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I still like email.

CobraA1 Updated - 24th Aug 2009

I still like email.

The nice thing about email is that it's not a pushy as the other forms of communication. It seems that the other stuff just demands too much attention.

I like a method where I can just check it once a day and not worry about it the rest of the day.

"2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction."

This baffles me as well, as frankly that's just pure nonsense. Are we really so poor at face to face that it's gone below online?

I think that's frankly telling that we've got our values in the wrong places and that we're killing our real life social skills by pretending to be "social" online too much.

"1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum."

That too is far too broad of a statement to mean much. I've seen all kinds of teaching approaches online. From very basic approaches of just using it to post and receive assignments, to full blown community-like online sessions. Could mean pretty much anything.

"But a university email gives you that university?s identity and at least a little control over security, spam levels and mailing list distributions."

. . . and frankly, I hate it. They send every tiny little event, no matter how uninterested you are, to everybody. Filtering by mailing list helps a bit, but frankly most of the time they are ignored and simply sent to the global list where you're supposed to get the important stuff.

. . . and, frankly, Gmail's spam filtering is 100x better than the college system's sorry excuse for a "spam filter," which doesn't even deserve the name. I ended up just forwarding it to my Gmail.

I'd much rather go with the world-class spam filtering of Google than some spam filtering system at a university which was probably done as a final project by some student with a bright idea that was only effective long enough to get a passing grade.

Universities aren't really known for having the budgets to afford an effective enterprise-class solution.

And, frankly, Gmail is more effective than even those.

"The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube."

Not surprised, but I don't use it. Waste of time.

"The world we know now has changed beyond recognition from what it was 30 years ago."

Yeah, instead of talking constantly on the phone, they're typing constantly on the phone. Forgive me if I'm not seeing that this "change" as really that big.

It's the same thing in new packaging. Nobody's more productive because of it.

Is this changing the world?

Sure, if you count wasting inordinate amounts of time talking about nothing as "productivity" somehow.

Talking more is not the same as doing more. In fact, talking more usually means doing less.