Neither of my children use email as their primary method of electronic communication. Certainly not in the way that I do. They both have accounts but they are mainly used to ensure they can register for the preferred Social Network site du jour. One ‘child’ is 20, the other is 13. They don’t really ‘do’ email.

They’re not abnormal in this respect. Whilst I and, I’m sure, others in the University tend to think of email as the de facto standard for communicating the written word, the current crop of teens will more often be checking their phone for an SMS, a tweet/DM or an IM. In my experience they don’t check their email unless reminded.

This leads to a bit of a problem with respect to how we contact our students if we need to ensure they have received and read an important and/or urgent message

Email is useful for us because, correctly configured, it maintains an audit trail of messages sent and received. The problem is that if the messages are not read when we think they should be (or at all) then the purpose of sending the message is somewhat diminished.

If possible we should develop/commission a communication promulgation system (or hub). Messages sent would be routed through this hub on the way to the final email (or whatever) destination. The hub would then check the recipients of the message and look up their proffered method of notification, be it SMS, DM, IM, etc, and then let them know that they should check their email (or whatever) for the contents of the message (always assuming that the notification cannot contain the full message itself – it should always contain the subject).

It may be worthwhile for the users to actually log in to the hub to retrieve the message this would allow confirmation that the message had at least been accessed by the intended recipient(s).

They may not ‘do’ email as automatically as I do, but at least this system gives them a nudge to make sure that they’re getting the information we believe they need…