“I often think that the blog headlines makes my job look rather different from the (hugely rewarding) day to day reality of university teaching …” (more)
[Mary Beard, A Don's Life, 3 December]
“UCD is moving its email and calendaring for almost 22,000 students to Google Apps as part of a four-year contract that’s expected to save the university close to €250,000 …” (more)
[Gordon Smith, Silicon Republic, 3 October]
“Irish students are 12 times more likely to try and contact someone via Facebook than via email, according to a new survey. The Data Solutions survey, carried out on behalf of Blue Coat Systems, found that while 75% of Irish students would use Facebook as their main channel for communicating online …” (more)
[Business ETC, 15 August]
“As a young academic Head of Department in the late 1980′s without any form of management training. I was eager to learn my craft and so devoured all the popular management books of the time. I remember that books by Tom Peters were particularly sought after. One book in particular that I found very useful and still dip into occasionally was How to Make Your Life Easier at Work …” (more)
[Richard Thorn, BlueBrick.ie, 12 August]
“On the hard drive of my computer I have, at an estimate, some 250,000 emails that I have sent or received over a period of just under 20 years. Some of them are either very short, or really boring, but even if you discount these I have thousands of emails that document what I have thought or said or what others have said to me. They are a diary, and a notebook, and a miscellany of ideas. Are they also useless? …” (more)
[Ferdinand von Prondzynski, University Blog, 2 June]
“It can’t be denied that people will judge you based on the email service you choose – whether it be Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail or AOL. Hunch, a web app that provides specialized recommendations, surveyed a group of their users to see which characteristics defined users of different webmail providers …” (more)
[Amy Lee, Huffington Post, 10 March]
“Thus spake Zuckerberg: ‘We don’t think a modern messaging system is going to be e-mail’. The Facebook founder said so in November, when his company unveiled its new messaging platform: a system, sans subject lines, designed on the assumption that in the future most electronic communication will be brief, informal bursts …” (more)
[Inside Higher Ed, 6 January]
“Assume the opposite of the situation I actually have at USC. Assume I am deeply disappointed in my university president. I send emails to my trusted colleagues and suggest that we put forward a vote of no confidence in the president … I find out in June that the president has moved to get rid of me …” (more)
[Bill Tierney, 21st Century Scholar, 22 July]
“Assume our usual email address is the university’s server. I get, roughly, 50 email messages a day and another 20 that are purely junk. I work at a private university, and like the mailbox where I receive paper correspondence, I always have assumed that the university has the right to circumscribe what I receive. What about what I send? …” (more)
[Bill Tierney, 21st Century Scholar, 21 July]
“An anonymous e-mailer adopting the pseudonym of ‘John Murphy’ has exploited a major breach in UCC’s online security setup by sending an unsolicited email to most of UCC’s registered students …” (more)
[Cork Student News, 30 April]
“For the first time in more than 10 years of using mobile email services, my phone has no mail sitting unread or unanswered. The screenshot is proof. I needed some help getting to this historic juncture, starting with my late conversion to IMAP services. I had resisted moving from POP to IMAP because I knew I would lose some mail and that happened four days ago …” (more)
[Bernie Goldbach, Inside View, 30 January]
“More universities are set to follow Macquarie and outsource staff email to parties such as Google’s Gmail, with Curtin University close to a deal with Microsoft. About 14 Australian universities have already outsourced their student email to Gmail or Microsoft’s Live@edu service, but this week Macquarie became the first to migrate staff to the so-called cloud in a deal with Gmail …” (more)
[Andrew Trounson, The Australian, 13 January]
“In this always-connected digital world, most of us suffer from some level of communication overload. Just thinking about my cluttered and unorganized e-mail in-box gives me a deep sense of anxiety. There are some solutions out there …” (more)
[Nick Bilton, New York Times, 4 December]
“Email is losing effectiveness as a standalone communications medium, according to international expert Erik van Ommeren of IT services company, Sogeti. Organisations today also need to harness collaborative technologies and cloud computing. Speaking at a SOCITM (Society of Information Technology Management) Northern Ireland event recently, Erik van Ommeren explained how collaboration and cloud computing are a natural fit for communications in the new global business environment …” (more)
[Irish Press Releases, 2 December]
“… Last month at a meeting here in the university some colleagues explained that they had found that the use of email by students was in steep decline. Whereas in the recent past announcements issued by email would have reached the target audience quickly and reliably, their experience now was that a majority of students would not read the information in a timely manner or at all. Email was no longer a reliable communications tool …” (more)
[Ferdinand von Prondzynski, University Blog, 20 November]
“While a number of colleges and universities devote resources to keep campus e-mail grounded on their own servers, they are finding it difficult to coax students out of the cloud. Students are increasingly arriving at college already managing multiple e-mail addresses with ‘cloud’-based e-mail services – such as Gmail and Hotmail – which are hosted remotely by third-party companies. These students are often reluctant to use the e-mail client provided to them by their institution. ‘We did a survey several years ago, and the overwhelming majority of incoming students said they had between three and four e-mail accounts’, said Beth Ann Bergsmark, director for academic information technology services at Georgetown University …” (more)
[Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed, 30 September]
“The view that university staff of all categories are overwhelmed by the volume of email and are in consequence not able to digest the information they contain may have a grain of truth in it. On the other hand, I remember the pre-email era well enough, and I don’t believe for a moment that communication strategies were more effective back then. Whereas it is quite possible that we have information overload now, in past years we often had no real communication at all … “ (more)
[Ferdinand von Prondzynski, University Blog, 5 January]
“An overbearing ‘email culture’ and a shortage of staffrooms and areas where people can meet and chat are being blamed for hindering internal communications in universities. In addition, communications directors consider academic managers to be much weaker at communicating with staff than their counterparts in purely administrative roles. The initial findings of a sector-wide research project led by the University of Leicester also suggest that the views of vice-chancellors on internal communications strategies are often far removed from those of the people employed to oversee those strategies …” (more)
[John Gill, THE, 18 December]
