Bret Weber, Department of Social Work, University of North Dakota
Bill Caraher, Department of History, University of North Dakota
This post originated in a phone call between Bret Weber and myself. Bret called wondering what I thought about adding some kind of statement about email expectations to my syllabus. The goal of the statement was, as Bret explains below, to control in some way the 24/7 expectations of access that some students have developed. I responded to Bret’s query (in an unhelpful way), by speculating on the roots of this expectation in the proliferation of social networking applications which provide almost constant access to a dense network of information and individuals. Bret’s response forced me to bring my utopian ramblings back to practical reality. He gave me the last word, but comment away!
Bret Weber: I’m committed to being responsive to student needs. This has increasingly meant answering e-mail questions within minutes or at least a few short hours, often at all times of the day and on weekends. In part I’ve done this as a simple management tool–it’s easier to deal with student issues right away rather than letting them pile up, and before they become bigger and more troubling to both me and the student.
However, I feel that I’m creating unrealistic expectations and possibly unproductive dynamics. I remember as a student hesitating to ‘bother’ a professor even during posted office hours. While that is an end of the responsiveness continuum that belongs to the past, I do think that the ’24/7 professor’ is problematic. For that reason, I am considering posting that “while I will frequently respond sooner,” students should only expect formal responses to e-mail and phone messages by three cut-off points each week—a form of virtual office hour.
This would afford me the freedom of responding right away, while sending the signal that I am not a 24/7 virtual professor but an actual person. Students would have the opportunity to ask questions or raise issues whenever it is convenient for them, while I would be providing a clear idea of when they could expect a response.
________________________________
Bill Caraher: When Bret brought this issue to my intention, my immediate response was that his “unrealistic expectations” and “unproductive dynamics” are the product of the social media “mini-revolution” that has begun to condition how we use the internet to interact with not only our students, but also our colleagues, family members, and peers. Applications like Facebook, Twitter, RSS feed aggregators, and instant messaging allow us to appear accessible almost any time we are online (and for some of us, that means any time we are at our computers). After all, the Twitter feed grows, Facebook statuses change, and the email machine pops along happily whether we’re paying attention or not. But sending a message or changing one’s status or Tweeting implies that we believe that someone else is out there (and perhaps a particular person or audience) is paying attention. Broadcasting a Tweet or sending an email, in fact, not only depends upon, but also reinforces, the expectation that we share a social space where some kind of interaction is required.
This has crucial implications for how we understand the role of faculty and teachers in higher education. On the one hand, social networking environments can appear to be a kind of utopian environment and offer an antidote to so many of higher educations well-rehearsed woes. After all, it’s a dream that students can work together virtually 24 hours a day, spanning distances, and interacting online whenever they find two or three of them in the same cyber-neighborhood. One of the best seminar experience that I ever had was an online seminar (back in “the day”) with participants from the US, Europe, and Australia. Every hour of the day some seminar participant was awake and sending off some kind of contribution to a threaded-discussion board that now appears primitive in comparison to the contemporary social networking environment. In our romanticized “days of yore”, the college system where faculty and students live together enabled a kind of round the clock intellectual atmosphere that broke down traditional barriers of “classroom time”, “office hours”, or “personal time”. Access to a faculty member (and faculty access to students) continuously via email or other social networking application is simply a variation on these themes. My online class, for example, is explicitly set up to run asynchronously. I did this because I reckoned that time on the internet was sufficiently fluid that I did not need to set up specific times for assignments and lessons.
Despite my utopian conjuring, I do admit that students and faculty must establish some kinds of barriers to ensure the continued validity of the evaluation and assessment process. And, of course, all social networks (whether online or flesh and blood) have rules of access. But I do wonder if limiting access even via email sends a pretty strong message to the students. If nothing else, it punctures the illusion that the particular class is the most important thing on a particular faculty member’s docket (a useful illusion if only because it can be used reciprocally; e.g. if I have to come to class, then you have to come to class, et c.). Along the same lines, it shatters the utopian space offered by various social media applications (and foreshadowed by email) that there were places where a kind of continuous access was possible and even desirable.
Maybe I’m over reacting. All Bret is saying is that he is going to limit in a formal way his responses to students. Maybe it’s the formality of the limitation that seems like a kind of cop out to me. I still hope that the internet and the 24/7 professor remains a useful illusion, and that the nature of access through the internet and, perhaps more importantly, in the realm of social networking sites is allowed to function along more natural lines.
So what do you think, Bret?
________________________________
Bret: First, like so many golden age myths, I’m not aware that professors and students ever had a ‘round the clock’ requirement of accessibility. Even a prince’s tutor must have been allowed some time to sleep and a day of rest! Additionally, I don’t believe that non-stop accessibility is necessary to expressing the importance that I feel about my classes, students, or even learning in general.
It’s not my intention to limit my responsiveness to students. Rather, I wanted to let them know that while I might respond quite quickly, they could be assured of a few times each week when they could count on receiving an answer. Rather than limiting my professional responsiveness to students, I am simply trying to check this excessive and unrealistic idea of being a 24/7 professor.
Students may text message one another through the hours when they should be sleeping, but they also binge drink and engage other harmful behaviors. Part of my role is to present a mature example and to relate to them in a professional manner. I want to be responsive, address multiple learning styles, and be empathetic, but that does not require feeding illusions about availability.
________________________________
Bill: Bret’s response is a fair one, and, of course, I recognized that my call for 24/7 accessibility is, indeed, utopian. But on the other hand, I stand by my assessment of student culture. Social media website, in particular, both provide a platform for a much more intimate and continuous level of access than was possible even 5 years ago and, perhaps more importantly for Bret’s observation, these kinds of sites which promote kinds of immersive behavior create an expectation that individuals are accessible at almost any time and almost anywhere. Bret characterized this kind of expectation as socially corrosive (like binge drinking or all-nighters), but I’d submit that unlike binge drinking or other socially destructive acts the level of “connectivity” possible as social networking sites holds forth tremendous potential for collaborative habits. In other words, we may want to think twice before trying to break students of the habit of expecting prompt responses from peers and colleagues.
Bret’s original query was interesting to me largely because it reveals a kind of student behavior that has clear roots in an increasingly networked culture and can be productive if channeled properly. For example, I wonder if the expectation for a quick response could power, in effect, a FAQ wiki or the kind of user forums that are common place in communities (of a sort) who use open-source software. In fact, a simple alternative to your syllabus caveat could be to insist that students submit any question that would not violate FERPA or involve a problem of a sensitive nature, to an electronic “answer” forum. In this forum, fellow students could answer a student’s question or you could chime in, at your convenience.
I may seem naïve, but I find that Twitter works this way for me all the time. Two quick examples: one from my blog (I received an answer to my query within an hour of posting it), and one just yesterday. I quipped that I could not understand how a book could have an Amazon sales rank before it was actually published. Within 30 minutes I had 3 answers from folks explaining that pre-orders count in Amazon’s sales ranking. What’s more, my social networks in Twitter and through my blog are basically the same size as a large class at UND, and represent a far more dispersed body of knowledge I’d guess that a classroom social network is much more likely to produce an answer than my dispersed group of Twitter followers and Facebook friends. If you have doubts about student’s willingness to play along, offer a few points for helpful responses, and let their web habits do the rest.
What do you think?
Teaching Thursdays 