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Tag: student affairs

My Adventures in Social Media

credit: http://www.trektraka.com/

I presented on the topic of social media along with some colleagues at UCSB twice last week, one for the Professional Development Conference for the Division of Student Affairs on Thursday, March 22 and for a whole-day workshop called “Diving Into Social Media at UCSB” on March 23.  My presentations focused on overview of social media use in higher education. The Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Dr. Michael Young opened both presentations in which he talked about the role social media in how we communicate and serve our students. In his words, “we need to evolve and transform so that we can thoughtfully and adequately serve our students.” He acknowledged that in moving forward with social media as part of our university business, we will make mistakes but that he would rather us move forward and make mistakes than stagnate. Personally, the Vice Chancellor’s declaration of social media as a part of our future was an affirmation of what I had observed a couple of years ago, that social media will be an integral part of how we in student affairs conduct our business.

Truth be told, there was a time when I felt like I could not even utter the words “social media” as those words were met with smirks and rolling eyes by the few skeptics who viewed social media as nothing more than a waste of time, a fad not worth investing, and risks not worthy of any benefits. These reactions reminded me of when I started developing websites in 1996 when I was asked “Why do we need websites for?” I realized when I started promoting social media to be formally adopted in our division that it would need the support of the Vice Chancellor.  I used to joke around with a few colleagues that the skeptics who view social media as “stupid” can always talk to the Vice Chancellor about his “stupid” idea.

I joined twitter in August 2010 in part to satisfy my curiosity about this “waste of time” and I have been wasting my time since then. That is if wasting time means creating professional networks, expanding my views of what the future may look like for higher education, including student affairs, and coming to realization that my technology leadership role will have to evolve to keep up with the changing demands of our students.

I’m excited about the future of social media and how we could use it in student affairs.  We’re just starting to figure out how to use social media beyond marketing. I’m looking forward to the point when we will start using social media as part of  social business. I don’t exactly know how we will evolve to get to that point, or how it will look like a year from now.

I asked VC Young once how he sees social media a year from now and his response was “We’ve got to find ways, across the division, to get to our students and constituents in ways that are effective. I don’t always know what that will look like, but this is my view:  if I wait until I fully understand what it looks like, we’ll never get a damn thing done.” I concur.


Failure To Change

credit - piedmontwebdev

I suppose it’s so easy to get comfortable when we reach a certain level of success at personal and/or organizational level.  It is important to celebrate our accomplishments and all the things that got us to where we are, but there’s a danger in stagnating, being conservative.  But the world does not wait for anyone.  Specifically in student affairs, our world is changing quickly. Driven by our changing student demographics,  economic difficulties and technologies, the way our organizations operate must change, at least try to keep up, or we fail to serve our students.

I spend a lot of time following trends in how higher education and our students use technology, including social media and mobile computing.   This comes from the realization that if my organization (a student affairs IT shop) fails to realize the demands and wishes of our constituents, I would not be doing my job as a leader in my organization. Does that mean that we can and will always meet our constituents’ demands and wishes? Of course not. There are always more work to be done relative to our resources. It’s hard enough to provide day-to-day support and “keeping the lights on”,  tasks that while our users may not always see are critical. As difficult as it is to change our ways, to go beyond what we can support, the reality is that if we fail to look at what the customers demand of us, our organization is in danger of being replaced with other options. We no longer live in the world when our customers must go through IT for every single technology requests. Cheap or even free cloud based services are now viable solutions. Our customers use their mobile devices  to access the web and social networks.  As an IT organization, do we take the role of the department that is seen as obstructionist to a point where customers no longer want to work with us or one that is a willing partner to progress?

I feel considerably lucky that we have a person at the top of our organization, Vice Chancellor Dr. Young, who is a champion of change and a true student advocate. He is a visionary who will freely admit that while he may not always know how to get to where we need to get to, he does know when it’s time to change, to take a new direction.  An organization’s ability to be open and accepting to change is rooted in its culture and leaders like Dr. Young plays a huge influence on how the culture is shaped. As those working in our organizations, I also think we have personal responsibilities to be open to change. Failure to change has its consequences.

 


Listing Technology on Your Resume – An IT Manager’s Perspective

 

credit - monster.com

I initially hesitated to  comment on Ed Cabellon’s blog post “Listing Technology on Your Student Affairs Resume” because I wasn’t quite sure how resumes for IT positions differ from student affairs positions.    I do think there are general considerations applicable to both and so this post is to offer an additional perspective. Purely from my perspective as a hiring manager in a student affairs IT department and limiting the conversation to the technology portion of a resume, here are what I look for:

* Context of how an applicant used the technology. This means numbers and scope. Designing an application used by 2 people is different from designing a system used by 1000 people.  A list of technologies are good, putting some context behind the experience is even better. It helps to see specific versions of software and/or programming language(s) used.

* Experience with technologies relevant to the position. Listing technologies used 20 years ago is irrelevant. For example, if we are looking for a SQL Server database developer and I see FoxPro as the only database experience listed, that’s probably not a good fit. In addition, I think it’s probably acceptable to list other technologies like web development software, social media, desktop publishing as secondary information and they do not take focus away from required technologies to the position.

When interviewing an applicant, here is what I expect:

* I expect an applicant to be able to describe what the task/problem the technology solved, how technology was used. I also would expect them to describe their role(s) and their use of the technologies including from the context of business perspective.

* Instead of asking questions like “describe how you would use this tech?” I ask “how have you used this tech?” What I’ve found is that even applicants who list certifications like MCP, MCSD, etc, when asked practical questions, sometimes cannot answer questions that I would assume are fundamental knowledge. In other words, I obviously want to know that an applicant has some foundational understanding of how/when/why to apply technology but I also want to know that they’ve had some experience working with them.

* Do not misrepresent your level of experience. After having reviewed hundreds of resumes and interviewing applicants, I have found it easier to determine whether an applicant’s resume matches his/her actual experience during their interview.

The required level of experience and skill set vary based on the classification of the position we are trying to fill. My general advice is to represent your experience to match the job description and requirements for the position. In my career, I have been a developer, project manager, department manager and now a director. When the position I am applying for is a software developer, I would highlight my software development experience. As a matter of fact, if an applicant is applying for a software developer position and all I see is management experience, I would question whether the applicant is actually a good fit or if they’re even competent for the position.

When determining an applicant’s level of competence, motivation and fit with an organization, there are other evaluation processes that could/should be used including reference checks, questions about soft skills and coding exercises.

What’s your perspective on my thoughts above? Any other considerations to add?


New School Year, New Opportunities – Exciting Times Ahead!

School year just started and I am excited, really excited and optimistic about the prospect of what my team and my organization can accomplish this year. We’re going through perhaps the biggest project our department has ever undertaken, the conversion of our mainframe-based student information system to .net environment.  This project is in addition to multiple enterprise projects throughout the entire Student Affairs division. With the decreasing budget and changing demands and expectations of our customers, technology have become more central to the operations of the departments. Personally for me, I am excited with the challenge and opportunities of  merging consumer technologies (social media, cloud computing, mobile) with enterprise IT. I think the last time I saw this much shift at work is back in the mid-1990’s with the advent of the web.  There were paranoia about security, employees wasting time on the web, or if web was of even any value to  our organization. But just as I am seeing the same fears and concerns, I also see the same curiosity,  grassroots adoptions and even some level of  formal institutional adoptions of these  consumer technologies. The reality is that the demographics of those we serve in student affairs have changed and along with these changes are the expectations of more agile, more open systems.The students we serve are far different from those in the 1990’s. Our students grew up with technologies that we did not even envision back then. The rise of social media as we know it now, arguably, could be traced back to when friendster came to existence in 2002.  The creation of facebook in 2004 and twitter in 2006 further changed the social media landscape. With the increased and more robust wireless infrastructure and cheaper mobile devices, the way our society communicate is far different.

I wrote a blog post a few months ago that for social media to thrive in our institution, it has to be formally adopted.  Since then, our organization has created a formal position to coordinate divisional efforts to advance the adoption of consumer technologies.  Just as I had suggested in the same blog post, our organization has created a productivity/security group composed of individuals representing different perspectives to properly assess the integration of these technologies for business use and to address the challenges of accommodating the needs of individual users for flexibility with the needs of the enterprise.

In addition to social media, my team has begun to explore and develop mobile web sites. Using the UCLA Mobile Framework, we are exploring how we can use it within our existing content management system. Personally, I have learned a lot the last few months on the principles of mobile web development.  I truly believe mobile devices has begun and will continue to significantly alter how universities do business.  By taking advantage of the features of mobile devices such as geolocation, multiple inputs (QR Codes, NFR, location, gestures) and the fact that they are widely available even in the poorest sections of the world, in my opinion, more and more business transactions will be conducted via mobile devices.

Just as it was in the mid 1990’s for me when I woke up with a book about web development in my hand and go to sleep with it, going to sleep at 4 am, spending every night learning about how to develop web applications, I find myself in the same situation now. I wake up every morning to find some new knowledge via social media, new ideas I want to research, new applications I want to build. I go to sleep with ideas in my mind on what technologies mean to me, to my work.  It truly is an exciting time and I’m just enjoying the ride!

 


Student Affairs Communications

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