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Saturday, October 07, 2006

Email is for Old People

Love this! A very timely email newsletter from the man on the pulse George Siemens at elearnspace. (The email Newsletter can be viewed at the elearnspace blog)

Following on from my latest blog about the purpose of a Blog Course Communication Center, George highlights the point that if you want to connect with students educational establishments need to consider communicating in mediums that are more natural to the students of the 21st century.

The elearnspace blog links to an "Email is for old people" report* that looks at teenagers and technology.

The report states that the basic preferred, natural and new technology for communicating with friends is instant messaging or text messaging, but they use e-mail to communicate with "old people".

The upshot of the report was that colleges in America are trying new techniques to try and reach students. These inlude primarily:

1. Mobile phone text messaging
2. Instant Messaging
3. Myspace/ Facebook the very popular social-networking service (similiar to blogs)

George points out that, in response the college listed in the "Email is for old people" article has decided to use Myspace as an additional tool in dialoguing with students and that results have been positive.

George goes onto say that "When we stop asking students to come to our space and use our tools, we start seeing progress
(imagine if the internet required different computers to access different websites...why do we expect that when students encounter our learning materials? Instead of an LMS, our content should come to the student in their native environment (blogs, wikis, social networking tools, iPods, whatever))"**

*"Teens and Technology" (2005) Pew Internet and American Life Project.
** George Siemens (2006) elearnspace blog

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