HTML5 and Student Affairs: An Unlikely Mash-up That Just Might Work

I am reading HTML5 for Web Designers by Jeremy Keith and I feared that I was at opposite ends of my dissertation mash-up topics of technical communication and student affairs. While I am certain that, in general, technical communication principles and practices can improve performance of student affairs professionals, I struggle with how writing and designing web pages improves service to students as a student affairs professional. Maybe this is one place where my mash-up does not work. On the other hand, here are some thoughts as to why it might:

Both fields value openness and freedom and I can express my leadership style through these principles

Using digital communication tools is imperative for me in my position, and by learning to communicate digitally I can round up, organize, and deliver information in ways that are open and helpful to my staff. The information available to my staff needs to be be malleable, and this is where my professional values as a student affairs professional mesh with values in the open source and technical communication communities. Open source software is a philosophy that frees software documentation and makes it available for users to use, change, and redistribute. The GNU Project defines this freedom: "'Free software' is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of 'free' as in 'free speech,' not as in 'free beer.'” Finding the commonality if the professional values helps me share information with my staff and encourage them to use the information, change the information and redistribute the information. One practical application of this is creating a wiki for training for the student employees. While there will be a page or two without writing permissions, emergency procedures for example, the wiki will be open for students and staff to use, create, edit, and change content. It allows us to push information in a more real-time fashion, something that students value.

Taking classes in technical communication has helped me to treat information differently. Information is a resource that is essential for the success of my organization in the McCormick Tribune Campus Center. With over 10,000 events and six-times as many "touches" to events in any part of the event-cycle, I need people and systems that can communicate what they know at critical moments for information delivery in ways that are easily understandable.

Working at a tech school, this knowledge helps me find common ground with students

In my role as a director of a campus center at a a technical institution, my students talk in code all of the time. And it is not just HTML code in which they speak. At a tech school, there are conversations about science-fiction, fantasy, video-gaming, mathematics, music, and many other intellectual pursuits that I am less familiar with, having come from a liberal education background.

By taking classes in writing and designing for the web, I have something in common with my students. This is no small thing in common, either. By taking classes, not only do we have an intellectual platform that we share, but as an administrator, I find that I am in tune with students' schedules even more. Sure my life has always revolved around the academic calendar, but when I am in classes, it does so even more. I am well aware of the stressful times of the semester and can balance that with expectations for staff while still challenging them to balance all that they have committed to.

In general, digital literacy improves my ability to communicate and helps me to do my job

My education in the area of technical communication, it opens new theoretical doors and I am able to view my student affairs position differently. We write considerable amounts in our positions in student affairs. In addition to the many e-mails we write on a daily basis, we write training documents, position descriptions, monthly reports, justification documents, and much more. By investigating theories of design, audience, knowledge management, and usability, I can apply this to what I do in my job. I can be more persuasive and advocate for my area. I can be clearer in my communication. I can relate concepts to my staff in ways that are understandable.

This semester, I will take a class that will help me create web applications. As I read the HTML5 book, I am taking notes about what apps I could create that may help the employees or the users of the student center. Writing digitally can help me improve my services for the students, faculty/staff, and community users of the campus and conference services.

Inclusion

From a student affairs perspective, the word "inclusion" is significant in the field. Leadership specialists, cultural and diversity offices, and student activities offices all use this word to promote campus community and increase student retention. Having been in student affairs for 20 years, I have witnessed ideas and practices of inclusion. I could root this post by including theory and research that would support my claims, but for now I want to use the word inclusion to talk about how this concept in student affairs ties specifically to technical communication.

A few articles have gotten me thinking about this idea of inclusion as it relates to my dissertation. I am looking for areas where the two fields connect, intersect, and benefit from each other. Using the word inclusion as an intersection point, the fields touch in important ways. Student affairs professionals are not always seen as core to the academic mission of an institution and are sometimes described as extracurricular. This was a struggle that we talked about in my grad classes back in the day (my day being 20 years ago as I mentioned earlier). In his article, "Horizontal and Vertical Structures: The Dynamics of Organization in Higher Eduction," Fenske describes the challenges for student affairs professional in 1990:

"Student affairs divisions are particularly challenged, given their ambiguous purpose (to support holistic student learning and development); the perception that they are support services, rather than core academic functions; and their primarily historically and traditionally framed organizational structures" (p. 22).

In the student affairs field, we have struggled with being included ourselves and we have also advocated for marginalized students to be included. Many offices in student affairs exist for this purpose of providing support and encouraging inclusion, such as women's centers, diversity and cultural offices, LGBT centers, and offices for students with disabilities.

It is here, in offices for students with disabilities, that the idea of inclusion specifically intersects with technical communication. Writing digital content using open web standards provides an opportunity for student affairs professionals and technical communicators to come together to serve students. Student affairs professionals should be advocates for accessible online content, and one way that we can do this is by understanding how to read the source code for a page. With an imaged labeled in the source code for the web page, students who rely on an auditory reading of a web page and could understand an image without being able to see it. An article in the December 12, 2010 Chronicle of Higher Education reports on this idea of inclusion: "Mr. Shandrow hit a wall when he got to Spanish 101. The obstacle: an online workbook that failed to correctly label images." Though this is a small example, it is a representative of the wider issues that students with disabilities face as they learn using technology. Using standards-based web design, technical communicators at universities can make web pages that are not only accessible for members of the community with disabilities, but better web design also helps the entire university population using universal design principles.

Think about the television remote as a universal design. When I was a kid, I was the remote control so my father did not have to get up to walk to the television. When it was time for M*A*S*H to air, his favorite program, I was the one who changed the channel for my dad. That remote helped those who could not walk to the television, as well as the multitudes of children that served as the channel changer. Even as recent as last night, rather than just changing the channel, we searched the entire house for the remote control which traveled down to the basement courtesy of my partner's brother. Apply that idea of universal design to creating web sites using standards recommended by A List Apart article, The Inclusion Principle, like clearly structured pages and headers, properly labeled images, and separating content structure from design ideas.

If student affairs professionals can understand the basics of digital literacy, even if we cannot write digitally, we can advocate for universal design principles that promote inclusion by helping communicate to the university community and those who interact digitally with our institutions.