Dispatches from Dallas

I am in Dallas right now at the National Orientation Directors Association (NODA) annual conference. It's all professional staff and students that work in college orientations. I'm one of a handful from Indiana. There are several Purdue colleagues and some from IU Bloomington. It's been a good conference thus far, except for a horrible keynote speaker that tried to be motivational but struck me more as Chris Farley's motivational speaker on SNL. She had us stand up and point to ourselves, and how we are the only ones who can change ourselves, to all take a step forward, and . . . . .GAG! How much they pay this woman to be here?

The rest of the time has been in breakout sessions with various topics all related to putting on orientation programs. I'll be going back to South Bend with a lot of good ideas. One area I'm looking very closely at is an online orientation to supplment our regular orientation. Although I'm also very cautious of it. In higher education, there's a huge movement to online and electronic delivery of information, which is good, but we can't lose the one on one interactions either. In fact, one colleague from the University of Iowa predicted that colleges are going so over the top with being online that it'll all eventually circle back to paper based methods. He may not be too far off. I've found that students want information available online, but when they are struggling with something and need answers, they want to talk to a real person.