Rethinking How We Communicate With Students Via an LMS
by Audrey Watters
on 02. Aug, 2011
in News
Rethinking (Student) Communication
When Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Facebook’s new messaging system last year, he started the press event with an anecdote about his girlfriend’s little sister and her friends — how high school students use (or rather, don’t use) email. That’s not a surprising revelation to those of us who work or live with teenagers.
A recent Pew Internet study found that only 11% of teens say they use email to communicate with friends, and even that figure seems a little high. For many students — both in high school and in college — email is not their preferred mode of personal communication; rather, it’s the mode they’re forced to use for professional purposes (i.e., for school).
In its attempt to become the central hub of communications — personal and professional — Facebook’s new messaging system was seen as an attempt to “kill” email. (“Take that, Google!” is the subtext here, of course.) There are plenty of reasons why doing so makes sense (I mean, ugh, email), and even though it hasn’t killed email — not remotely — there’s a lot to like about Facebook’s new messaging system: it’s real-time. It ditches the formality of email. It can be synchronous or asynchronous, depending if the person you’re talking to is online. You can respond via email or SMS, so you aren’t force to visit the site in order to respond.
Rethinking Communication via the LMS
All of the things that make Facebook’s messaging system appealing for students and for schools — something I wrote about back in November last year — are largely absent when it comes to the traditional learning management sy
