Submitted by Michael Widner on May 14, 2009, 09:58 PM
I came across two items of interest recently, both treating the ways in which we communicate with students. It looks like online office hours are catching on. Stanford now has professors holding office hours on Facebook:

"Stanford's transposes the concept of 'office hours' to Facebook. Beginning in March 2009, Stanford has brought a handful of high-profile scholars to the social networking site in an effort to 'make its discoveries and knowledge easily and widely accessible online,' according to Ian Hsu, the University's director of Internet media outreach."

Personally, I think this is a less than ideal site for office hours, but I laud the effort to meet students where they congregate. As we all know, very few students come to real office hours, preferring instead either to reach their professors via email (which, apparently, is incredibly old-fashioned; more on that in a moment) or simply not to come at all.

My problem with using Facebook stems from the fact that I am an avid user of the site myself and like to keep some distance between my professional and personal lives. While I don't mind former students adding me as friends, I don't like current students doing so as I then feel the need to censor myself from time to time. I, like many others, often use Facebook as a place for sharing links to articles and causes (though I generally avoid the plague of quizzes). Since I don't want to make any students inadvertently uncomfortable expressing views they know differ from my own, having current students as "friends" makes me likewise uncomfortable. Plus, I also like to make status updates complaining about grading. So, as I've detailed in previous posts, I prefer a separate IM account that I use only for my online office hours, which has quickly become a permanent tool in my pedagogical box. Oddly enough, since I've begun holding office hours online, I've seen my in-person visits during office hours increase, as well. I suspect this increase results from my students understanding that I'm trying to be accessible to them, so they feel more comfortable coming to see me.

Still, as I mentioned, I like that Stanford is reaching out to its students in this way. As Matthew Gabriele, an Asst. Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Virginia Tech writes, students don't communicate over email as much or as obsessively as older users of technology do. Instead, Facebook, Twitter, text messages, IMs, and other microbursts of information are far more prevalent. While I often bemoan the addiction to cell phones and texting that I see all around me (why can't people just be where they physically are for a few minutes?), Gabriele rightly notes:

"To a degree, we in academe are in the position we lamented of our parents -- a day late and a dollar short, still using the VCR. High School/ College students know and use email, perhaps they even blog themselves. But they don't use email in the ubiquitous way we do. They communicate in different ways, via txt, IM, tweet, or status update. This, of course, has long-term implications because these are the technologies that they'll bring with them to our courses and then outside of college. These new technologies are the ones that will govern our ability to communicate with them because it's how they communicate with one another."

I still send regular emails to my students and give the syllabus and assignments on a Drupal-powered website, but I think Gabriele's right that we can't rely solely on these already outdated technologies if we want to communicate with our students effectively. I'm considering starting a second Twitter account (current one: mwidner) strictly for teaching purposes through which I could relay details like grading progress, office hour updates, assignment due date reminders, and points to keep in mind as studtheyents are writing or reading. Although I feel the mainstream media's obsessive love affair with Twitter overstates the usefulness of the service somewhat, my natural inclination is to employ as many different technologies as possible to reach my students. Since Twitter is popular (and could itself serve as an interesting case study of how formal constraints influence content) and rapid, I'm more than willing to add it to my arsenal.

Has anyone found any these or any other methods of communication effective or ineffective so far? What sorts of issues do these different information streams raise as regards student learning? Are we following the usage patterns of students because we've (or I have) internalized the student-as-consumer concept? Are we just contributing to information overload?