Category: Student Affairs

List of SA Tech Units and Leaders

Kevin Guidry has a great thought piece on technology in student affairs and how that fits into our current (and hopefully new) professional organizations. Joe Sabado from UC-Santa Barbara commented on that post and lamented about not knowing any other IT directors in Student Affairs.

I find myself asking myself this question all the time: Who are my peers?

I created this Google Doc to document to help capture that information. I know who a few of us are, but ask others to please add themselves to the document so we can really see who is part of this niche in the profession of student affairs. (Tip o’ the hat to the Student Affairs Collaborative – I basically just copied their Directory idea.)

As Kevin says:

There seems to be three groups of people in student affairs interested in technology: administrators who manage technology projects and groups in student affairs departments and divisions, student affairs scholars who study technology and its uses and impact, and student affairs professionals with interests in technology but a different primary focus.

Certainly the third group is very broad, and we know many of them follow the various blogs and hashtags on the topic, and many are members of the NASPA Tech Knowledge Community. The second group is likely very small…but would it be worth seeing who identifies themselves as such?

So, this is an effort to capture that first group: the geeky admins…some of us may be SA professionals first and geeks second. Others might be geeks first and SA staff second. In either case, identifying the members of this community might be helpful to us all.

Mobile Health Research

The folks at Pew have a new report out on Mobile Health. Here’s the Overview:

The online health-information environment is going mobile. 17% of cell phone users have used their phone to look up health or medical information and 9% have software applications or “apps” on their phones that help them track or manage their health.

What are the implications of this trend for student health centers? Our own Student Health Center at NC State University is under-going a web-redesign, but there just isn’t funding for a separate mobile version at this point…that means the new design (and content) will have to be as mobile friendly as possible. Likewise, maybe we can take advantage of a new mobile initiative on campus.