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E-Mail Is for Old People:  As students ignore their campus accounts, colleges try new ways of communicating

Carnevale, D.  (2006)  E-mail is for old people: as students ignore their campus accounts, colleges try new ways of communicating.  The Cronicle of Higher Education, October 6, 2008, A27-A29.

Summary:

Dan Carnevale writes of the dilemma facing colleges and universities pertaining to the dispensing of information.  Several different educational institutions are discussed as well as different solutions to this problem.  The dilemma centers on students not checking their university email accounts.  Students have become disillusioned with the amount of messages they have been receiving and have stopped checking their accounts and are therefore not getting vital university information.  According to Brian Niles, “colleges need to branch out and find new ways to connect with students.”  Several solutions have been tried with some success.  These include campus MySpace pages, text messages and web portals.  Carnevale suggests that campuses and universities find ways to communicate with their students that the students will respond to.  He suggests that MySpace pages and web portals are less formal than university emails and will be received better by students.  Although many students like the new applications for information sharing some believe that these measure are unnecessary and that the colleges are trying too hard.  The University of South Carolina is an example of a school that has not chosen to use different methods to communicate.  They require students to check their campus emails and hold them responsible for the information they contain. 

Response:

I found this article very interesting.  I think it is a really great idea for colleges and universities to start thinking about how they dispense information to their students.  Educational institutions need to start thinking outside the box in order to connect to the new population of college students who use multiple different technologies to communicate with one another.  Using social networking sites such as MySpace and web portals would be a very effective way to communicate with students.  I liked the way that Harcum College uses a MySpace page to communicate with their students.  I think the use of a question section where students can pose questions to university officials and someone will get back to them in a timely manner will be a very effective way to communicate with students.  I also was intrigued by the idea of a text messaging service such as the one used by Pennsylvania State University.  I think that allowing students to choose what types of messages they receive via texts is a very smart service.  Whatever methods colleges and universities choose to adopt it is clear that a change is necessary and it will be interesting to see how this shift in presentation of information plays out.