We have been hearing for years that "the world is flat" and that global collaboration will be the key to the 21st century's success. Does this trend bleed over to higher education? Academic advising? I started out exploring these questions and was surprised at how little I found.
Here are 2 quick reviews of 2 of the resources I found:
At first I thought that this was going to be the most promising resource to use for fostering collaboration among students and/or academic advisors. However, it really turned out to be more of a collection of ads for vendors which offer software to facilitate collaboration. The official sounding title is somewhat deceiving....
This site gives a a voice to students who want to speak out on issues affecting the globe. Most anything one can think of is covered within these pages; global warming to access to health care. Of particular interest, to me of course, was the educational technology page. Students from all over the world are joining together in efforts to bring forth new educational technologies and sharing ideas about what their partciular schools are doing in the present.
Neither of these websites directly address the question of how global communication could impact academic advising...My first thought was that NACADA already hosts some type of international conference, but I don't know very much about it. Perhaps a future post will detail more about this and what types of innovations are taking place.
Perhaps we (or NACADA) could create some kinda of forum that would enable academic advisors from around the globe to communicate more seamlessly. Services which assist with the creation of podcasts (e.g., gabcast, podomatic) or even synchronous tools such as Skype might enable us to conduct this conversation. In the past, speaking at length with those in our field who are continents away would be next to impossible to achieve without running up an extensive travel bill. We need to embrace this technology and make it do everything that it can. The most difficult part is taking the tool and finding a way to apply it to our everyday lives or careers.
Does anyone have any resources on academic advising on a global scale? How about in regard to higher education in general?
3 comments:
Jillian -
This is a huge and wonderful topic full of possibilities!
What I'm really excited about is letting students keep blogs as their e-portfolios.
I put up a post on it here:
http://blog.swiftkickonline.com/2009/02/blogs-as-e-portfolios-better-for-the-students-cheaper-for-the-edu.html
And then sharing their education foot prints with other similar students. The blog, and other tools like twitter, would capture what they've done, and written, based on the tags they've used. For example a student would tag a blog "physics" or "Phys405" for a specific class and this would leave a record of their activities out in the open for other to benefit from.
(You can see an example of an RSS timeline here:
http://www.dipity.com/kprentiss )
These education footprints could be shown to similar students, providing peer driven advising.
"Students like you who majored in x and did activity y, liked z next."
This architecture could just as easily be global as local.
The advisor then, would have a huge repository of successful pathways at their disposal. The advisor and the students would collaborate to help sort through others' paths, while leaving yet another successful path for others.
Jullian,
How about getting in touch with the teachers or administrators in the English Language Institute at UB? Many students who are accepted to the university take at least one course through the ELI and personell there may have some great ideas that would complement yours. You could ask for Barbara Campbell. I have worked with her in the past and I think she would be quite open to collaboration. If you do contact her, please say hello for me. :-)
Dr. Burgos
@kevin I agree! I am actually going to be doing another post about it sometime today. You have inspired me! Thanks!
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