Leslie Dare

I've been reading the various blogs related to Da Chen's visit to our campus. Many students on campus (including at least FYC and ALS students, and likely others) are given a writing assignment based on Da Chen's work. The blog titles chosen for many of these blogs are Da Chen specific. Here are some examples. (And, if you visit each you will see that the vast majority have only the one post.) My favorite is DaChenGoState; never miss an opportunity to show that school spirit!

http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/ChenDa
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/chenreading
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/dachenals
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/ALS103abl
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/wcotm
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/cotm
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/dachen101
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/DaChenGoState
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/DaChen15869
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/chencotm
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/dachencom
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/summerreading
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/Reading
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/myvalues9
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/DA
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/ValuesALS
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/dachenqnn
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/colorvalues
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/dachenbmmmallar
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/valuesoflife


This catches my attention because of my recent interest in the concept of teaching our students to be "net savvy" (as well as our staff and faculty). Will these students use these blogs for other purposes? Do they not understand how to set up a blog? Maybe they understand and are only blogging for this one course requirement and don't intend to use the blog again.

I should note that are a number of other posts on blogs that have more traditional blog names (usually the name or unity of the student). But the number of Da Chen-specific blog titles really caught my eye and has me wondering just how much our first-year students understand blogging.

A recent post to the EDUCAUSE blog nicely sums up the challenges of being a participant (citizen?) in the Web 2.0 world. Trying to navigate through a variety of tools and the resulting multiple identities can be a hindrance to really exploring all that Web 2.0 has to offer. And to compound it, some of those identities are personal and some are professional...and some are a blend which blurs it all even more. Lines that I had firmly drawn years ago to separate those worlds now seem to have shifted, which causes me to ponder just how transparent I want my life to be.

But back to the more technical challenges. A micro-level example of the problem of multiple profiles/identities is on our own campus. One of the most common questions I hear is "When will I be able to have just one login?" I think that the powers that be are very aware of this issue, and it is being addressed as part of an Identity Management initiative (I'll add a link to that soon as I can find it).

A response to that post has led me to read more about OpenID, a phrase I've seen but only now am appreciating as a concept. Simply put, "OpenID means the elimination of multiple user names and passwords and a smoother, more secure, online experience."

The notion of solving this at the macro-level is exciting, and I look forward to watching its development.

The Centre for Learning & Resource Technologies recently published a list of  Top 100 Tools for Learning. I'm not familiar with this organization though reading up now. The list is dynamic and routinely updated based on Top 10 Tools lists submitted by a variety of folks from the corporate world, higher ed, K-12, other non-profits, consultants and so on.

As I scroll through the list, I find myself thinking in terms of myself (do I use these tools?) and my Student Affairs colleagues (do they, generally as a group, use these tools?).

The top five: Firefox, de.licio.us, Skype, Google Search, and Wordpress.

Me: Yes (daily), Yes (daily), Yes (occasionally), Yes (daily), and No (Blogger and others)

My SA Colleagues: Some, Probably Not, Probably Not, Yes, and Probably Not.

This isn't surprising to me, or really even disappointing. It is so hard to keep up with the technology, especially for those of us who are digital immigrants. Many university administrators are probably unfamiliar with many of these tools, and it is my job to keep our SA folks up to date about these tools. First, how do students use them? Second, how can we use them to deliver courses, student services, and developmental programs? Third, how can we use them for our own individual productivity?

This list might be good material for initial self-assessment for workshops related to these tools.

Today's article on Technician Online makes clear that students' love of  Facebook is not unconditional. In fact, students seem to have a love/hate relationship with this and other online social networking sites. This article outlines some new tools available on Facebook, which are the result of Facebook Platform (a set of developer's tools that allow these applications to be written). Apps range from pure entertainment to politics  to dating to the "doing good deeds" genre, and include titles such as iLike (music), LOLCats, Movies, Naughty Gifts, Compare People, Causes, My Purity Test, Fortune Cookie, What's your Stripper/Porn/Gangster/Hieroglyph (and more) Name, Moods, Bumper Sticker...and hundreds more.

Some students quoted in the Technician article feel that these applications make Facebook more of a time-waster than before, and others feel that the applications are silly or meaningless.

This coincides with some student perspectives I heard through an Interactive Theatre performance at a conference I recently attended. The students (both in character and out) stated that they have a love/hate relationship with Facebook. On one hand, it is the ultimate procrastination tool, and you can find yourself suddenly hours into a Facebook session. On the other hand, it helps the students feel connected. Essentially, the students were saying that they are addicted (their term) to Facebook and had to get their fix every day, even though it could (but doesn't always) waste time.

Another theme from this performance was the notion that Facebook seduces students into the notion of "feeling connected" but that when using Facebook in a vacuum, it can lead to all sorts of misconceptions and behaviors that can be harmful to individuals and and their relationships with others. Students use Facebook to "feel connected" (especially on large campuses) but can also end up feeling isolated and friendless.

I think our Student Affairs staff have a love/hate relationship with Facebook as well. Many recongize this as a resource that indeed could be a wonderful tool to help students connect, but worry about the lack of personal interaction, the sharing of personal information, and the consequences of the behaviors on students.

Kudos to Student Health Services for a succesful implementation of their new electronic medical records system. This incredibly challenging project improves service for students and inreases efficiency for staff. Here is a nice review by the Technician. Student Affairs is proud to be the home of a department that continues to push forward with appropriate use of technology to serve our students.

My ten-year-old daughter loves visiting the NC State campus. Her favorite spot is Clark Dining Hall. Why, you ask? Two words: Unlimited bacon.

But this Bacn (yes, without the letter "o") ain't the same as the tangy, salty, crunchy, chewy manna from heaven (I like bacon, too). Nope, this is the latest techno-hip-buzzword that may or may not make it to mainstream dialogue. But I found it fun nonetheless (cuz...gee...it's bacon!)

Bacn (first cousin to Spam) is, according to the folks at Bacn2, "email you want, but not right now." Geeks are posting online their favorite strategies to deal with Bacn, such as creating an  email folder with a label like "Later" or "When I Have Time."

Want to learn more? Just do a search on "bacn" with "email" in your search window and you will be surprised and likely amused with the results.

I'm laughing now, but will be watching to see if this term truly becomes part of our lexicon. (And by the way, Sausage is next!)

Word from my Student Affairs colleagues is that GossipReport.com has shown up at UNC-W events in an effort to generate material for their website, and may be looking to do the same on other campuses. I'd be interested to know if anyone here at NC State has had interaction with anyone from this organization.  This would be the type of website we include in educating our students about the consequences of their actions out in cyberspace...all part of helping our students (and ourselves) become Net Savvy. 

Author Da Chen was the speaker at Convocation this past Monday night, and was by all accounts a huge success. He also met  with First Year College students, which was fitting since Chen's "Colors of the Mountain" was this year's FYC Summer Reading Assignment.

What I find interesting are all the blog posts by students in response to Chen's visit on campus. Most (if not all) appear to be on students' personal blogs and not related to class assignments. I haven't carefully studied campus culture and attitudes via blog postings, but it was certainly noticable that Da Chen postings dominated the WolfBlog's "recent posts" list most every day this week. It is great to see students capturing their thoughts in a way that lets the rest of us peek in.

After reading this article in the Chronicle about branding and domain names, I decided to see what happened when I went to http://ncstate.edu/ and yep, sure enough, it goes to our university home page. And not just a redirect to http://www.ncsu.edu/ but rather it maintaints "ncstate.edu" in the address field. I can remember in the early or mid-1990's when there was a specific effort on our campus to move away from "NCSU" and use "NC State" instead. It is good to see we already own the "ncstate.edu" domain. There is a group on campus working on branding and marketing for the campus. I wonder if this was a result of that group's current work, or just some diligent individual who thought of this on their own awhile back.

I recently discovered an interesting section on Technician Online, the web version of the student newspaper. It is a regular poll on questions relating to student life, campus activities and university politics.

These polls provide some insight into our student population. There are obviously a couple limitations with these polls. The participants self-select. And, I've never seen any data regarding demographics of the regular readers of this online paper, so I can't even begin to surmise who these students are. (To the Technician's credit, they have a disclaimer about this not being a scientific poll.) Also, the answer options are sometimes non-exclusive and overlap.

Nonetheless, it is an interesting slice of data. If nothing else, we know what is on the mind of the person creating the poll questions!

I think sometimes I'm quite late to start using some technologies- at least compared to techies I know. But then I realize I'm usually one of the first among my peers in Student Affairs to really explore various gadgets, software and other tools and then I don't have the late adopter blues.

In this case, the tool is Google Reader. I had played with Pluck a year or so ago. When I decided to truly explore the RSS more fully, I was surprised to see that Pluck no longer provided the feed reader service. Deciding against a stand-alone product, I looked at web-based readers and decided to give Google Reader a try. It was well reviewed and seemed the obvious choice.  It's been great so far. Here are a few observations:

1. Adding subscriptions is even easier when you change your Firefox preferences (version 2.0.0.6 in my case) to automatically subscribe feeds you select to Google Reader.

2. Managing subscriptions can be a little tricky until you  work with it a bit.  You organize feeds into "folders" which are also referred to as "tags" and thus the confusion.

3. There is only one level of folders and no sub-folders. But you can put the same feed into more than one folder.

4. The  "star item" feature lets you quickly note which items you want to come back to later. This is great when you don't have time to read in depth and/or think you might want to forward the item to others.

5. The available feed bundles are a good way to get started, though some have broken links.

6. I haven't yet explored the sharing feature. I'd be interested in hearing from others how they use this.

7. Going offline is fabulous. On a recent trip, I clicked on the "offline" arrow, which then downloaded all my un-read feeds onto that local computer. Then, while on the plane ride home, I was able to go through all my feeds. Once I returned home and connected that computer to the internet, I clicked the same arrow button, which took me online to the Google Reader and updated my account to show what I had read.

8. Using the "J" (forward) and "K" (back) keys for viewing feeds is a nice alternative to using the mouse scroll wheel or arrow keys.

I'll be posting soon on how I plan to educate others in my Division about this tool, which I believe will really improve efficiency for many who regularly review mutlitple websites.

I recently attended the EDUCAUSE ELI Fall 2007 Focus Session as a presenter. This category (ELI07NetSavvySession) in this blog is all about that experience. As noted in a separate entry, this category (or tag) is being used so these posts will aggregate with postings from other participants on the EDUCAUSE site.

Most of the current WolfBlog (Roller) templates have a "Category" section in either the left or right navigation. However, this is the code that puts the content into an RSS reader. (I use Firefox and have my preferences set so that any link like this automatically adds it to my Google reader.)

My goal was to show all the categories and let the user click on a category, resulting in a list of all posts in that category. I pulled the code off of one of the other themes, and recreated it in my sidebar template. Here is a sample of the code. I'm leaving off the open and close marks (< and < /a> so it won't actually get converted into HTML in this post.

a href="http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/lesliedare?catname=%2FDistance+Ed/">Distance Ed

Faculty in Student Affairs are quite varied. We have military professors in ROTC who rotate out after 2-3 years. We have a large number of faculty in Physical Education, some of whom have been with the department for many years. Many of our Music faculty have long histories with the department, though many are not in full-time status from what I can tell.

This diversity - of faculty, and of curricula - has alway somewhat stifled my inertia to provide more support in a proactive manner. However, my attendance at this event truly has me motivated to start down that path.

At first, I was thinking we could provide some training and education for all faculty, which would also serve to connect this somewhat unusual (to Student Affairs) classification of employees with each other.

However, it seems clear that the needs would be quite different in the three areas. For example, I could see where mnay of the on-campus PE courses wouldn't be interested in a lot of these tools. They are used in DE courses. However, I need to learn more about their operation.

Here are some things we could focus on, in no particular order:

• Use of Blackboard Vista
• Use of Elluminate
• Use of Wolfware
• Use of Wikis, Blogs, Twitter
• Tech Fluency - Students and Faculty both

And, later we could try to provide similar support for the odd course here and there (Peer Mentor Class, RA Class, and so on) to bring those staff up to speed as well.

Thanks to the Blern blog (which I've been enjoying for a couple months now) for providing some quick commentary on Twitter and a link to an article by Wired. I'm struck by the various phrases used by author Clive Thompson to describe Twitter: constant-contact media; almost like ESP; quick-ping media; it's like proprioception, your body's ability to know where your limbs are. I think he aptly captures the appeal of this technology.

 I recently set up my own Twitter account through my experience with a recent EDUCAUSE ELI event, where Twitter was one method of documenting our experiences while learning more about this technology. I only submitted on inital test "message" (twit? update? post? again, the lingo still eludes me), so I haven't truly used it to it's fully extent. I don't know anyone else who is Twittering that I could follow, nor do I know anyone who would be willing to follow me. (What do you call someone who doesn't really know quite how to Twitter properly? A Nit Twit, maybe?) But I hope to set up an experiment to learn more for myself about this technology and then to adjust and repeat to use as a demo for others.

I first heard of Twitter when Scott Hanselman (a popular blogger on the topics of technology as well as diabetes) decided to Twitter his diabetes for one day. This fascinating activity was designed to help others better understand the impact of diabetes on one's daily life. But it is also a great example of how Twitter might be used in an educational setting.

In my view, micro-blogging is worth exploring as an educational tool.