Hi there,
the system is on the way! we have developed a system that can exactly what your article talks about plus more!

Watch out for it at a campus near you of if anyone would like me to explain more then please feel free to contact me directly.

jon (dot) fletcher (at) bluepodmedia (dot) com
http://www.bluepodmedia.com

@e – hah! Creepy Treehouse is why I felt reluctant to reach out to students on Facebook. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I knew it was somewhat undesirable. Now I know why, and have a name for it.

Re: twitter – I’m not sure if I want students follow me on it. I don’t think my Twitt’s tend to be appropriate, vulgar or just plain silly. Also, this is another creepy treehouse territory.

Not to mention that I have surprisingly little luck convincing people to join Twitter. Last time I mentioned it in a classroom I got blank stares. When I explained how it worked the students looked at me like I was from space. They were like “why the hell would anyone need a service that works like Facebook status but is not a Facebook????”

Hey, how about a classroom community on Twitter? ;) I’ve done it and so have @academhack and @hrheingold at their universities.

According to the PEW report on teens & social media, in particular in the component dedicated to writing, email really has such a limited role in their life.

I have read about teachers using Facebook and MySpace as well as some other social media with limited success. The issue is whether students can accept that social networking can be transformed to educational networking.

I don’t know if you heard of “creepy treehouse”. It has become a prevelant reaction of students to educators who are trying to reach them via one of the platforms that many students already use. I’d like to hear your comments on this phenomenon

The computer systems here are pretty insanely locked down… won’t let me block any of the shit that comes through.

@Matt’ and @Daosus – yup, I’m the same way. I check my email regularly, and I set filters to flush the garbage down to /dev/null.

@Fr3d – Agreed. I wouldn’t drop email – I like email. I just want to reach out to the students who stubbornly refuse to use it. :)

Oh and we do have spam filters. The problem is that the university itself does a lot of spamming. By default you get subscribed to mailing lists like:

[allusers]
[allstudents]
[undergraduatestudents]/[graduatestudents]/[allfaculty]
 [campusdeals]
[campusevents]
[announce]
[discuss]

Those you can unsubscribe from I believe but the crafty administrators also set up their own private mailing lists which they can use to spam people who do that. Then there are people who blatantly abuse LDAP servers sending broadcast emails to everyone with their silly annoucements.

The lists above usually average 10-20 emails per day (sometimes more) so you are looking at 100-120 mailing list emails every day. Then there are the stuff you can’t unsubscribe from – that ends up being 20-30 emails per day as well. And there is a regular spam.

So it is not uncommon for an email address to get close to 200 emails each day, with over half of it being legitimate (but unwanted) university emails.

The only way to deal with this is to unsubscribe from as many lists as you can, then figure out who sends pointless broadcast emails to the whole university every day, and filter them out.

Oh, and I think before this semester students had a ~20 MB email quota which meant that if they didn’t clear their inbox over the weekend, the messages would likely to start being bounced Monday morning.

While using SMS or IM is a good idea, and is worth looking into, I think it’s essential not to drop email – the other two options should be an extra, not a replacement. If students can’t be bothered to check their email (of course, they should be given OWA or some other webmail to do this) and delete the spam that’s filling it up*, and therefore turn up to cancelled classes, that’s their lost time ;)

Getting them used to using and checking email merely gets them ready for the “real” world — email is central to pretty much every company these days. Also, as phones get smarter, and smartphones get cheaper (and both get more sophisticated), students could probably setup push email notifications, so they don’t have to manually check their mail.

* Do you not have any anti-spam measures?

Another version of what Matt` said above: school email has a really high noise to content ratio. If I need something, I will use the search function to find it. It is not worth my time to go through the dozens of messages every day and check to see if they’re something I should be worried about (they’re not). At least from my point of view, this is an offshoot of the problem where you’re signed up to a billion different email groups, and you can’t unsubscribe because:

1. The person in charge of that group stopped paying attention years ago.
2. You might miss something important!
3. Hey Undergrads! I hope you all enjoyed the recent concert, let’s meet in the … AAARGH!!

They way to deal with this, of course, is filters. Or at least that’s how I dealt with it (as poorly as I did). As soon as a message arrives from your professor, or any one of his graduate students, or any one of his graduate students’ buddies because the grad student was over at their house when they remembered that Homework 14 is due tomorrow, you redirect to a folder for that class. The rest gets dumped to /dev/null.

All of this takes about an hour to set up each semester, and requires some technical savvy. This explains why your technically inclined students get their emails more often: they know they can put in the hour at the beginning of the semester and not worry about things. The non-technical people just panic and give up.

I’m normally a regular email-checker, but my college email goes unchecked for much longer periods of time… basically because there’s rarely anything of value in there…

Most of the messages are mass-mailed and not worth the electrons they’re written on (no I don’t want to buy tickets for $some_event, I haven’t seen your lost folder/watch/brain and I’m not interested in volunteering for your psychology coursework)

On the occasion that there’s something I want to read, I probably knew in advance it was coming, and hence checked more frequently… and the college actually has a much better internal messaging system for a lot of stuff. Oh, add the fact that I can’t access it from home, and often can’t be bothered to use my breaks to go check email…

Would be so much easier if I could set it to forward everything to my Hotmail account so I could see all my email in one place… and if we could access Hotmail instead of hitting the ridiculously tight web filter.

The problem what i allways had with Jabber was that all the other students used different im-protocols.
There was never a problem that protocol-X was unable to do Y, the whole time the problems were “how was the im-adress again?” and “shit, he uses [insert any proprietary protocol here] and i would have to create just another account”.
Of course here the most used protocol is ICQ and of course most of the others used icq, but jabber got rid of the last problem, i could use transports to talk to other students the only thing that stayed was “which f***ing adress?”. we could get rid of this last problem by implementing a index of im-adresses where students COULD leave the university-intern jabber-address or just place an adress for any other network.
The generated contactlist would look something like:

studentA.foo@university.edu – studentA foo
studentB.bar@msnhost.university.edu – studentB bar
studentC.foobar@aimhost.university.edu – sudentC foobar
1234567@icqhost.university.edu – StudentD Smith

It is a great idea on paper, and I’d be all over it if I didn’t see how things like that pan out in practice. What I wanted was to engage students using the medium they all know and are addicted too. Introducing something new is almost always an insta-fail.

Students would never log into the Jabber network because they already have a better, more comprehensive network for communicating with their buddies – namely AIM.

Also, if I shut down my IM client, I won’t get the notification which sort of defeats the purpose of this whole thing.