LIVE SESSION
“The University Life Cafe: A Virtual Community to Enhance Students’ Emotional Resilience”
Shalin Hai-Jew, Kansas State University, USA
Date:
March 19, 2010
2:00 pm to 2:50 pm EST
(see time in other time zones)
Description:
This Web presentation will showcase the University Life Cafe (www.universitylifecafe.org), which was launched in Feb. 2009, as a virtual community to support college student emotional resilience, self-expression, and peer connectivity at Kansas State University. The site combines social networking, artificial intelligence (text analysis to head off potential crisis situations), and multimedia content showcasing to connect college students among themselves and with members of the K-State Counseling Center. This will describe the creation of a culture of care and anti-suicide “safe messaging”; the original planning, research, and evolution methodologies of this site (in its first year); the application of cultural sensitivity strategies in the creation of multimedia contents; efforts to target specific sub-groups among the student demographic (non-traditional students, overseas students, returning veterans, and others), and anticipated future challenges. Further, this will examine the affordances and constraints of contemporary site-building technologies. This endeavor was initially sponsored by SAMHSA, under a federal grant.
About the Presenter:
Dr. Shalin Hai-Jew works as an instructional designer at Kansas State University. She worked as a tenured college professor for many years but left teaching to pursue instructional design work. She recently published “Digital Imagery and Informational Graphics in E-Learning” with IGI-Global.