The Professor as Instant Messenger

By Kathryn Wymer

I pride myself on keeping up to date with the latest technology. I regularly use computers in my classroom, and have long been a fan of the educational potential of online discussion groups. So I was completely taken aback a few months ago when a colleague informed me of something she had recently learned from her students: Teenagers no longer check their e-mail.

I confirmed that in a subsequent conversation with a 16-year-old. "Yep," he said. "It's way too slow. I never check it."

The immediate gratification of instant messaging, commonly called IM, has superseded the possibilities of e-mail for teenagers and college students. My colleague commented that her students found e-mail to be "dinosaur-ish," good only for communicating with parents and teachers.

Determined not to be left behind, I decided last semester to follow the lead of those pioneering instructors who have become IM buddies with their students. If my students found e-mail a clunky and outdated way to communicate, I wanted to reach out to them and use instant messaging.

During the semester, however, I discovered that making the switch was not as easy as I thought it would be. As it turned out, my students were somewhat reluctant to contact me via IM, and I found that I was having a difficult time adapting, too.

My plan was to be available for two hours a week exclusively via instant messaging and to keep the IM software up and running during my other regular office hours. Over the course of the semester, though, only 7 of my 72 students ever sent me an instant message. Only four contacted me through IM more than once.

I kept regular office hours, too, and I had approximately two thirds of my students drop by in person; the e-mail messages I received from my students were, contrary to what I had expected, still too numerous to count.

So why didn't my students want to communicate with me via instant messaging? I think it's important first to look back at why I thought they would be excited to do so.

My university encourages faculty members to experiment with new technologies. One of the most-cited reasons why is that students are already using those technologies. If we bring them into the classroom, the logic goes, students will feel more at home with the lessons.

For example, the writing program at my university encourages us to edit student papers in Microsoft Word because most of the students are already using that software program. Other universities have applied similar logic to iPods, noting that students already use those and other mp3 players for music; why not find applications for the devices in classes that employ audio files?

My experience, however, makes me question the extent to which our students want us to reach out to them in those new ways. Do I, as an instructor, have the right to appropriate students' technologies for the classroom? Most people would probably say, of course.

Consider, though, what it means to invade that technological space. Students use new technologies as a way to express themselves and their individuality. They develop identities related to those technologies, and those identities are not always the ones they would like to bring into the classroom.

This issue is not new. When students at my university started acquiring e-mail accounts, they were (and still are) allowed to create a user id of their own choosing, and most students consider that decision in terms of what might seem cool to their friends. A student who then decides to e-mail the professor has thus indelibly characterized himself as "rockjock98" or some other such moniker.

When I began asking my students to bring laptop computers into the classroom, I started to see such identities broadcast on their laptops. Students personalize their desktop spaces in much the same way they decorate their dorm rooms. Inevitably, I see one or two desktops in a given class that make me wonder about the boundaries of decorum.

The same identity creation proved to be true of IM accounts, and students' self-representations affected our interactions in subtle ways.

One of my students, always quiet and attentive in class, had a username indicating she was "18 and shy, but sexy." Another had personalized his account so that clips from rap music would play every time he sent me a new message. Yet another posted an automatic response one day for all of her IM buddies to see (little did she realize it was sent to me as well): "off to see the english professor about a paper, grrr."

I wasn't troubled by those insights into my students' lives, but I wonder if other students resisted the impulse to use instant messaging in order to keep their personal and professional modes of communication separate.

Another problem with my IM experiment was, I'll admit, my own difficulty adapting to the technology. Having an instant-messaging program running in the background on your computer means that your work can be interrupted at any moment. During the IM office hours I held, I found the program very distracting. Instant messaging can disrupt your train of thought, and it is very difficult to delay responding in order to compose a well-conceived answer to a student's question.

I found it nearly impossible to keep an IM program running during regular office hours because I didn't want to disrupt the face-to-face conference I was having at any given moment. I also found it very difficult to associate an IM user id with a name and face. Each time students wrote, they would have to preface their queries with a note about who they were. I found much of the process disorienting, and, though I didn't abandon my IM office hours, I didn't push my students to make more use of instant messaging as the semester went on.

Despite the problems, I still plan to IM with my students again this semester. Ultimately, I believe that adapting my teaching style to include the technologies with which my students feel comfortable will enhance my interactions with them. But I never want to forget that I am moving into territory that is new for me and for them -- a space in which we may have to learn new ways of interacting with each other.