Perspectives on Communicating with the Net Generation

Abstract

benefits and challenges of using e-mail to communicate with students. All of the instructors interviewed for the article felt that e-mail’s capacity to facilitate instructor feedback rendered the medium a potentially valuable teaching tool, as students could use it to clarify questions about course material. Many of these instructors also complained, however, that their students often used e-mail in ways that were not directly related to instruction. Examples of these non-instructional uses ranged from requests for information and demands for assistance to complaints and excuses; often, students used e-mail to criticize and critique in ways that they might not have in face-to-face communication. Some students assumed that e-mail accessibility meant that instructors were available to them at any time of the day or night. Instructors felt that students took advantage of that perceived accessibility, leaving instructors with a sense that e-mail communication was becoming an infringement on their time and, sometimes, privacy. In other instances, instructors felt that some of the messages they received from students were too informal or that they were inappropriate for academic communication in other ways. Unfortunately, Glayter notes, many "students seem unaware that what they write in an e-mail could adversely affect them " (¶18). These inappropriate and informal e-mails were perceived by the instructors as representing poor judgment on the parts of the students. Many instructors expressed displeasure with students who disclosed large amounts of personal and