Comments on: More on Email

By: Western Dave

Western Dave — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 19:22:18 +0000

Jadgul,
That only became possible with servers. The notion of having something permanent on my computer made no sense with my MAC II si. In fact, between that and the zip disks a large chunk of my graduate school career is in a very precarious state of permanence.

By: jadagul

jadagul — Sun, 26 Feb 2006 04:34:56 +0000

David: I think most people do. It’s an odd conversation I often have with my parents in particular, and with most people over thirty in general. They say, “Oh, this is important, I want to keep it, so I’d better print it out and file it somewhere.” I say, “Oh, this is important, I want to keep it, so I should scan it and save it on my computer.” I get the feeling that it’s largely a generational gap.

By: David Chudzicki

David Chudzicki — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 17:59:59 +0000

Another nice thing about all of this is that keeping track of one’s things electronically is becoming much easier. With professors’ comments made on the electronic documents themselves, it’s easy to keep every assignment forever (literally). (As is, I’ll have my own work forever — but if the professor’s suggestions only exist in hardcopy, they will be lost eventually.) Sometimes I even type comments into the file itself, so that I won’t need the hardcopy.

I wonder if some people still see physical documents as more “permanent,” in the sense of lasting longer. (It’s true that physical documents are more “permanent” in the sense of being harder to change.) On that note, it’s nice to see that Google has started digitizing the National Archives’ video content (http://video.google.com/nara.html).

By: Western Dave

Western Dave — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 15:42:04 +0000

I use turnitin.com for longer papers and e-mail for shorter papers. Word has improved its comment function for usability compared to a few years ago and this helps. Like sdorn, I have bad handwriting so this is a god send for me and students.

By: CMarko

CMarko — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 06:59:12 +0000

What distressed me in the Times article was the professor who ignored her freshman student’s inquiry about school supplies. She may have thought it would be scary for the student to hear that that was an inappropriate question, but not responding probably intimidated the student without letting her know what she’d done wrong. If the professor is able, it doesn’t seem either difficult or hurtful to simply respond that notebook choice is up to the student’s discretion. If the situation is as Medium Blue describes it, though, maybe one answer is for professors to include communication guidelines in their syllabi. That’s still more work for the professors, but I’ve seen syllabi include really detailed guidelines on nearly everything else, and it’s an obvious place to inform students of their professors’ expectations. One of the most difficult things about being a student, for me at least, is knowing what level of familiarity is acceptable. I doubt the students whose e-mails were described in the article realized that they were being inappropriate–and their e-mails don’t seem that inappropriate to me either, which makes me worry that my e-mails may also be out of bounds. I’d rather know from the outset what the professor is comfortable with, both in terms of e-mail and other unwritten rules such as form of address (I call all professors “Professor,” but I’m never sure).

As a side note on Professor Burke’s (see?) comments about student e-mail addresses: when I was in high school, I sent my Latin teacher a paper using the address jupiterturtle@domain, which I’d chosen for no particular reason a few years earlier. The teacher thanked me graciously for the paper, and added that my name was “an interesting combination of the celestial and the aquatic.”

By: Laura

Laura — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 14:20:15 +0000

Despite serving as the primary supporter of Blackboard, I’m not a big proponent of it, but one thing it is good at is collecting papers. I used it last semester and it was great. You can also collect all the papers at once and download them as a zip file which then creates a dated folder. Very convenient. I also commented on them electronically–both by typing comments in word and once by recording me talking and writing on the papers. A tablet pc helped the process. And I understand Swat is getting at least one for testing (since they called me to ask what models we had).

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 13:36:42 +0000

Fair enough, Medium Blue. I have smaller classes and students who are pretty self-sufficient and mature, so I don’t tend to see very many of the sillier or more frustrating queries. Reading around the academic blogs, there are certainly some amazing examples of rudeness and cluelessness in student emails being reported in reaction to the story–actually much better examples than the ones in the Times story.

By: Medium Blue

Medium Blue — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 10:32:17 +0000

I don’t like the way “academics” are lumped together as if
indistinguishable. I’m a community college prof and we don’t
get teaching assistants and research assistants. We get large
classrooms and lots of grading on weekends. K-12 teachers
work like MULES.

Re email. Well, frankly, I find that 50% of student emails these
days are from students who have no initiative at all in problem
solving. When the first moment of anxiety arrives, they send an
email for “help” which, translated into English, often means “I
have examined the problem for two nanoseconds and now I
want you to give me four or five hints”.

Puleeeeeeeze!!! I often sympathize with criticizers of academia
but please recognize that the K-12 and community college systems
often have weak students with weak character caused by weak
parenting coupled with no administrator backing of INSTRUCTOR
RIGOROUSNESS.

I’d like to see most of you office workers out there get nagged
and harrassed by lame students who can’t figure out who was
buried in Grant’s Tomb. Most of my friends who’ve even had
to teach a 3-day seminar in industry are sick with fatigue by
the end of the week.

Walk a mile in a man’s shoes before you spew about your
IMAGININGS about what he does.

Medium Blue

By: Powen

Powen — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 10:28:39 +0000

I’m actually very often frustrated by multitudes friends / acquaintances here at Swarthmore who’ve made the switch over to Gmail by setting Swatmail to forward, but can’t seem to make the effort to set Gmail to ‘send as’ their swarthmore address.

I find it somewhat disconcerting to send email to one address and to receive a reply from another. I can’t pinpoint any other specific disadvantages for the move away from using the institutional email address, but I can’t but seem to feel unnerved by it (aside from the fact that people have odd addresses). On some level it’s related to my annoyance with the many people don’t even set up their voicemail on the phone that the college provides and instead rely solely on personal cell phones which may have out of state area codes.

By: meg

meg — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 06:44:57 +0000

So, here at U. Topia (heh, so much for my previous pseudo-anonymity), all the students had read the article, so today’s classes were about email conventions.

And one less-than-surprising bit of feedback: They really like confirmation too. A “got your paper” really means a lot. I have always done it, just because my momma taught me to acknowledge, but it’s definitely the counterpart of “A thank-you wouldn’t be out of line for the letter of rec I just wrote for you and FedExed because you got the form to me so late.”