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Lunch-table messaging
March 5, 2007

As the parent of a junior at Northeastern University, I know it can be difficult to reach today’s college students, even though they are “wired, wireless, Sidekicked, Facebooked, YouTubed, and bleeping with instant messages and text messages,” as Washington Post staff writer Susan Kinzie puts it in the Sunday paper. Kinzie’s article notes that students are “surprisingly tricky for administrators to reach” despite their being “more connected than ever,”

The article quotes Gwendolyn Dungy of the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators as saying, "Everyone is hoping there's not some emergency where they can't get in touch with students."

The source of the communication problem: “Land lines are all but obsolete. Cellphone numbers are slippery. And e-mail gets lost, overlooked, erased, or ignored.” The article paraphrases George Washington University student Ryan Brier as saying he “never gives out his GWU e-mail address--except to people he doesn't really want to hear from.”

The article says many schools are turning to increasingly high-tech cell-phone and Web-portal schemes to keep in touch with students. But perhaps the best approach is low tech. At Trinity University, administrators scatter paper notices on lunch tables and tape them to restroom doors. "You get right in their face," says Trinity president Patricia McGuire.

Posted by Rick Nelson on March 5, 2007 | Comments (0)