Technology – Page 12 – Technology in Academic & Student Affairs

Google Reader Observations

I think sometimes I’m quite late to start using some technologies- at least compared to techies I know. But then I realize I’m usually one of the first among my peers in Student Affairs to really explore various gadgets, software and other tools and then I don’t have the late adopter blues.

In this case, the tool is Google Reader. I had played with Pluck a year or so ago. When I decided to truly explore the RSS more fully, I was surprised to see that Pluck no longer provided the feed reader service. Deciding against a stand-alone product, I looked at web-based readers and decided to give Google Reader a try. It was well reviewed and seemed the obvious choice. It’s been great so far. Here are a few observations:

1. Adding subscriptions is even easier when you change your Firefox preferences (version 2.0.0.6 in my case) to automatically subscribe feeds you select to Google Reader.

2. Managing subscriptions can be a little tricky until you work with it a bit. You organize feeds into “folders” which are also referred to as “tags” and thus the confusion.

3. There is only one level of folders and no sub-folders. But you can put the same feed into more than one folder.

4. The “star item” feature lets you quickly note which items you want to come back to later. This is great when you don’t have time to read in depth and/or think you might want to forward the item to others.

5. The available feed bundles are a good way to get started, though some have broken links.

6. I haven’t yet explored the sharing feature. I’d be interested in hearing from others how they use this.

7. Going offline is fabulous. On a recent trip, I clicked on the “offline” arrow, which then downloaded all my un-read feeds onto that local computer. Then, while on the plane ride home, I was able to go through all my feeds. Once I returned home and connected that computer to the internet, I clicked the same arrow button, which took me online to the Google Reader and updated my account to show what I had read.

8. Using the “J” (forward) and “K” (back) keys for viewing feeds is a nice alternative to using the mouse scroll wheel or arrow keys.

I’ll be posting soon on how I plan to educate others in my Division about this tool, which I believe will really improve efficiency for many who regularly review mutlitple websites.

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.