Students need boundaries, and so do you. This is as true online as it is in the classroom. At the same time, students need feedback and a stable, responsive learning environment. All too often, though, email presents an obstacle to creating both boundaries and responsiveness. As users of email, we often get into the habit of checking our email whenever we happen to be online, and answering whatever message happen to be in the inbox when we log in. For teachers interacting with students online, however, that behavior can be detrimental to both the learning environment and our peace of mind.
In the first place, answering email intermittently creates false expectations and frustrations. Sometimes students get a response almost instantaneously, but sometimes they don’t. When they don’t, they feel ignored. This quickly leads to multiple emails from the same student asking the same questions over and over, prefaced with phrases like “I’m not sure if my last message went through,” and “I think there may be something wrong with the system.” Nine times out of ten, the problem isn’t with the system, it is with the student’s unrealistic expectations. In such a situation, the instructor is put immediately on the defensive, having to reassure the student, and perhaps even justify his/her time away from the keyboard.
Instead of creating those unrealistic expectations, set some firm ground rules at the beginning of the semester. Instead of saying things like “email me any time,” or “I’m up late,” give the students some online “office hours” that you will check your inbox, and set a response window. For instance, you could say that you check your email most days between 10:00am and 6:00pm, and that you will try to respond to all emails within 24 hours (this is the currently accepted best practice rule for returning emails). If you don’t answer emails on weekends, or are going to be out of town or otherwise AFK during your normal “office hours,” let your students know that in advance.
Most importantly, once you set the ground rules, stick to them. Even if you are online late at night, don’t answer your student emails. If you feel like catching up on work after hours, save your replies as drafts, and send them during your next response window. That way, your students won’t come to expect responses at 2:00am Wednesday or 9:00pm Sunday night, and when you go out of town for vacation or a conference you won’t come back to panicked, frustrated students and a hundred emails wondering why you haven’t responded to questions.
During the break, Apple released a production version of its popular Safari web browser for Microsoft Windows. Early benchmarks indicate that Safari is the fastest-loading web browser on the PC, and the first to correctly render images with embedded color profiles. In other words, if you routinely view professionally-produced images on the PC, you’ll probably want to download Safari, because Internet Explorer hasn’t been showing you what photographers and artists want you to see. (You can see an example of the difference here; Safari is in the background, Firefox, which renders images in the same way as Internet Explorer, is in the foreground.)
Most importantly, though, Safari for PC gives PC users a chance to see what the world looks like for their Mac-using colleagues, and gives us all a much-needed second cross-platform browser, now that Internet Explorer no longer supports the Mac.
If you use iTunes or QuickTime on Windows, you should see Safari in Software Update, otherwise, you can download it directly at http://www.apple.com/safari.
SPSS Technical Support has recently detected a problem in SPSS 16.0.x whereby modifications are made to an existing data file and the file appears to save, yet the file is missing from the system. This problem canoccur if you exit the application without explicitly saving your file first. This problem has been observed when working with larger size data files or saving to a slower device (such as over the network) such that the saving process takes longer than 3 seconds. It is strongly advised that you do not save your files in this manner until the issue is addressed which isslated for the next maintenance release.
SPSS is evaluating the most appropriate solution but until it is available, always save your file explicitly via File->Save or the save toolbar button prior to exiting the application.
The Faculty Technology Center is partnering with the Biology Department to document this year’s Tropical Ecology field trip to Puerto Rico, March 15th-22nd 2008. The goal is provide a record of the species and other natural phenomena the students encounter for later analysis, as well as documenting some of the activities the class engages in. As part of the project, we will be uploading a video podcast every night with some of the highlights from the day’s encounters. If you are interested in following the students’ progress, watch this space, or use the direct link at http://itac.edublogs.org/category/podcast/tropical_ecology/.
If you’ve been hearing about Twitter, but aren’t sure what it is, how it’s different from blogging, or why you might be interested in it, the latest episode of the Common Craft Show lays it all out for you, in an easy-to-follow papercraft presentation from the people who brought you Wikis in Plain English and Blogs in Plain English, previously featured here.
