TargetX Xpert Summit

Today I’m headed to sunny Las Vegas for the Target X Xpert Summit. I’ve never been to Vegas and I’m super stoked! Plus, the conference has some great topics. I’ve always been interested in what they do and I think the conference will be a great opportunity to see what they do. Our student workers supervisor and another co-worker are going too so it should be pretty great. I plan to be on twitter and live blog at some of the sessions so stay tuned!

A-HA!

Before I was in Admissions, I was a Children’s Pastor. Now even if you aren’t religious, stay with me here. Once in a while, I would prepare a lesson to teach the children on let’s say, Noah’s Ark. Several times I would find myself listening to the sermon I had missed while teaching to find that the Pastor or someone during an offering meditation would refer to Noah and his many animals. I called these A-HA! moments. Because not only did my student learn about Noah, but maybe he told his mom about it on the way home and she says, “Hey, that sounds like something we heard about in the sermon.”

Enter: My TWOA-HA moments. First, I was thinking about how we can use Twitter here at FC when our Webmaster came over for our staff meeting. Lo and behold, she’s working with one of our IT guys on an FC Twitter! Then, there was a post about Twitter in my Feed Reader. Makes me feel like we’re working on something exciting!

My second A-HA! moment is going to require your help. For our state organization conference (IACAC), I am planning a session on Technology in Higher Education. Then, there was this GREAT discussion this weekend about this topic over at Matt Herzberger.com. I read this after I had volunteered to plan this session. My ideas are to cover Student Blogging, implications of FERPA when communicating via Chat, IM, etc., and… What else? What do my 5 loyal readers think? Do you know someone who would love to speak at an Indiana Conference? Would you?

Oh, and here’s a quick peek of what happens when our only male Admissions Counselor is home sick the day before April Fool’s.

Yep, we shrink wrapped his desk.

Facebook Friend Lists

Interesting… I just noticed that Facebook is giving it’s users the ability to filter who sees certain things in their profile. For example, I have a list of friends, colleagues, and everyone else. I only want my friends to see the pictures of me partying last weekend, but everyone can see that I just forded the river in Oregon Trail.

It sounds to me like the powers that be at Facebook have gotten wise to our discussions about whether a college/employer should use a students profile against them and decided to do something about it. At least, that’s my thinking.

This is incredibly fascinating to me. We starting using a Facebook group to encourage students to meet others. We are a small school (about 1000) and there are already more than 70 students in the group. For us, that’s a lot. And, the conversations these students are having range from “who wants to room with me” to “I’m nervous about college.” That speaks volumes to me about a students interest level. What a great way to connect to your college before move-in day.

For another great blog about Facebook, new technologies, and how it can affect recruitment, check out what Chris Potts over at SquaredPeg has to say. There has been some great discussion to follow.

I think most people agree, everything in moderation. And for the record, we’ve starting trying out Zinch and we’ve been pretty pleased. I’m sure I’ll blog about it more as it progresses. I noticed several people have mentioned it being phony because it’s a “scholarship competition” and I guess I didn’t realize they started awarding them until just now. I know Anycollege does a lot of that, but I didn’t recognize it with Zinch.

So back to Facebook, and the original subject of my post, I think there will be a lot of students who decide who sees what in their profile. Has anyone done any playing around with these new settings? What do you think?  Will students take advantage of this? Will you?