Advising Is the Sum Of All Parts With Technology

I took a bit of a Tech-cation after returning from #nacada10 last week. There was so much social media involvement at the 2010 NACADA annual conference, that I thought it was very important to be social in real life (IRL) and get back to the daily grind at the office.

After over a week away from blogging, I thought I would share some of my ‘deep thoughts’ about NACADA10 and the brilliant advising community. It was a pretty fun experience to be part of the NACADA10 Social Media Dream Team.

My NACADA #SM accomplice, @bradpopiolek, helped to fuel the 1st Official NACADA 2010 blog and backchannel at the annual conference last week. This was a great opportunity for pictures, videos and tweets both as an archive to the conference, and it was an easy way to share the NACADA10 happenings with other Academic Advising folks near and far.

The opening keynote speaker, @reyjunco, brought some interesting ideas to the NACADA attendees during his talk about  student engagement, social media & change. This sparked many conversations and questions on how to best utilize these resources for our students in our advising profession, etc.

The 1st ever NACADA TweetUp was a success. I had a blast meeting all my academic advising friends from Twitter IRL. It was a great to connect & chat with everyone including: @vcuesposito, @bradpopiolek, @JPKirchmeier, @howardsj, @peacox, @Ahjim,@USMAccAdv, @adamduberstein, @amy0631, @reyjunco & @KellyJBailey.

For those fantastic #AcAdv tweeps on my NACADA-AdvAdv List who couldn’t attend the NACADA TweetUp that night at Rix, I was fortunate to meet you throughout the conference. Excellent discussions and introductions made with fellow tweeters like @UOAdvDir, @sally_garner, @jadana17, @jbarkemeyer & more! For those of you on “the list” I look forward to a tweetup sometime in the future. For now we will continue to learn & share on Twitter.

My NACADA10 takeaways:

• learning is continuous & not a specific location – many #AcAdv joined the conversation from afar
• advising peers sharing experiences/resources is always a good thing
• my personal learning network (PLN) at NACADA continues to challenge & support me
• academic advisors are a great group of #highered professionals
• #nacada has a WEALTH of information & resources (we need to share these MORE effectively)
• conversations at conferences are THE reason why you go to a conference
• sometimes social media can make you less social IRL – balance is good

Being part of a great association and meeting at an annual conference is grand, but I truly value the resources and contributions my network of #nacada peers share online and always. Whether it’s an article posted on a blog, to a comment on twitter, my PLN best contributes to my educational and professional life. Thank you. Keep up the fine work.

I will leave you with a great quote from Dr. Rick Schwier (@schwier), an #edtech faculty from the University of Saskatchewan, who shared these thoughts #during a recent #eci831 lecture about the history of learning networks:

“You can’t separate the network [from learning],

the network is learning.”

Hey #AcAdv PLN – let’s keep collaborating, connecting & learning together. See you in the social media-sphere.