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Putting Student Communication in Con-TEXT
2/15/2007
Colleges and universities are struggling with or are beginning to realize there is a growing problem with their communications with students. Living "in the moment" as they do, many students are beyond regularly checking e-mail, so sending their important and timely communications that way is increasingly fruitless.
Even in my own family, I cannot remember my 18- and 21-year-olds' e-mail addresses, if they even continue to use them, because when I do send them e-mail I never, ever hear back, and often do not ever find out if they even received my message. Despite my own utter dependence on e-mail, I have not received an e-mail message from either one of them in more than a year, even though I hear from their grandmother, my 81-year-old mother, by e-mail at least weekly.
At some institutions, administrators are negotiating with local pizzerias to implement "on time, on demand" communications stickers containing official university information that can be slapped onto the top of pizza boxes before they leave the store. It may be possible, even, for pizzeria customer databases to communicate with institutional enterprise systems to individualize student messages, right down to communicating deadlines for class papers and projects.
Okay, I made that last part up, although students do eat regularly, so communicating with them in some way that connects with one of the few things we know they will do no matter what we want them to do is an intriguing concept.
The problem of how to communicate with students is real. I can't even rely on getting one of my three kids--the two above, plus the 23-year-old--to answer a phone call. It appears to be routine practice now not to answer calls, but to consider instead the act of someone calling you to be the equivalent of "asking" for a call back at your convenience.
My personal solution is also the one that a growing number of colleges and universities are coming to: text messaging. I simply have my kids' phone numbers as "buddies" on my instant messenger service, so I can type a message to them in IM, and they receive it as a text message on their phone. At the moment, nothing else captures their attention with the same effectiveness.
I knew that in many countries, texting was a primary communication method, especially in parts of Asia, but my first exposure to the concept of large-scale, one to many communication via text messaging came with the news accounts of the evacuation of extranationals from Lebanon during the bloody and inane hostilities there in 2006. As presumed adults began stupidly battering each other and innocents with military weapons there, the Swedish government used a series of text messages to get its citizens out of Lebanon, even before the United States had seriously mobilized its effort to just begin getting Americans out:
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