The Death of e mail?

Posted on by

I read Ian Pitchers blog about his children not “doing e mail” yesterday.https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/ianpitcher/2012/07/10/but-i-dont-really-do-email/

By coincidence at last week’s congregation ceremony I came across the problem first hand. A number of students turned up without tickets and instructions because they hadn’t been told anything. Of course they had, by e mail! I was working with some bright sparks last week and I tested Ian’s idea of a communication promulgation system (suspect that’s a hub in layman’s terms) that would sift messages and send them by an individual’s preferred method of communication. The younger contingent agreed that they only used e mail for work purposes and used other methods of communication at home. In other words they don’t do e mail either but they are constantly carrying and checking their phones for communications.

How far could you go with this? Tweet when someone is due at a lecture? A text reminder for an exam? IM when they are late? Megan Quentin-Baxter is organising a conference and if I have got this right, the communications during the conference will be done by SMS/IM?  e.g. Workshop 2 Room 29 3pm til 5pm. Apologies Megan if that’s not the case.

It’s a brave new world, are we ready for it? I read recently some conference notes (Cloud communications stuff) where the presenter asked participants under 25 to raise their hands. There were none apparently. Is there a lesson there? That under 25’s don’t get sent to conferences perhaps, or maybe that we are not listening or even exploiting young minds enough in emergent technologies and communications.

I wrote this last week and today I am told that 4500 students logged into their e mail since the end of term….

4 thoughts on “The Death of e mail?”

  1. With respect to the 4500 email logins – I suspect that people check their emails when they are actively seeking something (e.g. information about exam results or resits) but probably not so much for ‘passive’ reception of short term notifications (e.g. “Tomorrow’s lecture has been relocated to the Herschel Building Lecture Theatre 2”)

  2. It’s a difficult issue. Students arrive with established personal Emails/online identities – it all adds to the pressure: ‘bring your own identity’ as well as ‘bring your own devices’!

    Whilst the policy is University emails are the primary form of official electronic communication then that needs to be drilled home consistently by staff from day 1. In the ideal world it would be nice to see personal emails supported (forwarding) but personal Emails are highly changeable / fluid and would everyone update the University when they changed? It still doesn’t help with the sub-group that ‘don’t do Email’ any more.

    Supporting other channels in parallel with Email would be good – for example sending an SMS for the last-minute timetable changes. Because these are personal funded devices, this needs to be ‘opt-in’ and needs students to update their details on SP3 when they change their mobile numbers (based on our early experiences in Medical Sciences we found many mobile numbers provided by students application stage were already out of date by the time the students had arrived. Worse still phone companies sometimes recycle mobile numbers so you need to periodically verify you are contacting the right person!). Less pressing news can also be made available by RSS.

    One challenge for IT will be to develop ways in which it is easy to send messages through multiple channels at the same time and for the customer to personalise their communication preferences.

    No easy answers. In a future world the University may be able to interact with each student’s identity management service – or allow social login (by SocialAuth/OpenId) but this would have massive logistical/resourcing implications for the University.

    Simon

  3. Sorry for spamming your blog Jane!

    Tangentially related but worth a look at a recent article by John Waters in Digital Campus: The High Cost of College: Is Tech Part of the Problem or the Solution?
    http://campustechnology.com/Articles/2012/06/25/The-High-Cost-of-College.aspx?Page=1

    Later on it touches on the impact of the change from students to ‘consumers’ in the US. It is questioned if there is an ‘arms race’ as IT support becomes an area of competition between institutions trying to keep up with rapidly changing IT expectations of prospective students….communicating in ways other than the institutional Email may be part of this. Wouldn’t happen in the UK, would it? ha ha 😉

Leave a Reply