Category: Higher Ed

ELI07: TLT Support for Student Affairs Faculty

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.

Study: Student/Faculty Relationships on Facebook

Here is an study on student/faculty relationships on Facebook. It is authored by Hewitt and Forte at Georgie Tech, and outlines a project that is currently at the half-way mark. The first part of the project involved a survey of students regarding their attitudes about faculty participation in Facebook. It included a set of questions designed to rate the their interactions with faculty through Facebook, and also the specific question, “Should faculty be on the Facebook?”

ELI07: Program Materials

Program materials are now available for the ELI Fall 2007 Event.

– All Materials (check back, as presenters are still uploading)
– My Presentation

This is a nice feature that EDUCAUSE provides for all events. Being able to access the materials is great for both the participants as well as those who could not attend. Since I posted my file after I actually presentated, I was able to correct a couple of errors and add some more meat to the bone.