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Student Affairs
Daniel Salter Penn State University Editor Stuart
Brown |
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Fall 2000 • Vol. 1, No. 3 |
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IT in student affairs may be seen as composed of four elements: Policy, Practice, Staffing and Technology, arrayed in a diamond pattern. These four elements are interdependent; policy influences practices, which drives staffing, which affects technology. Independently these elements make convenient categories to make sense of IT on campus. Student affairs professionals need to attend to each of these areas in their daily practice for meeting student development and learning goals. |
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Policy... is the collection of formal statements about all aspects of information technology. Codes of student conduct, guidelines for student E-mail use, restrictions on the uses of college owned computers and networks, guidelines and standards for web pages are all part of the policy element in IT. Legal issues and constraints add an important dimension to this element. Student affairs mission and goal statements that connect student development and student learning to IT use are also important aspects of this element. On most campuses policies have not kept pace with practices, and technology plans seldom articulate student development and learning goals. Policies are enacted often as remediation; solving current problem, and are not often seen as preventative, nor as developmental. Campus responses to Napster.com are examples of reactive policy formation, responding to network crowding. |
Practice... is the work accomplished. Practices involve both our interactions with students and with ourselves. Web page designs, the ways in which student organizations use technology to provide forums, or gain membership, services for distance education students, web based undergraduate and graduate applications and alumni e-mail accounts are some of the practices found on campuses. Office management practices, word processing, record keeping, communication, conferencing and calendaring are integral parts of IT practice and affect how we work together. At this point in the development of IT in student affairs there is often a marked disparity in practices between offices. For example practices in the career center may be far more advanced than practices in student activities. The causes for this disparity may stem from policy, or from technology or from staffing elements. Typically the offices with more advanced practices have identified people who are capable of merging practice and technology. The idea of best practices cannot be used yet, since there are not yet any benchmarks. IT practices in student affairs should be grounded in values, theory and research, as our residence hall practices are grounded in values, theory and research. |
Staffing...for IT is a new endeavor in student affairs. While some campuses have had technical support people managing student affairs hardware and software, these individuals generally perform support roles for the central student affairs offices. Some staff engage in developing new IT uses, and some staff use IT to increase efficiency of current practices. Staff training is an important component of this element, as is the management of IT staff within student affairs and the coordination of student affairs IT staff and campus wide IT staff. IT staff in student affairs will need to do more than fix machines and install software. They will need to support and help develop our practices, they will need to help us with policy development, with connecting practices to missions and goals, and with staff development as the IT demands on current staff change. New staff will have to be identified as IT developers and designers who have as their main assignment addressing student services needs using IT. New staffing partnerships are being formed as distance education staffs become engaged in the student service business. Managing IT within student affairs, and managing the new partnerships will require new types of managers who can join the staffing, technical, policy and practice elements. |
Technology...is yesterday's, today's and tomorrow's hardware and software. Machines on desks, printers, scanners, cameras, routers, fiber optics, network software, word processing, communication, conferencing, and calendaring software, servers, Internet connections, peripherals, laptop and hand held equipment and the myriad developments that were launched last week make up the dynamic collection of technology. Appropriate uses of technology, planned growth, investigations of emerging technologies and integrating student affairs systems into the campus technology infrastructure are becoming important aspects. New applications software, and new types of software are arriving on the market at a fast pace. Hand help technology may or may not become important on campus, and may or may not be appropriate tools to help us meet our student development and learning goals. However, proactive approaches to identifying and using new and appropriate technology needs to be utilized, and staff members need to be working to discover what might help students. |
The interrelationships between these four elements are as important as the elements themselves. Each campus should have a policy for most practices, and practices should reflect policies. Staff should be well trained to carry out practices and policies, and have access to appropriate technologies. Staff members need to be identified who work on more than technology, who are practice advocates, who develop policy from a perspective of practice.
Many campuses and campus units provide technology and support staff without a clear focus on policies and practices. What good is technology and staff without appropriate and effective IT practice? How is effective practice possible without staff training? Attending to these four elements will help the practitioner balance the demands being placed on IT utilization.
There are obvious additional issues for IT in student affairs. Technology plans are a regular feature of many campus divisions, and good plans will address all four elements, connecting them to student development and learning. Only rarely do student affairs divisions have technology plans that address more than the staffing and technology elements. Using this four-element model will enhance technology plans in student affairs, and across campus, by presenting an integrated approach to developing IT on the campus.
Resources for IT are an ongoing and underlying concern. Obviously without resources, there will be no staff, there will be no technology, no policies and consequently no practice. While resource issues should not be ignored, the reality is that campuses will continue to find the resources to increase IT activities. Planning for resources should take into account many factors, but should begin with student affairs missions and goals before proceeding to addressing these four elements.
- A good model should be simple and useful. This model is certainly simple, and has been useful on my campus in problem identification, planning and development of nearly all aspects of IT on the campus.
