[Air-l] email is 'out'

[Sarah Robbins]

Deanya: I think I have to disagree with you about availability and overall
productivity. The "distributed attention" type model has shown that today's
students have a bit more ability to multitask well than we do. There's no
doubt that their ability to do this may need to mature (ie they need to know
which signals are important and which can wait) but their digital print
settings (lots and lots of simultaneous windows) and their connectivity via
phones, Blackberry, IM, email etc. suits what the workforce is looking for
which is people who can do five things at once and do them all well. I teach
my students to discriminate between all of the signals (ie sources of info
they are connected to) so they can pay selective attention to what is really
important at any one moment.
There's certainly a time to shut it all off and focus on one task or one
form of communication but as someone who multitasks all the time myself, I
can't with good conscience preach to them that they'll have to ditch their
connectivity to fit in to corporate culture.
Just my opinion as a techno-addict.
S

On 10/14/06, Deanya Lattimore <mdlattim at syr.edu> wrote:
>
> Sylvia, you may be feeling old, but I'm sure that you're not looking
> it, LOL.
>
> This article should be renamed, "Email is for People Who Are Too Busy
> To Be Slaves to Their Blackberries."  Age as a variable is being
> conflated with responsibility, so the studies of usage are flawed atm.
>
> I teach freshmen, and one of two things is going to happen:
> either they will learn that in order to be productive, they will have
> to abandon their "I'm always available" strategies OR
> the workforce will have to adapt to people who think it is perfectly
> fine to text message and step out of the room during meetings to take
> phone calls.
> I don't know WHICH it is going to be, but my students don't seem to
> understand that being available all of the time means that one's
> overall productivity is substantially reduced.
>
> Which one's it gonna be?
>
> Deanya
> :-D.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Saturday, October 14, 2006, at 08:16  AM, Sylvia Korupp wrote:
>
> > Just saw an interesting article that made me smile and look quite old.
> > SK
> >
> >
> > Teens: E-Mail Is For Old People
> >
> > Excerpts: For some schools, the correct answer is: set up a MySpace
> > page. After all, there's nothing hipper for students than being
> > "friends" with your college registrar or school principal. The
> > intriguing thing about this method of reaching students is that it's
> > most often not "instant" at all; students receive messages when they
> > log
> > in or they visit the school's MySpace pages - the equivalent of using
> > e-mail and a Web portal.
> >
> > * Source: Teens: E-Mail Is For Old People, Nate Anderson, ars technica,
> > 06/10/02
> >
> > http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061002-7877.html
> >
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-- 
Sarah "Intellagirl" Robbins
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