While Laura, Mike and Chris hold down the ETC fort I am attending the Educause Conference. One attendee had the audacity to claim that email will become obsolete sooner than we realize. Is email currently obsolete? No. Is email used differently by college freshman than it is by their faculty and the college support staff. Yes. Might there be a new method of communicating with students 5 years from now? I doubt it, but it's worth considering.
When I was in college it was the rare person who requested an email account from the college and made their way through the Pine interface to communicate with the 12 other people on campus who had an account. We all made weekly phone calls home at a fixed time because there were no answering machines; we received paper notices from the college about important issues, and we sent letters to our friends during summer vacation. As we know, times have changed. The question I hadn't considered until this week was whether today's students will look back on the current use of email as quaint, as I regard my college communications.
The colleague who made this claim at the pre-conference symposium had recently conducted a focus group with a handful of 13 year olds. She learned that none of them had email accounts. They electronically communicate with their friends through instant messenger, text messaging and social sites like Facebook and Myspace. I assume their schools communicate with them through paper and course management systems and they are as yet still unencumbered with other groups or individuals trying to reach them electronically.
Our colleges have come to view email as our primary way of communicating with students but it's not 100% effective. Another symposium attendee shared that after they released a new webmail service they discovered that within a day over 100 students had set filters to send all email from the help desk to the trash automatically. And we all struggle with getting our students to set up the forward to the email address they really check.
It seems to me the lesson in all of this is not whether or when email is going to become obsolete. The first lesson is the different attitude that young adults have to email and other communication methods. They don't want to hear from you unless you are relevant to them. They view email as a way of receiving unwanted communications and are less patient in sorting through it than those of us who view it as a huge improvement over waiting a week for a letter or calling back endlessly because there weren't answering machines. We need to make sure that our communications are clear and relevant and as infrequent as possible.
To digital natives email isn't a life preserver it's a potential noose. And we should listen carefully lest we lose this fairly streamlined method of connection and need to figure out how to reach them in the various electronic locations where some but not all of them are hanging out. And frankly they won't want to hear from us there either if we don't make some changes.
