Technology Enables Sharing with those Nearby

A few months back as I was wrestling with ways to better inform students about services available to them when I had an idea. No plan for how to make it happen mind you, but the idea seemed pretty cool.

Different thoughts were converging as I recall: The rise of mobile (smart) phones, students walking by services as they moved around campus and images of Minority Report. The vision that resulted from these random thoughts converging was that of messages popping up on a student's mobile phone as they walked by an office designed to support students. It was somewhat like the futuristic stores in Minority Report welcoming customer's by name after scanning their eyes... but less intrusive ;-)

Eric Stoller highlights in his latest blog post that this vision could become reality through emerging technology called Near Field Communication (NFC). Stoller highlights that "Information is exchanged/retrieved when an NFC-enabled device is placed next to another NFC-enabled object." Thankfully, their is no mention of eye scans! Check out his blog to find out more about NFC including ways the technology will directly support student affairs.

Use Twitter? Connect with me via @Wepps

The Time has come for Leadership Programs to Thrive

"[Students in school today] will need to be equipped to make their own opportunities. They need the skills, knowledge, and qualities that leadership programs cultivate: self-reliance, social and cultural capital, appreciation for lifelong learning, creativity, conflict-resolution and team-building skills, ethics, understanding of economics, and more."

This quote is from Richard Greenwald's recent article in The Chronicle where he argues that students need leadership skills now more than ever. He points out that leadership programs started slow on college campuses and leadership as a concept is challenging because it is amorphous. Despite the history and challenges he points out that today's students are seeking out leadership programs, "the career ladder of old is broken," and post-secondary education is in the best position to provide leadership education. 

Given the state of our economy and how the public views our political and corporate leaders today a great opportunity exists for post-secondary education, especially those of us in student affairs. Greenwald does a nice job of laying out the opportunity that exists so I would encourage you to check out his article. 

Twitter: A New Way to Serve Students

What methods do you use to answer students' questions? Chance are that Twitter never crossed your mind. You most likely would have thought about answering questions over the phone, through email or face-to-face in your office. 

Twitter provides a new forum in which to find and answer questions from students. A growing number of organizations are leveraging Twitter to provide customer service. For instance Jet Blue Airways, Dell Computer (Canada) and recently the City of Toronto's 311 service have all incorporated Twitter into their service strategy.  You can follow @JetBlue, @DellHomeSalesCA and @311Toronto to see how Twitter is being used by these three organizations.  You can find more case studies on the Twitter 101 website. 

As a way to help students at Ryerson the staff at the Student Services Front Desk have added @AskMeRU to their tool box of customer service options.  To enhance the service they provide the staff are searching for comments, questions and problems on Twitter by following tweets that contain "Ryerson" or "#Ryerson" in the text. In many cases this allows the staff to proactively address concerns that are posted on Twitter.  The staff use HootSuite to monitor comments made on Twitter.

To find out more all you have to do is follow the groups above on Twitter. If your school or department uses Twitter to serve students please share your @username so others can learn from you. 

Strategic Planning Using the TEDx Approach

TED, TEDx and TEDTalks have been gaining attention rapidly in recent years. Understandably so given the inspiring nature of the presentations. Several schools have been adding life to their campus thru TEDx and I recently adopted the TED approach in strategic planning to leverage its ability to share ideas and stories.

Given that my role as a Director is smack in the middle of the management structure I see my purpose as providing clarity for my staff. Using well know models when managing is one way to provide clarity, especially when examples are readily available, popular and relevant to a wide variety of people. TED satisfies all of this criteria and the model seemed to be ideally suited as a way for my staff to share ideas, generate dialogue and help us with our strategic planning efforts.

My responsibilities involve overseeing four areas - Student Housing Services, Tri-Mentoring Program, International Services for Students and the Office of Student Community Life. In my first two years overseeing these four areas, which includes over 20 full-time staff and 150 student staff, we did not gather as a large group often. My strategic planning focus in year one and two was on each unit, but the time had come for a wider discussion. In general, staff understand a lot about their own unit, but little about other units so the logical place to start was exchanging ideas and raising awareness of the issues affecting each unit. I wanted staff to be engaged in this process which made the TED approach ideal. 


My staff were given more than three months to plan and told that we would be using the TED model. To reinforce some of the TED principles I stressed that each unit had 15 minutes to present, the material had to be relevant to their work and the sessions must encourage dialogue and the exchange of ideas. 

Our TEDx Student Community Life or TEDx SCL, which was the name we adopted, was held this past Friday. The sessions were impressive. Historical video was used in one case and hours of video captured of current students in another case  Staff spent hours in deep discussion about their purpose in third area while another group orchestrated a well choreographed presentation that allowed everyone to contribute to the unit's story. TED is known for its "extended breaks" to allow for dialogue and discussion to take place and TEDx SCL was no exception. In fact, one of the highlights of the day for me was seeing staff interact and exchange ideas in the first break. Everyone was engaged and people that did not know each other prior to our event were exchanging ideas. There was a buzz in the room.

Pre and post event surveys are being used to assess the event and help us learn how well the TED approach worked. My instinct is that the event was well received given the effort that staff put into preparing and the interest everyone exhibited throughout the day. If you are looking for a model to help your staff exchange ideas for strategic planning then I would certainly encourage you to consider using the TED approach.

Web 2.0 is Not Scary

Snakes, spiders or one of those centipedes with a what seems like a million legs can bring genuine fear to many people. Facebook, YouTube or Twitter never generate fear, or so I thought.

A few weeks back I was telling a colleague about a new feature my staff set up on a Facebook page.  The conversation when something like this,

"Are you on Facebook?" I asked
"Nope" she responded as her eyes widened and a nervous smile crossed her face "My kids are on it all the time" she added hastily
"Setting up an account is easy" I said trying to alleviate her emerging fear, "All you have to do is go to Facebook.com and click the Sign-up button"
"Well, I'm not sure I would use it and I don't really have time at work to use Facebook" she said

I was surprised to encounter this resistance. She was not anti-Facebook. Her resistance was different. It was only after I left that I began to realize that she was afraid. It is natural to be afraid of something new.

Those feelings of uneasiness, or fear, are long forgotten once you gain experience using something or knowledge about the subject. To that end, the Digital Community program at my school  has set up a blog to help people in the Ryerson community become more comfortable using Web 2.0 tools.

The blog, called RU 2.0?, is meant to provide basic information and instruction on Web 2.0 tools for students, student groups and service program staff in the Ryerson community. The content posted on RU 2.0? is easily found elsewhere online as there are several excellent resources that explain how to use tools like RSS feeds, a Wiki or a blog. RU 2.0? centralizes the information so it is easily found.

By providing this resource we hope to prove that not only is Web 2.0 not scary, but that it can open up new and exciting possibilities.