Advising 2.0

Never in my life did I think I would be writing (or caring!) so much about utilizing technology in my professional life. But, as I wrote a few weeks ago, you never know where you’ll end up, and once you’re there you just have to take the opportunity and make the most of the experience. Taking my own advice, I have charged myself with bringing a new aspect of student services to FSU. I call it Advising 2.0.

Image from NACADA TECH

My concept is simple – meet the students where they are. This is a student services mantra at universities all around, but how many actually follow through? Better yet, how many actually know “where the students are”? This is my first hurdle. Luckily I am enrolled in a course for my MLIS (Master’s in Library and Information Science) on Assessing Information Needs, and one of our projects is to identify the information behaviors of a group. So, like a good little social scientist or cultural anthropologist, I will need to gather some data. What percent of FSU students are online? How often? What sites?

Once I have an idea of a baseline, it will become a matter of targeting specific needs in the student population and getting creative with meeting those needs. My first experiment will be to develop the “Advising First” brand in a small variety of Social Media sites. I’d like to see how utilizing these technologies can affect the value students place on their advising. From there, it will only be a matter of continuing to build our presence and interact with students in a new medium. Obviously, all personal advising will have to stay face to face, but I hope that establishing a presence online will give Advising First an informal and inviting face, encouraging students that advising at FSU is more than scheduling classes.

I am excited about this process and will continue to write about it here. Please feel free to let me know what you think. Do you, or would you, interact with professional development organizations (like advising at your university) through social media? What would make this process worthwhile to you? Should university offices stay out of the business of social media?

Please read over my proposal, and visit Advising First on Facebook, Twitter and Delicious. We are just getting started.

First Job, ‘Professional Development’ and Me.

As I kind of alluded to in a previous post, I am feeling strangely stuck between my former life as an academic and my current job as a professional in higher education. Also, this being my first “real” job (I’m not counting my part-time or graduate assistant work), there are many uncharted workplace areas that I am uncovering. Perhaps this will turn into a series of posts, but for now here is my current dilemma: what exactly is “professional development” (PD) and how does it work?

I have a vague idea of what constitutes PD – attending meetings, going to new training seminars, maybe even a conference on productivity in the workplace. But I am a 26 year old academic advisor confronted for the first time with a job that does not necessarily fit with my previous ‘experience’ (writing and teaching on subcultural music), and also work that is primarily dictated by the whim of students’ queries, which we all know are fickle at best. Is there more to PD than meeting, seminars and conferences?

Working for a university provides myriad opportunities for academic, professional and even personal growth, and I suppose the primary issue I am having is finding out where I fit, and what the rules are for my engagement with professional/academic life. Coming from graduate school, where the entirety of my experience was focused on MY interests and strengths, this whole job thing is very strange, being accountable upwards to Directors and Deans as opposed to horizontally to students or major professors. Here is my worry, does PD apply solely to my current job, or can it be as broad and varied as my schedule and interests allow? Don’t get me wrong… there are quite a few great resources for advisors on campus, and I take advantage of them as much as I can. But could it be that my personal professional development is comprised of advising and discussion and networking and blogging and coursework, ect? As I am also a continuing student in Library and Information Studies, can my participation in a “Digital Scholars” discussion group be fair game too? Or my interest in Social Media and engaging students in that medium? Or my burning desire to land an internship to augment my Museum Studies Certificate?

Bottom Line: Does Professional Development have a personal aspect? What are my options? And ultimately, who decides what qualifies, myself or my superiors?

PS. To be clear, I am very satisfied with my current work situation, and this topic was prompted because of my desire to be the best and most complete advisor I can. Just learning how to navigate the waters of the working world!

Assessing Info Needs at FSU

As a grad student in Library and Information Studies here at FSU I am currently enrolled in a course titled “Assessing Information Needs.” I will admit, I chose it solely because it is a required course. But now, two weeks in, I have become intrigued by the concept of an “information need.”

In addition to being a student, I work at FSU as an academic advisor. Part of my job is to effectively communicate to students the requirements of their degree, and what the university expects of them in order to graduate. Based on some early readings for my class, I started to wonder, “What are the information needs of a student at FSU, and how can I effectively communicate with them if I am not privy to those needs?” Walking through Strozier Library this afternoon, I “took inventory” (spied) on the screens the students were using. As expected, 7/10 were on Facebook and at least 2 were using some sort of chat client. Therefore, based on my highly scientific methods, it would seem that students are gathering information from sites like Facebook, and sharing it via instant messaging. (I made no immediate judgments about the type or content of said information). Going further, it would also make sense that in order to accurately fulfill my position and duties, the students would be best served by at least having access to me via their preferred communication channel. Right?

Maybe. This is where it gets sticky. There are more than a few universities  that are currently adopting social media strategies to “meet the students where they are at,” as the catchphrase goes. UT Dallas for example supports a Twitter feed and multiple Facebook Pages. The complications come in dealing with Information Policy, privacy issues and sometimes unwillingness at the administrative level to put in efforts to accomplish such goals. Here at FSU, as far as I know, there are little to no official policies or motions toward addressing the information gap between students and advisors, for example. (or any policies discussing faculty/staff blogging practices… yikes!)

In becoming interested in this topic and through some asking around, I have been invited to join an official FSU Social Media Committee. I hope that this opportunity will allow me to propose that the school quickly introduce a policy that allows, or better encourages staff and faculty to get creative with their communication. Because, lets face it, kids just don’t care about websites anymore. And if we are to interact with them, it is going to have to involve some social and immediate point of access.

If you were/are a student right now, would you appreciate your university being available on some of the communication channels you use regularly?

How do you prefer to get information from your school/job?