Professional Development

Sunday, February 17, 2008

Session: Leveraging Facebook Applications for More Effective Orientations

Red Rover is a Facebook application (free) by SwiftKick, the presenter was Kevin Prentiss. It is a connection tool, not a communication tool.

Began by telling us that Mark Zuckerberg wrote Facebook in 3 weeks at Harvard, he is 23 and his company is worth 15billion. 3.5 years old, worth more than GM. Prentiss described one Wisconsin University Facebook group with 28,000 members; that equated to 110% of enrollment.

On average, 80% of 70 schools surveyed had a freshman group that was formed by a random student about 10 months out. Freshmen are self-orienting on Facebook. (And that one random freshman can email everyone!)

One challenge we face at Universities to get them to check the official email. Facebook is checked 5-6 times a day. The goal for students is to find their people and get comfortable. Some university staff are “seeding” these groups with positive topics, a subtle approach. They join the group and then slowly introduce positive things to meet around.

Some assumptions and beliefs around Facebook:

• Assumption 1- If we don’t introduce them around something positive - they will meet over beer.
• Assumption 2- From Learning Reconsidered, social, academic and institutional context all overlap.
• Assumption 3- Facebook relationships are a good thing, face to face is better and preferred. Social capital, bonding capital, bridging capital (Christmas card friends) Students using Facebook have more bridging capital (small town America)
• Assumption 4- Students looking to Facebook for bridging capital and social integration
• Assumption 5- Institutions must facilitate social context with being the parent at the party.
• Assumption 6- Faculty participation in Facebook is a best practice (for those who can do it well) chronicle of higher ed dec 4 2007
• Assumption 7- Schools are not going to beat Facebook, so don’t recreate or buy a new social network and try and impose it (students use Facebook 15 times more than official portals)
• Assumption 8- Doing a few things well is better than doing many things “half-vastly.” The goal should be simple, NOT comprehensive.
• Assumption 9- To stay relevant schools must experiment faster. It is getting cheaper to be wrong.

Demo of Red Rover:

• Identity profile- Red Rover helps theem write a profile, then we can see the diversity. Also lets them see all the tags of all the groups on campus.
• Only thing Red Rover hides is phone number, all information is public and searched by Google.
• Red Rover is publishing only positive academic stuff in red rover
• Tags appear, choose tags that apply to you.
• They find out by school emailing it, and by dropping it in the facebook freshmen group.

Session: Engaging an Entire Campus Community in the First Year Summer Reading Program

The presenter was Dr. Vickie Folse of Illinois Wesleyan University. She began by describing the school and the student population. There are 550 incoming first year, transfer and international students. Students all take a Gateway Colloquium, similar to the Wake Forest First Year Seminar. (Similar tuition to WFU) They use the gateway class as the group, rather than advising group as we do at WFU.

Previous program prior to 2002 had not been successful. From 2002-2005, the model was more of a festival for orientation. In 2005, the school wanted to have students participate in a shared intellectual conversation with the campus community.

School felt it had to be more than a one time event/discussion, needed to be integrated into the first year. They wanted students to talk about the book in small groups, large groups and to write about it. They tried a very classical approach, reading Shelley’s Frankenstein, and it was a failure. Now they try to focus on issues like civic engagement and global citizenship (most of their students do a semester abroad)

When selecting the text, they asked the faculty who were freshman advisers for their feedback and asked Gateway Colloquium instructors. After the fact, they surveyed and found the summer reading program was either despised or loved. Much depended on the group they were in.

In 2007 they teamed with Development and Alumni Relations to invite select graduates to participate, about 15 participated. They even approached the Board of Trustee with the President’s support. They also included orientation leaders, student leaders and others. This gave them many facilitators and co-facilitators. (Student criteria included: under 300 pages, something that grabbed students immediately)

Recent reading choices have been: “Nickled and Dimed” by Ehrenreich, “Mountains beyond Mountains” by Kidder, and “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time” by Haddon. Kidder was also a convocation speaker. (They considered Freakonomics but it would cost $75,000 per author to have them come and present) They do make the students purchase the text. They also try to engage the parents. Parents come to summer workshops and at those they encourage the text. Discussion questions and facilitation skills are shared with the discussion leaders.

Facebook has become an active source of information. They also set up man co-curricular activities around the text.

Session: Taking it to the Streets: Extending a First-Year Reading Program to the Community

This program was not my first choice, but by mid-morning the number of attendees had grown and my first choice was beyond standing room only, I thought the topic of extending reading programs to the community would also be interesting, especially given the location of the program and its’ chosen speaker, so I headed to that session!

The presenters were Katherine Powell and Clarice Ford of Berry College in Rome, Georgia. (Which happens to be where I went to high school) and the speaker they brought to campus was Maya Angelou. They had a desire to find an author who was also a public figure and would engage the community. They partnered with Shorter College and Darlington School, my alma mater. Events around the evening with Maya Angelou included an all day reading of “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” a writing contest through the local newspaper, film viewing and discussion and numerous other events.

Almost 2,000 people in the community attended these various events. After getting the primary event venue donated, they were able to get other donors for other venues and items. Their assessments of community members after the events showed they were successful in some areas and not others. They only had about 35 responses to their survey which was done in survey monkey and required users to click on it.

Session: Not Just Smiling and Nodding: How to Use and Engage Student Members of Committees

The speaker, Kelly Thorngate, was a second semester senior at Edgewood College. She discussed her observations as a member of the common reading program committee. First she discussed communication and creating an open environment to get students to participate. She also mentioned point of view and not assuming students have the same institutional knowledge as faculty and staff. Another potential problem she mentioned was coordinating with faculty and staff and handling differing schedules. She also mentioned using student to get feedback from other students, but not to be the sole student voice.

Interestingly, a secondary discussion started about common reading programs. In this group they were less common than in some of the morning sessions. One school even had a common reading program for faculty and staff. Also discussed were how to manage student expectations on committees and aligning programs to the University mission statement.

Session: Transforming Library Research in a Web 2.0 World

The speaker was Colleen Boff, First Year Experience Librarian, at Bowling Green State University. By a show of hands, half the people at this session were librarians/library staff. Bowling Green is a 4 year residential campus with 17,000 undergraduates and 5380 first year students. 88% of undergraduates are from within Ohio. Her job is constantly changing. There are three major library consortia there. OhioLINK in higher education pools resources of 80 libraries and 300 databases. Everyone struggles to incorporate all this into their sites.

Next she discussed Curriculum Mapping, “the process for collecting and recording curriculum -related data that identifies core skills and content taught, processes employed and assessments used for each subject are and grade level. The completed curriculum map then becomes a tool that helps teachers keep track of what has been taught and plan what will be taught.” (as defined by Linda Starr, Education World)

When polled on 4 of the 40 people in the room were using Blogs and Wikis. Boff started using Blogs and Wikis when the University took control of department website away from individuals. She created a blog to discuss the work of the common reading experience selection committee (the book, Mountains beyond Mountains, by Kidder, got another mention here) Also using blogs to create pathfinders. She also used Ebsco Composer to create a cool page of resources. Explained reAssess, a software developed by students, faculty and staff at Bowling Green. It can be used to develop online quizzes, tutorials, evaluations, assessments and surveys. Boff also discussed WebQuest, a tool more often used in the K-12 environment, but useful here as well.

Opening Session and Keynote Address - Saturday, February 16^th 2008

I am very excited to have this opportunity to attend the First-Year Experience (FYE) conference, as a member of the Freshman Orientation Committee at WFU, and as the manager of the Technology@WFU, I know I will hear some new ideas for engaging first year students in the college experience. The conference was opened by M. Stuart Hunter, the Assistant Vice Provost and Executive Director of the Natural Resource Center for the First-Year Experience. She began by expressing all our concern for those involved in the recent University tragedies at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University as well as at other schools since the last conference in early 2007 and ended by announcing that almost 2000 people will be attending this 27^th FYE conference and introducing leaders from the institutions co-hosting the event.

Robert Corrigan, president of San Francisco State University and Robert Cooper, Associate Vice President of Undergraduate Studies at San Jose State University both welcomed us the conference. Robert Corrigan mentioned some of the things they were doing at San Francisco State to deal with so many freshmen on campus. Freshmen on campus is unusual and unexpected for SF state. The California university master plan in the 1970’s expected universities to be fed by the community college syste, but in recent years there has been a shift and this year, more students started at SF state than transferred. Robert Cooper stated that his school, like all schools, was trying to address the diverse needs of students in this day and age. Cooper also commented how no one model of FYE was right for every student and multiple formats were needed ranging from a first year seminar focus to group models that help students develop a support structure.

M. Stuart Hunter took the stage again and mentioned this is a very sharing and friendly conference. She made us all stop, turn around and meet someone we didn’t know. I met Quentin James from Furman U. who knows Connie Carson who just left WFU to work at Furman. Next, she introduced John N. Gardner, the Executive Director of the National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition. He announced if we were there looking for epiphanies about engaging students, we were in the right place!

The keynote speaker, Parker J. Palmer, founder and senior partner of the Center for Courage and Renewal spoke on “How Meeting the Needs of First-Year Students Can Make Higher Education More Life-Giving For All.” After a glowing introduction by John Gardner, Palmer started by telling us his father’s aphorisms he would tell his children to start the day. One was that “the only difference between a rut and a grave is width;” another was “Today’s peacock is tomorrow’s feather duster.” He began discussing how the first-year experience is a time filled with the potential for success and calamity. We as staff, faculty and administrators need to be aware of the vulnerability of these students. He described them as canaries in the coal mine, saying that if we help the canaries we help everyone. He described our mission as one of “knowing, teaching and learning.” He then offered the word “hospitality” as the focus of his talk, not the standard idea of hospitality, but something deeper that would make students’ entry into college better a better experience. The first type of hospitality involves engaging students who feel intimidated and tuck away part of themselves. He went on to describe how they live in a parallel reality to the reality of faculty, staff and administrators, their social world where students feel more at ease. Palmer gave an example of going to where the students are. He described a VP for student life who put a “Lucy booth” (the doctor is in, from the Peanuts cartoon) in the student union. It took a while, but students started stopping by and discussing problems and offering suggestions to transform the University. He used the booth for over 15 years and found it a great way to hear the needs of students. Palmer believes people need permission to do what they want to do especially when it is awkward in nature. It is up to us to create environments that engage them and encourage them, it is not enough to just say it is hard and ignore it.

As an example of how to be hospitable and engage students Palmer told the story of Uri Treisman a math professor at Berkeley in the late 1970’s. He observed phenomenon that Asian Americans were learning math more rapidly that other students. He became an anthropologist among his students to find the root cause, and learned that if you got a snapshot of learning as they all left the classroom, everyone was about equal, but after they left, the Asian Americans students were engage in collaborative learning outside of class. He got funding to create hospitable spaces for all students to engage in collaborative learning outside of class. Here is a link to the article.

Next he described hospitality in terms of encouraging it in our students. He called it hospitality to otherness, saying that deepening people’s capacity to take seriously ideas that shake our reality is the key. We think of rigor coming from confrontation and competition, not hospitality. What constitutes rigor in a classroom setting? Concrete behaviors that question the content. Student don’t ask questions unless invited to. Honest questions make you vulnerable, but most questions are playing academic “hard ball,” showing the professor what you know. Learning to accept and hear diverse viewpoints, needs to be encouraged. Tony Bright and Barbara Schneider Carnegie Foundation did study of 1990s school reform in Chicago public schools. They found an unexpected variable called “relational trust.” If the school had high relational trust at beginning of 1990s it had a 5 in 7 chance of performing well. That differential around relational trust was there no matter how much money the school had. The hardest place to get relational trust was faculty to faculty. Palmer said we need a more hospitable way to accept a range of teaching techniques, methods, approaches and should avoid the “method dujour” approach that can create an inhospitable environment.

It was an interesting and thought provoking keynote address. I can’t wait to see what’s in store today!

I am currently attending the 2007 ALA Gaming Symposium in Chicago! (Actually, it is at the Marriott near O’Hare) Since arriving Sunday morning, I’ve listened to a bevy of speakers, participated in a Wii tournament, and given a presentation with Lynn and Lori Critz from Georgia Tech, and there is still an entire day left in this two day conference!

The conference, sponsored by ALA And ACRL, began on Sunday afternoon with three excellent speakers. The keynote speaker was Henry Jenkins, the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. He talked about his white paper for the MacArthur Foundation. It focuses on Media Literacy. He describes how one half of teens have created content on the web.

The next speaker was Dr. Scott Nicholson from Syracuse University. He released newly published survey data of phone interviews with 400 libraries (I’m happy to say ZSR participated in his recent unpublishd SurveyMonkey survey of 313 libraries) You can find a quick review of the data at Stephen’s Lighthouse or read the full report at The Library Game Lab at Syracuse

The final speaker on Sunday was Eli Neiburger, who is my new hero in gaming (along with Jenny Levine of course!) He runs the gaming program at the Ann Arbor District Library . He announced they are opening up their tournament software GT System to all libraries who want to run regional and national tournaments! Woohoo!! Thanks Eli!

Sunday night Amy Harris from UNCG (who is here presenting with Scott Rice) team up with me to play in the Wii Tennis Tournament! We won our first round but lost in the quarter finals! Monday morning Lynn, Lori and I gave our presentation on “Gaming in Academic Libraries: The Why and How.” The program went well, including our clicker questions! (Gotta love the clickers!)

While I could write more, I think the best approach is to point you to the blog of Paul Waelchli, the Assistant Director for Library Instruction and Public Services at the Charles C. Myers Library at the University of Dubuque. His blog, first recommended to me by Rosalind Tedford before I had even met Paul, is called ResearchQuest and he is far more eloquent than I could be. Paul does a great job describing Greg Trefry-Big Fun, Big Learning: Transforming the World Through Play
Discussion of “Big Play” program here.

Check out the photos on flickr by searching for the tag “glls2007″

On Wednesday, June 6^th, I gave a presentation to the staff of the Joyner Library at ECU on GetGame@ZSR. Mark Sanders, one of their librarians, heard me speak on the topic at ALA in New Orleans last year, and he had Emily Blankenship, from the Joyner Reference department ask if I would be willing to drive over to Greenville and give them a presentation on gaming in academic libraries as a precursor to their Student Services committee offering a game night this Fall.

A group from the Joyner Library, including Mark and Emily, took me to lunch prior to the program and we had a great discussion about gaming in academic libraries and what worked and didn’t work with these programs. After a spirited lunch discussion at a local Chinese restaurant (where the chef had a photo of himself and Henry Kissinger on the wall by the cash register) it was time to return to campus and give my presentation.

I learned in advance that the Joyner Library had not been using Audience Response Systems, so I brought our “Clickers” and asked them a few questions to warm up the audience and learn more about them prior to the presentation. The “Clickers” were a huge hit, and a great way for me to find out how much my audience knew about gaming before I started talking! I highly recommend using the “Clickers” and plan to take them to the ALA Gaming Symposium in July.

After 45 minutes of describing the various “GetGame@ZSR” events we have hosted and the details of how we organize them, I took questions from the group and found them to be very excited about the prospect of gaming in academic libraries. Several of the staff had visited NC State’s new library facilities and seen their Nintendo Wii available for public play. I was interested to learn that Joyner is facing some of the same issues as ZSR. They need more power outlets for users; they want to build an Information Commons, and there is never enough study space. Some library issues seem to be universal.

I have included a photo I took of my audience and one of the fascinating water feature in front of the Joyner Library.