Tag: social media

Categories
Student Affairs Technology Uncategorized

Next Gen vpsa

Presenters

  • Josie Ahlquist, Research Associate and Instructor, Florida State University, @josieahlquist, josieahlquist.com
  • Dr. Ed Cabellon, Vice President for Student Services and Enrollment Management, Bristol Community College, @dredcabellon, edcabellon.com
  • Mordecai Brownlee, Vice President of Student Success, St. Philip’s College, @ItsDrMordecai
  • Angela Batista, Vice President of Student Affairs and Institutional Diversity and Inclusion, Champlain College, @drangelabatista
  • Dr. Tim Miller, @JMUTimMiller

Resources

This is my first session of the 2019 NASPA conference, and I’m well-rested and ready to learn! When I saw the title “Next Gen VPSA,” I knew I needed to attend this session 🙂 Today’s agenda: facilitated discussion around ” purpose-driven digital leadership.” Any omissions or errors are mine.

Change: digital leaders accept and embrace change, calling on others to fill knowledge and skills gaps with technology.

Connection: digital engagement for campus leaders is built around relationships for genuine community building

Personalization: A holistic approach humanizes both a leaders’ campus position and their use of social media tools.

Strategy: campus leaders need to have a clear, yet flexible strategy that aligns their values and personality, as well as university objectives.

Legacy: the theory, practice, and pedagogy of leadership can be applied in digital context to create meaning, build community and leaves a legacy.

Question 1: How do you define “Next Gen VPSA?”

MB: more courses are moving online. SoMe is important for providing a level of representation of who you are and what your institution is about. It’s going to be a norm soon.

EC: I’m an early adopter and my research was around use of SoMe and tech by leaders in higher ed. When I became a VP nine months ago, I thought I’d be able to continue using SoMe the way I’d always used it…that came to a screeching halt! I’ve had to rethink how and why I use SoMe. It really helps when your president and board “get it.” I’m using MailChimp to help measure staff and student interest.

AB: being intentional and strategic is important. We need to be there for our staff and we need to keep learning. Our communication tools are most useful when we’re intentional about HOW we use them. Using it to share your true self is important because it appears in how you “show up.” I was able to respond to a student recently who had a less than ideal experience who said the campus did not care about students of color. Because I was on SoMe, I was able to respond directly to that student’s post.

MB: we’re able to respond in an immediate way…our students want to hear from us. These are opportunities for us to share that we see our students’ concerns, we hear our students’ concerns, and we care about them.

How do you balance your personal and professional accounts?

EC: I’m in a state role now. Because my FB account is intertwined with my personal life, I had to separate things. I do have an assistant that helps me out with things, but it’s still a lot of work to have multiple accounts.

JA: FB and Instagram allow you to have “branded pages” which are underneath the main institutional account.

AB: I intermingle my personal stuff with my professional stuff. I often will share articles, but that does not necessarily mean that I endorse them. If you’re going to do a branded page, make sure that it actually has value.

MB: make sure your SoMe has purpose! Really look at it! You need to evaluate what you’re looking at…ALL of it. You’re never “off” as a VPSA. SoMe is not a place to rant and rave.

EC: if you’re on Twitter, have a look at what lists you’re on. This is a good measurement of how people view you online.

MB: You need to have purpose behind your presence. You also need to be aware of what kind of interaction opportunities each platform presents. Some do not allow you to control things beyond the initial post. I am not an endorser.

JA: Instagram stories are the biggest ROI for younger people. Different intents for different platforms.

How much time do you spend on your SoMe?

TM: I have an assistant who I’ve given all my favorite books, and she provide motivational quotes M-Th, and I do things on Friday. I spend about an hour a day on mine.

AB: I spend most of my time on FB. I post at every event that I go to on campus, which helps with the student voice. Students who want me to amplify their voice, I ask them to tag me so that I can help them. It’s not about quantity, it’s about intent. It’s my way to build relationships.

MB: I spend less than 30 minutes a day on average. I check at the end of the day for sure.

How do you intentionally connect with staff and students?

AB: I don’t invite my staff to connect with me. If someone wants to connect, I really think about what that person wants from the relationship.

MB: if you’re a VP or senior student affairs officer, you should definitely have a conversation with your PR department. Be prepared to review your own personal material aligns with that of your institution.

How do you interact with your leadership team?

EC: Bring data to the table. Pick a platform that works best for your institution…even if it’s just one thing.

MB: I’m the only member of my cabinet that has a SoMe presence. You need to understand your campus culture…I push my president to be engaged with video and SoMe pictures.

AB: most of my colleagues are on SoMe, and they are growing their presence as a result of the posts that I’m making. In my opinion, it’s important to keep your opinions to yourself.

TM: I was the first on my cabinet to be on SoMe. Our PR team had an intervention with me. Students will pull you into very specific concerns…SoMe back-and-forth isn’t the place to resolve their concerns. However, I DO tell the students that I will meet with them individually to resolve their concerns.

Categories
Student Affairs Technology Uncategorized

Student Affairs and Social Media

Warning:  I’m about to sound like a curmudgeon.  I’ve held my tongue (so to speak) on this topic for several years now, but Eric Stoller’s post today in Inside Higher Ed was the straw that broke the camel’s back.  And to be clear, this has nothing to do with this specific post, or with Eric personally.  I’ve never met Eric, and I find many of his posts thought-provoking and entertaining.  I just had to put what I’ve been thinking about into words.

Maybe I need to broaden my online reading horizons, but whenever I see posts about technology in student affairs, nine times out of ten it’s about social media.  Social media and leadership.  Social media and identity.  Social media and the admissions process.  Social media and emergency notification systems.  Social media and campus climate.  Social media and why you’re missing the boat if you’re not on the latest platform.  Enough already!  Without a doubt, social media is important, and there are interesting ramifications for students with this new “permanent record” that we older folks haven’t come to grips with yet.

Many rising stars in the student affairs profession are brilliant at using social media as a platform for self-promotion.  An irrepressibly upbeat attitude coupled with a positive message goes a long way in this field.  If you have an EdD, you’re probably also an unstoppable force of nature and you don’t give a damn what I think.  Popularity contests don’t bother me.  What bothers me is the implicit connection being made that somehow social media IS technology.

That’s wrong, and it really grinds my gears.  Mastery of social media is not the same thing as mastery of technology.

Legions of IT pros in student affairs support an incredibly diverse range of systems, services and infrastructure.  Most of them work behind the scenes and don’t draw any attention to themselves.  It just so happens that the things they work on aren’t perceived as being as sexy as “SoMe.”  But the systems they manage are an integral part of what makes a university run.  And if any of those systems fail, boy howdy.

What makes social media interesting as a technology (at least to me) is that they’re platforms designed from the ground up AS PLATFORMS.  They’re easy to integrate with and can “talk to” virtually any system you can shake a stick at.  But this isn’t what student affairs social media evangelists talk about.  They instead use it as a fulcrum to leverage against current hot topics in the field.

I usually don’t complain without bringing some sort of solution to the table, but in this case I’m annoyed and need to vent a bit.  Maybe the quiet techies need to speak up more and participate in standards-making bodies.  Maybe they should be more active in (gasp) social media.  The only thing I can say for sure is that I’d really like to see the student affairs social media evangelists slow their roll a smidge.

Frankly, I doubt this post will resonate with anyone.  Hardly a surprise, given my massive double-digit readership.  Maybe I should take the hint and use social media more effectively << sighs >>

Categories
Accessibility Technology

Scaling Web Accessibility at Facebook

This is my fourth session from the first day at the CSUN conference.  This session “…covers Facebook’s work over the past year to scale web/mobile accessibility across the company’s large engineering department.”  Description comes from the conference event guide.

Presenters:

  • Jeffrey Wieland
  • Ramya Sethuraman
  • George Zamfir (@good_wally)

 

RESOURCES

 

BACKGROUND:  how to scale accessibility in a large engineering environment.

  • Complexity:  Each platform has different considerations
  • Awareness:  products need to know what do for accessibility
  • Speed:  need to integrate accessibility into the process

 

JEFFREY’S SEGMENT

Accessibility team came into existence by recognizing that users were using AT to mediate their relationship with the product.  Jeffrey appealed to user interface engineering (UIE), which is the front-end team that builds all the core components of the product.  These components are similar to the design pattern library work that LinkedIn is doing.

Unfortunately, most Computer Science graduates do not have much exposure to accessibility.  So, accessibility has been integrated into the core training regimen at Facebook.  If it’s a part of the core training, then it sends a message to the developers that it’s important.

Testing matters, so we’ve invested in something called an “accessibility nub” which is essentially a flyout menu (built in-house) that allows developers to toggle looking for best practices.

Centralizing documentation and best practices has helped engineering review things “in-context.”  Contextual links to this resource have been embedded wherever needed.

These steps have give us the ability to “have more hands on deck” with respect to accessibility.  This has grow the number of developers working on accessibility fixes to over 80(!)

A number of ambassadors have been enlisted to help evangelize accessibility internally.  We also have channels by which we communicate with our users (see resources section above)

 

RAMYA’S SEGMENT

Ramya began her segment by describing the alt text issue she had posting a picture of her one year-old daughter trying yogurt for the first time (very cute!).

Caption generator:  takes bits of metadata about uploaded photos and auto-generates a caption for the user.  Ramya demonstrated how this sounds with VoiceOver, both before and after using the caption generator.  Addition of  metadata elements like location photo was taken was very effective!

Semantic Structure has been added via headings and landmarks.

The core components library contains controls like buttons, links, images, etc.  Accessibility is built directly into these components.  Dialogs now have keyboard enhancements, with appropriate labeling.  Focus cycles through dialogs.

Keyboard Shortcuts:

  • j/k keys are used for moving focus forward and backward, respectively.
  • “c” key is used to comment on a post
  • “s” key is used to share the post,
  • “o” key is used to open attachments like photos
  • “q” key to chat.

High contrast mode is also available now.

A lot of effort was put into making the desktop view accessible.

 

GEORGE’S SEGMENT

Quality Assurance:  all is done with scale in mind.  It all started with a spread sheet, and testing was done in an ad-hoc fashion by a very small accessibility team.  In order to scale it, it had to be spread to the entire team!

We now run standardized regression tests on a regular basis for each platform.  We also do user testing with people who have disabilities.

QA (test run) > ProdOps (triage & assignment) > Eng (improvements)

Where does the A11Y team fit into the above?  It fits in wherever it makes sense.  Across products & platforms, and runs on auto-pilot.

“If you build the product, accessibility is YOUR responsibility.” It’s just another form of code quality.

 

JEFFREY’S SEGMENT

Mainstreaming accessibility is something that we want to pursue at all levels.  One of their front-end engineers was working on the web messenger product, and when asked if he’d tested with a screen reader, his response was “what’s a screen reader?”  This is not his fault, because he was not exposed to accessibility during his education.  So, Facebook is now partnering with PayPal, Stanford engineering to get students to think about accessibility.  This will help to build awareness.

 

Q & A SEGMENT

Question:  how much of the data associated with the photo example presented earlier is auto-generated versus user-supplied?  Answer:  it has be user-entered content.

Question:  how are you testing for high-contrast mode?  Answer:  well, it’s complicated…(I didn’t catch all of the answer).

Question:  are the testing links you talked about generalizable for use by public testers?  Answer:  not really, but we’re working on it.

Question:  how do you track focus when using keyboard shortcuts?  Answer:  we return the currently active element.

Question:  have you been able to document whether or how the accessibility features have been implemented?  This is a big challenge, quantifying the impact your work has made.  We’re doing a lot around measurement, which helps improve where we focus our efforts.  We do read all of the feedback we receive, both positive and negative…please be candid with us!

Question:  where does the role of the engineer start and end?  Where does design fit in…how do you get accessibility baked in?  Answer:  we’re still defining how this works Facebook.  Some things engineers should absolutely be involved with, notably focus and readback.  Things get trickier when building more dynamic and collaborative tools.  George indicated that their designers were ready to roll straight into implementation and pretty much ate up everything he gave them.

Question:  do you need to activate keyboard shortcuts somewhere in the user preferences?  Answer:  no!

Comment:  I wanted to mention that I submitted a JavaScript-related accessibility bug recently and got a response THE SAME DAY.   Very great high-touch service (this got some applause).

 

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