Anatomy Lab, World Without Emale
Summary:
Blakewell: People are generally very generous and one on one inter personal conversations. He says when everyone getting emales from that personal address, they conceptualize this like you’re there in the room telling them something. Blakewell: We have to break that connection. It’s one of the unfortunate side effects of this sort of arbitrary decision that emale addresses should be largely attached to names.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
It would be very weird if i poked my headin in your office and asked you a question and you just look down and ignore me. That woud be like, a really big deal. People are generally very generous and one on one inter personal conversations. We take this type of interaction seriously. So when everyone getting emales from that personal address, internally in their minds, they they conceptualize this like you’re there in the room telling them something. It’s the most natural thing in the world. Blakewell, let me just ask you to follow up here. We have to break that connection. It’s one of the the unfortunate side effects of this sort of arbitrary decision that emale addresses should be largely attached to names. And my book, world without emale, i get into the history of why we do that. And spacically, arbitrary, it has to go back to the account. It goes back to the account system on the original time share servers on which the original emale clients were produced. And i think it’s kind of an unfortunate tradition that we put in place for exactly this reason. Is because when we we see emale addresses associate with names, we just think of that as being a standing for the person. That doesn’t scale though. It doesn’t scale two 600 people who have that address, 600 people who feel like you’re just standing there in the room and they can just ask you a quick question, and of course you’ll respond. And that’s fine if there’s three people in the rom but if there are 600 people in the room, it wouldn’t scale, right? So that is the issue with this, this particular convention we’d use. So what you need to do here, jenna, is get any of this sort of personalized communication channel out of your interaction with this anatomy lab students. Now you have a couple of options here. For example, you can have the i t department an ne university or the texav t a set up a different emale account for communicating with these students. This should be an account that does not have a name associated with it. It should be announcement at anatomy lab dot school dot e d, or in fo at anatomy lab dot school, tha d, or whatever, but not name. So now when you’re sending out information to these people, it seems generic, like someone just posted something on the bulletin board. There is not this implicit, internal, culturally mediated assumption that if i send a message to this address, i should, of course, get an answer, because it’s no longer ginna talking to me. It is a generic announcement channel. Now you can use like a, you probly should be used in any ways, mailing list software to manage such a big mailing list, anyway. So just get a different address. Your other option, of course, is just to move away from emal list to main way that you communicate with these students. Use one of these educational software systems like blackboard. I’m sure your school subscribes to one of these. Maybe you should be running the lab through one of these coarse management sights whre thre’s an announce page where you put your announcements, and that’s where people go to see the announcements. And they can subscribe to him, typically, so they can get emails from the software, not from you, that says, other’s new announcements on the page. Write, again, we want a d personalized communication when we’re dealing with lots of people, because personalized communication does not scale. Finally, give these students really clear instructions on how to ask questions, and frequently, ask information that could prevent those questions from being asked in the first place. Sno, every announcement you do can say, hey, questions or comments? Go here. And it can be a page, and that that web page says, ok, hereis the five most commonly asked questions. Here the answers. This probably will will solve it. If these don’t solve it, here’s what your your fallback is. Its the contact your graduates don’t t a hear’s how you find their contact information. So now your studentsr have a crystal clear place to go that answers their common questions and tells them what to do if those don’t apply. You’re giving them clear instructions. So now if they want to try to go around those instructions, they know that’s what they’re doing. They are seeing it in black and white, and they’re deciding to still go around it. Which brings us to the third and final point is, if they still find your address, if they still try to answer you directly, you have to tough love it. Theyr’e 600 of them. (Time 0:10:58)