Communication Breakdown

by Richard White

2016–02–21

It’s not just an awesome song by Led Zeppelin—it’s a topic that has become of some concern in my teaching, particularly as more channels of communication have opened up.

A quick inventory of communication devices that I access during the course of a school day includes my mobile phone, my Apple watch, and my work phone (which doesn’t ring very often, thankfully), and most heavily, my computer, which is the focal point for most of my chatter.

But the channels that have access to those devices are truly astounding, and literally impossible for me to reasonably monitor. My “communication feeds” include:

• mobile phone calls
• texts (monitored with mobile phone and computer)
• emails (6+ accounts continuously monitored with mobile phone and computer)
• personal calendar (continuously monitored with mobile phone, computer, and watch)
• websites (3) I maintain for students in my own classes
• other websites related to my profession, including the one you’re reading right now
• the school’s internal website
• the school’s attendance interface
• work calendars (4 separate ones): daily, junior and senior test calendars, homework calendar
• work calendars (2 separate ones, for students, posted on course websites)
• SFTP software (Panic’s Coda, for updating websites)
• RSS feeds
• Facebook (monitored rarely, almost never used for outgoing communication)
• Twitter (monitored occasionally, almost never used for outgoing communication)
• Skype / Google Hangouts / GoToMeeting (used on an occasional basis)
• GitHub for storing repositories
• Presentations (LibreOffice’s Impress, Microsoft’s PowerPoint) for delivering content to students and peers
• Terminal windows open on the computer (multiple), which require a whole sub-section themselves:
  • to-do list
  • ssh sessions to the server maintained for computer science classes
  • text editors, for grabbing notes in an “Evernote” fashion
  • git version control for software projects

You are probably in a similar situation. If you don’t have as many websites or Terminal windows as I do, I’ll bet you more than make up for it with the time on Facebook (you can admit it—I won’t judge you) or the time you spend enjoying your family. Let’s face it: we’re all busy.

One of my challenges as a hybrid teacher is developing in my students the ability to manage some of these channels. My students keep up with the most important elements of class via the website or the school’s course calendar, but even then, I email them on a semi-regular basis to remind them of especially important items. And students in my computer science courses submit assignments to a server, a new channel for them that some of them occasionally struggle to manage.

Our students are young and adaptable, but also easily distracted. As we ask them to incorporate new channels into their lives—subscribe to my Twitter feed! Watch this YouTube video for my flipped class!—are we helping train them for other classes, for university, for work? Or are we tempting them with more distractions?

I pose this question as I consider whether or not to introduce them to Slack, a team-based online communications tool that has taken the tech industry by storm. (I’m not just trying to be cool: Slack has the potential to give my students access to their instructor and each other, so questions can be answered sooner rather than later.)

I ask these questions as I develop curriculum for an Advanced Topics in Computer Science course that will leverage GitHub for distribution of class materials and for submission of coursework.

I consider these questions as I write this blog post at the computer while a large pile of important work—grading my students’ most recent test—sits over on the coffee table, waiting for my attention.

Where do you lie on the communications spectrum? I’d be interested to hear…