At the end of class the other day, a student who had some questions before an imminent midterm asked me when I would be available the next day for office hours. Now, I commute an hour each way to campus, and I had planned on good library time the next day.
I suggested a solution: “Why don’t you IM me if you have questions? I’ll be on-line most of the day?”
I have to say, the student’s response took me a little aback: “Why would I IM my professor? That’s just weird.”
My perspective came from thinking of IM-technology as a tool to enhance, enrich, and expand communication, one which is suitable for a variety of contexts, both personal and professional. While I certainly do use IM in a personal context, I am straining at the bit to think of viable ways in which to harness the “back-channel” potential of it in the classroom. And, while some meetings are best done face-to-face, during the busiest times of the year when every second seems to count, I must confess, I could be persuaded to hold a number of meetings electronically.
It occurred to me, though, that this student’s objections to holding conference via instant message conveyed an undercurrent of imputation–an imputation, in fact, of violation. I had unwittingly wandered into a DMZ between public and private domains. Although I, myself, never troll through Facebook, I have heard similar anecdotes about students expressing feelings of violation when their professors and administrators look them up or simply have a presence of their own on Facebook. I wonder how they will feel when future employers who have fewer qualms than I do about trodding into “private” public territory read about their undergraduate escapades? (Dean Dad has a great post about this! And Techist is using Facebook in very interesting ways…)
No doubt, there is a generational gap at work here, one in which notional boundaries between “public” and “private” are contestable. While I want to remain sensitive to students’ desire for privacy, it also seems to me to be the case that the academy can do more to embrace these tools and to help define the parameters of etiquette.
Readers, how do you tactfully negotiate the “public” and “private”?
June 9, 2007 at 3:06 pm
Well I can’t really address your question but, this is something I have run into. I’ve gone out to lunch with Steve a couple of times and some friends think this is really weird. For me it hasn’t been too awkward because I’ve chosen to ignore the stereotypical boundaries that are supposed to exist between faculty and students. Recently I have read some articles on how the construction of a separate teen culture (that mostly happened post WWII) is an unnecessary creation that has only stratified relations between adolescence and adults. Teens are not expected to act like adults or engage with them in anyway, which, is kind of bizarre when you think about it because that is the direction teens should be heading, adulthood. So obviously the answer is change the culture, simple enough right? heh
June 9, 2007 at 4:11 pm
I’ve been IM-ing with students for a couple of years now, since a seminar when the students made it their goal to get me on IM. The initial reaction from students with whom I IM’ed was not violation, but surprise. One student said, “I never thought I’d be doing this with a professor.”
Since then I’ve told students from the first day that they could reach me by IM as they needed to. Since *they* contact me, all the feedback has been positive, if a bit surprised.
June 9, 2007 at 7:20 pm
I too have used IM with students (since the start of the last school year). My sense is that some students love the instant accessibility (10-15 contact me regularly that way, even now), while others don’t see it as a way to contact me so they don’t.
I did ask students at the start of the spring semester for their IM usernames, thinking I’d know who they were when they contacted me. Midway through the semester one of the students said that she and some other students wondered why I had wanted them. I explained my reasoning, and she replied, “Oh, we were afraid you wanted to track our away messages to see if we were really studying….”
So, one of the things I think we need to do as we embrace these tools of communication is discuss with students exactly how we see ourselves using these tools. Because they are typically personal tools at this point, reorienting them in this way may take some time and clarification of goals.
June 11, 2007 at 2:20 am
Very good question. I’ve use IM for years quite successfully, but I still get the, “IM-ing the professor? This is weird” reaction. I’m constantly crossing these weird public/private this silo/that silo boundaries. I think I like making people feel a bit uneasy with their desire for neat distinctions. I admit that it often causes uncomfortable situations for me but I enjoy trying to figure out why these situations are uncomfortable. I agree with Jeff that we should explain why we communicate the way we do. I imagine email might have gone through a similar phase, though perhaps not as dramatic.
June 15, 2007 at 10:53 am
I’m on the fence about using IM with students, actually. I can see the benefits of responding to the questions as they arise and of encouraging students, in a sense, to weave their learning deeply into their day. I also see that it is a time-saver for us. Using chat for specified office hours makes sense to me.
BUT–and here I go again, much as I did in a response to Jim Groom’s recent post on Facebook– precisely because students are on IM all the time (and venturing into their anything-but-school space doesn’t bother me in the least) I want to resist IM. I want to resist being available to them all the time. I want them to turn to themselves and each other for answers, to puzzle out what I might have meant by a comment in class or an assignment. I want them to go deeper and not reach for me as though I could be switched on and in their service at the click of a button. I want them to have to trek across campus and find me in my office and have a f2f chat; I’m worried about them losing the fine art of engaging in a conversation f2f with their teacher.
That being said, I am seriously considering using a chatroom for some of my office hours (to help them articulate questions in writing) and Twitter this fall.
~Barbara