This is how I am feeling at the moment. I have a router that is dying and I have irregular access. Last night, my wonderful brother helped me get the provider's phone number and I went through tech support, only to be told what I already knew -- the router is dying and I have irregular access. I have ordered another one and it will get here on Monday or Tuesday and then I have to deal with setting it up. Oh well.
There are so many ways the internet has changed things. I send snail mail letters -- thank you notes to those who loaned objects to the exhibit I have curated, and letters to my mother, who is in assisted living and never knew how to use a computer anyway. But I rely on the internet for just about everything these days. Suddenly not having reliable access to it is rather unnerving.
Come one below the Indy 500 of section divisors and we can have a chat.
Over the past couple of years I have become more and more reliant on email for communication with students. I have only 5 hours or so of office hours, but mostly my students contact me through email. Many of my colleagues have more scheduled office hours, but they either don't check email at home, or make it a policy not to answer students' messages beyond whatever would be deamed reasonable. I am odd that way. It is me and my cats at home, and there is only so much "life" we share (they are usually not particularly good conversationalists, and their idea of fun is sleeping, which we can't do together all the time). So when I want to entertain myself I take a walk on the internets. That means I am on the internets a lot. And email is kinda fun. I do find myself answering the same question over and over, but I sometimes cut and paste. I can proofread what I say, go back and make sure it meant what I thought it meant, etc. And in a way I feel as though I have a better handle on their personalities when they email panicked at 1:30 in the morning the day a paper is due. Of course, they also know that I am up that late, but that doesn't bother me.
My phone number is in the phone book. I have a mobile as well; the only student who has that is the one who catsat for me last summer. In 21 years I have been called at home by a student who did not have an invitation to do so only twice. The first time was an actual threat, and that is another story. The other time was a new freshman who was really clueless about boundaries. I feel comfortable with interacting with students via email at all hours. Other faculty feel differently. What limits do you set in terms of email contact with students?
The line I do draw in terms of interaction with students is that I will not friend current students on Facebook. I use Facebook to interact with friends and as a way of keeping track of people I know (or knew in a past life -- there are a lot of folks from high school and lots from college, and there are a few from grad school and people I worked on digs with etc., etc.). They post pics of their families and pets, travels and adventures, and I hear about jobs, discuss politics, etc., and I want to feel free to do so without having any overlap with current students. I know some people do share Facebook with their students or have different "identities" for a work persona and a personal one. I don't want to have to keep things that carefully separate. I am not that "neat" in my lives.
The last three grants I applied for were done online and the last several articles were submitted online as well. The workshop I am facilitating at (in Delaware, a day or two after Sandy blows through -- this could be fun!) and the site report I am preparing are being organized online. My memberships and subscriptions are paid online. I do plagiarism checking and look at articles in my own research through my computers at work or at home, and now back publications of many museums are online free of charge as well, which is really helpful for updating my lectures and helping students find good sources for their papers. It also saves our university library a lot of money (those museum catalogues that are out of print can be horribly expensive!).
I know that my life is like almost anyone else's in the western world (and more and more in the rest of it as well), in the way it has changed with access to the internet and the quintillions of bytes of info out there. But on a night like last night where I was almost ready to pack up and go to McDonalds because they have wifi and are open late into the night, I realize how much I have come to rely on it.
And I don't even teach online. What is that like?
What are your experiences (good and bad) with email, internet, and other electronic technology? Where is your field going? What does your school or university think it will be doing in the near future with the computer stuff?