them obsessively even when there’s nothing new to see, so I knew I’d need some help with this.

That’s where feed readers came in. RSS feed readers monitor websites for updates. There are plenty of options out there (feedly, FeedDemon, there’s even an RSS option in Outlook), but I chose to start with Google Reader (Google Reader in Plain English) because, honestly, I was already using Gmail and GoogleDocs (more on that in a couple weeks), and I liked the familiarity of it. And since it’s the one I’m still the most comfortable with, and probably the most popular RSS feed reader, it’s the one we’re going to practice with today. Ready?

Create your Google account
Step 1: Go to www.google.com/reader
Step 2: Login if you already have a Google account. If not, go ahead and create one-it’s easy and you’ll have other opportunities to use your new Google account during upcoming Tuesday Tech Talks. Google accounts are used to access Google services. You can create your Google account using any email address, but it’s usually a good idea to use a Gmail account if you have one. Don’t worry-creating this Google account won’t give you another email address!

Set up your Google Reader account

Once you have your account set up, it’s time to start adding the websites you want to monitor to your feed. There are two ways to do this. Let’s start with the easy way, which works for any webpage that has the RSS symbol on it (You know that orange square with the three little lines that you’ve wondered about? That’s the one!)
Step 1. Open the NACADA Region 2 blog in a new window.
Step 2: Click on the little arrow next to “Posts” under RSS on the left side menu.
Step 3: Select “Add to Google”.
Step 4: Choose “Add to Google Reader”, log in, and presto! You’re following this blog, and anytime you log into Google Reader, you’ll be able to see if the blog has been updated. Anything in bold is something new for you to read.

Now, that was the easy way. Sometimes, however, website designers aren’t very good about putting the RSS symbol in a place that’s easy to find. Luckily, you can also subscribe to follow a webpage directly from Google Reader. Here’s how:
Step 1: Head back over to your Google Reader page (log back in if you need to) and click the “Add a subscription” button in the top left corner.
Step 2: Type inside higher ed in the search box and click “Add”. Now Google will search for any RSS feed that uses those keywords.
Step 3: Click the “Subscribe” button under Home-Inside Higher Ed et voila! You’re now subscribed to Inside Higher Ed.

Now Google Reader will check both the NACADA Region 2 blog and Inside Higher Ed for you, 24-hours a day. This means you just have to go to one page, instead of 2, whenever you want to see what’s new with either page. Add more sites and Google Reader will be even more of a bargain. I log in about once a day, scroll through the feeds from 13 sites, pick a couple posts to check out and maybe read fully, and I have guaranteed professional reading that fits into even the busiest day! I deleted those 13 sites from my browser bookmark list and no longer grumble about missing an article posted online because I checked the site too early or too late in the day.

Let Us Be Your Guide

I was at the gym the other night, stretching in the corner after my run, when I noticed the gym trainer come in with a woman. Now, normally, I don’t take much notice of the gym trainer but my gym is small and the area where I stretch is adjacent to one of those of multipurpose Cybex gym machines. You know the kind, with the various handles that can be changed to accommodate a variety of exercises. Well, that machine was their destination and as they approached, I overheard the woman tell the gym trainer, “Thanks for showing me how to use this machine. I’ve never used one before and I didn’t want everyone to look at me funny if I did it wrong.”

Initially, I didn’t think much of this conversation. It is a new YMCA branch that opened in my neighborhood so there’s a number of people joining each week. However, as I sat down to write this post, I noticed how that experience provided a parallel to social media and online technology use. The woman, let’s call her Susan, was ready to try something new. She was new to the gym and wanted to make the most of what it had to offer; for Susan, that meant learning to use the Cybex machine even though she was a little intimidated by it. However, during this exploration she wanted someone to provide her with some guidance so she wouldn’t feel ashamed or ridiculed if she was using the machine incorrectly.

Time cover by keepthebyte (license)

When we first use social media or online technology, we probably all feel a little like Susan. I know I did when I first started using Twitter. I thought it would be a great tool for collaboration and information sharing, but I didn’t really understand it. What did it mean when a word was proceeded by a # symbol? I knew I had no interest in telling the world what I had for breakfast so what would I post, or tweet about? Who should I follow? Who would I tweet with? Can you even tweet “with” people? In other words, I wanted to know the rules and more importantly, I wanted my own “gym trainer” to guide me on its use. So I turned to my good friend, David.

David is the Digital Media Director of The Sun, an independent, ad-free monthly magazine and one aspect of his job is creating and monitoring the magazine’s use of social media. He walked me through the rules of Twitter, explained that the # symbol is called a hashtag and used for keeping up with conversation themes, encouraged me to write a bio and extolled the virtues of TweetDeck. Now I find myself a happy (though not prolific) twitter user who is learning a lot of new information through my online twitter connections and by following a few important hashtags (such as #acadv for academic advising information). I attribute much of my twitter success to his tutelage and great advice.

by mountainbread (license)

So that’s why we thought these Tuesday Tech Talks on the blog would be a good idea. We hoped that if we were willing to provide our colleagues in Region 2 with some guidance on technology and social media use, some of you might be willing to give some of them a try. As a conference committee, we’ve started the process of reaching out to you both as a group through this blog and individually by listing our social media “connect with me” options on the About page. This is your chance to be like Susan, brimming with curiosity and ready to experience and make the most out of these exciting new forms of digital collaboration and sharing. Let us be your trainer.

We know that collaboration and engagement with our colleagues is beneficial to us professionally (that’s why we attend conferences, right?) and research is just beginning to show the positive impact social media engagement can have on our students’ performance (from the NY Times: Twitter: The New Rules of Engagement).  So why should we limit these important conversations and connections to specific events? With that in mind and in keeping with our conference theme of moving forward, we hope you will join us in forging these relationships and continuing the dialogue online by commenting on posts in this blog and utilizing some of the social media tools we’ll be introducing. Through the use of these tools, we think you’ll have a more rewarding and enriching conference experience and posting a comment couldn’t be easier. Just select the “Comments” link at the bottom of a post, type in your comment and either select one of the profiles listed (if you have one) or “Name/Url” and provide your name. Let’s see who channels their inner Susan and is the first to comment, shall we?


In the weeks leading up to the conference, we’ll be featuring and explaining a variety of online technology and social media. At this point, based upon the feedback we received from the region survey that was sent out late last year, we’ll be featuring the following:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Blogging
• Online Document Sharing/Collaboration
• Podcasts
• Webinars

Now, that’s not enough to get us to the conference, so we’d like to hear what else you want to learn about. Leave us a note in the comments section or send us an e-mail at nacadaregion2+tuestech@gmail.com. Until next Tuesday!