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Abstract: Electronic mail has been used in Human and Economic Geography courses by the authors at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and at the University of Washington. This paper describes the successful, less and less experimental implementation of e-mail as an extension of the classroom, as the 'continuous office hours' and as the infrastructure required for an expanded use of the Internet in teaching and learning. Automated distribution lists and individual communications between faculty and students, and among students, are described. The paper then presents and analyzes data collected from a survey of students using e-mail. It concludes with a speculative look at future uses of the World Wide Web in Geography classes, and briefly reassesses the paper's findings in light of much more extensive uses of electronic communication technologies.
Keywords: Educational Technology, Electronic Mail, E-mail, Geography Education
Introduction
There seems to be little doubt that we are presently witnessing the onset of an Internet-inspired electronic revolution at all educational levels. We are bombarded with new terms and concepts hidden behind abbreviations and acronyms like WWW, URL, HTTP, HTML, ftp, home pages, course webs, Java and Netscape etc.. Some of us have begun rethinking our writing and documentation styles and, at the same time, looking both into a hypertext future and into the almost forgotten past of footnotes and appendices which editors and publishers had forced us to abandon. At the teaching front, we have become painfully aware of the utter inadequacies of large lecture classes. "Theater courses" have been forced upon us by one-dimensional productivity thinking (scale economies). These courses are embraced by lethargic or tired students who find the needed commitment of smaller, more interactive classes incompatible with their work schedules and the single-minded desire for degrees at the expense of education. Yet the tide appears to be turning. Pedagogically desirable down-sizing of courses may become feasible, although for economic reasons not in response to a demand by students. Lagging faculty salaries, segmented teaching staffs, higher tuition, demand for personal attention, new communication technologies, and new collaborative teaching styles with a shift to peer interaction and education may result in "smaller" classes through individualized and group-based teaching-learning approaches.
Future generations may well associate the beginning of a fundamental restructuring of education with the introduction of e-mail into the "classroom". One can only speculate about the causal relationships, but there seems to be little doubt that e-mail alone has already had a significant influence upon the educational process. It is our belief, however, that e-mail's significance and impact will go far beyond its present use as a means of asynchronic (sending and receiving at different times) communications between members of a relatively well-defined educational community in general, and a "class" in particular. In addition to many benefits, there are costs associated with this communications medium, only some of which can be addressed through adaptation in our teaching styles to better integrate e-mail and like media. In this paper, we are suggesting that e-mail is but a first step in this revolution. Our present experiences with e-mail in classrooms can guide the introduction of other computer based educational media. More specifically, this paper looks at the application and results of electronic mail use in geography classes. First, it reviews the literature on electronic mail in post-secondary education. It then describes the implementation of e-mail in classes at both the University of Washington and at the University of Colorado's Colorado Springs campus. The paper identifies common experiences and then looks at student responses. The conclusions include a discussion of the significance of these experiences for the next steps in the emerging integration of electronic modes of communications into the teaching-learning process.
Variations and Changes in the Use of E-Mail
While the use of e-mail has been growing rapidly, there is little in the literature describing its role in geography courses. Of 669 references listed in ERIC pertaining to electronic mail, only one (pertaining to the K-12 environment) used the key-word 'geography'. Perhaps the most prominent use of e-mail as described in articles about post-secondary curricula relates to writing, and writing improvement, in English departments. Business schools expect students to use e-mail communication because large corporations use it. For example, at Microsoft, employees reportedly send at least two hundred million e-mail messages to each other every month (Seabrook, 1994). E-mail has become such a commonplace phenomenon that even Gary Trudeau's Doonsbury comic strip recently had homeless people using e-mail at their public library (February 20, 1995). Our students may know of, but not know how to use, this medium.
While the business world has had extensive experience with electronic communication, Internet-based e-mail originated in the U.S. military, science and university communities. Nevertheless, e-mail is still in its early stages of use in the classroom. It has traditionally required hardware and software that were budget-busters for departments or schools without central computer systems. At minimum, a computer terminal (often inexpensively available as surplus) or personal computer with terminal emulation software, and connection to an e-mail network is necessary. The overall cost of connection to established electronic mail systems can sometimes be lessened by subscribing to a commercial system like America Online or Compuserve.
The use of e-mail understandably varies by discipline since the rationale for its use varies and tends to determine subsequent quantity, types of uses and speed of diffusion within departments and disciplines. Porter (1993) notes that e-mail use ranges from messages that function as "speech analogs," like a group discussion or conference, to "print analogs" like a memo, letter, brochure or article. Librarians tend to focus on the ability of e-mail to transfer documents quickly, while writing teachers see e-mail as a writing technology. Business Organization teachers may see it as a vehicle for collaborative project management.
Why Use E-mail?
Electronic mail can enhance communications between students and faculty, among students and between students and class-related resource sites on or off-campus, including librarians and other information providers for student projects ( D'Souza 1991, 1992a,b; Mabrito 1992; Hall 1993; Zsiray, 1993).
However, e-mail only makes sense if there are identifiable objectives (Kinkead, 1988; Barr, 1994). Students and teachers find the technology of electronic mailing exciting, but technology cannot guarantee sound educational content. Many critics argue that, too often, the focus of electronic mailing projects is on process rather than content. As a consequence, questions and responses often appear shallow and superficial (Barr, 1994: 282). In the English class, Kinkead (1988: 39) uses e-mail to move students towards becoming better writers of purposeful prose for "real" audiences of peers. Collaborative relationships develop, and writing takes on more meaning and justifies more effort than it would when the instructor is the only reader. Zsiray (1993) has students employ e-mail to gather data for reports and papers by accessing on-line databases and establishing contact with prominent decision makers like legislators. Applying electronic technology to such practical ends helps to sell its use to students, particularly when such uses are diverse and becomne more sophisticated during the quarter.
Effects of E-mail on Communications
New technologies are often put to entirely new uses only after first replacing existing tools. Three effects of E-mail use can be distinguished: First, E-mail often replaces in-class handouts, time-consuming discussion of class-logistics, face-to-face office hours, small-group meetings, telephone calls or extra trips to campus leading to savings for any given informational transaction -- at times considered a double-sided sword due to the parallel increase in communication activities and many students' tendency to print out electronic communications. However, Varricchio's (1992) report that students read e-mail messages sooner and more reliably than paper handouts would suggest that this substitution would lead to more informed students and a more efficient use of the time between class meetings.
Secondly, the mere increase in communication in the learning process through complementary electronic means of communication may also lead to a more focused and engaged learning environment and thereby to better informed students and improved learning outcomes. Traditional course formats with their physical and institutional constraints have greatly restricted the ways in which instructors and students communicate. Often hurried face-to-face contacts before, during and after class and during formal office hours, are complemented by uneven written comments on the margins and periodic grades on papers and tests. Mail, fax or telephone communications which potentially could overcome some of the temporal or spatial constraints are seldom used in classes due to their formality, expense or perceived intrusiveness.
Finally, it is increasingly recognized that in addition to its substitutive and complementary characteristics, E-mail and other Internet communication appear to create new pedagogic opportunities and to fill previously unseen gaps in course communications. Most exciting are no doubt those potentially beneficial pedagogic effects resulting from new interactive approaches to learning which would not be feasible in non-electronic environments.
Towards More Interactive and Collaborative Communication
Electronic mail has consistently increased group participation and collaboration (Kinkead 1988; Hall 1993; D'Souza 1991, 1992a,b; Mabrito 1992). There are numerous facets which contribute to this interactiveness by creating appropriate occasions or by removing constraints.
In business organizations, lower-level members tend to use e-mail more than managers (Rice and Shook, 1990). However, e-mail generally increases the volume of communications among management and workers in organizations (Adams, Todd and Nelson, 1993) Interestingly, they found that superiors communicated with subordinates more than expected.
Organizationally and functionally, e-mail may have similar results in classes as in businesses. E-mail may significantly increase communications between students, and between students and faculty. Hawisher and Moran(1993) note that teachers have traditionally performed a significant part of their work at home, preparing for class and grading papers. Even for teachers who might otherwise resent working at home, e-mail may offer a sufficiently positive medium of communication to make interacting with students during "off" times worthwhile.(Kinkead 1988) Similarly, the increased accessibility students gain through e-mail may lead to increased off-hour "telework," where students might send a message at night or on weekends when they ordinarily would not communicate.
E-mail appears to lead to more "equal" communications between parties than face-to-face or telephone communications between young "whippersnappers" and white-haired, authoritatively voiced faculty (D'Souza 1991, 1992a,b; Hall 1993; Mabrito 1992).
Many authors note that e-mail is an effective mechanism for including shy, reticent or apprehensive students in class activities (Updegrove 1991; Hall 1993; Mabrito 1992; D'Souza 1991, 1992a,b) leading to an increase in class-related interaction. Electronic communication also tends to reduce the dominance of students who are vocal in classrooms (but less so electronically), be a confidence builder for less verbal students and lead to a more balanced participatory and thereby a more democratic environment. As Hall (1993: 757) suggests, "those students who talk the most frequently and the most loudly [may not] have the most insight."
In addition to the reduction of formality, it is the ease of distributing identical messages to all students at once that tends to level the playing field and reduce the potential for the appearance of favoritism (Hunter and Allen 1992). Adams, Todd and Nelson (1993) describe e-mail as a "less personal form of communication," and thus a more comfortable medium for making "novel or risky contacts."
Electronic Communication may lead to shortened turnaround times and more spontaneous responses from students, an especially helpful occurrence when students are working on a group project or critiquing each other's writings, especially if students check their e-mail directories regularly. While its asynchronous nature does (except for on-line "chat rooms") allow "conversation" in the normal sense, e-mail may be more truly spontaneous due to the lack of potential intimidation by personally present faculty and, at the same time, permit a more reasoned, less "off-the-hip" dialogue. (For those seeking "synchronous" communications with the informality of e-mail, many mainframe and minicomputers have "talk" facilities.)
Too much and too Superficial Communication? The Caveats.
Informality and spontaneity may come at a price. As repeatedly experienced by the authors, students, in the isolation of a "screen-to-face" environment, can lose their composure, act on frustration and strike out at the instructor through e-mail before considering possible consequences. One university administrator notes, e-mail
.. is a strange medium; people say it's the same as paper, but it isn't. If I send a letter to someone, I'll look at it before I post it and maybe put it to one side if it seems offensive. But with e-mail, you write what you think and hit the return key and its gone--without any reflection at all (Maslem 1993).Thus, the reduction of 'authoritative barriers' may lead to (even less pleasant) communications between students and administrators, by e-mail or otherwise (Hawisher and Moran 1993).
There are many indications that the ease of communications leads to overload, "junk mail" perceptions and frustrations. (Adams, Todd and Nelson, 1993; Ruberg and Miller 1992) It is also easy to predict that faculty using e-mail in a large class, or several classes, may be overwhelmed with messages at home and will either discourage some of this communication or try to preempt questions and answers through the use of pre-programmed Web pages (Krumme, 1996).
One notable "side-effect" of e-mail reflects the way screen text is generally read. Hawisher and Moran (1993) note that text is read by the 'screen full', and that the structure and meaning of a communication may not be comprehended as readily or fully as text on a printed page. Earlier parts of messages tend to be subordinated to the last part, or screen, of text. A request placed at the end of an e-mail message extending over several screens is more likely to be acknowledged than one placed early in the message. Being able to scroll back and forth through a message alone does not guarantee contemplative responses.
E-mail is convenient once learned, but the hurdles of the learning process differentiates users and usage. To begin with, people with computing or related (e.g., touch-typing) experience tend to have less fear or anxiety towards learning to use e-mail. (Hunter and Allen, 1992) The ease of actually learning the use of e-mail appears to be related to the acceptance of the use of computers in general, and more specifically, familiarity with computer command structures. People with computer experience are more prepared for "difficulties," and are less surprised and upset with the learning process than non-computer users. Finally, behavior disposition and inertia have the effect that earlier learning difficulties negatively affect the amount of subsequent email use in the day-to-day work environment. (Hunter and Allen, 1992: 260)
While some students may be empowered and become active through e-mail, some students may also be "silenced and marginalized." (Hawisher and Moran, 1993) Antipathy towards computers, or technology in general, may cause some students to resist or refuse to use e-mail. Actual tendencies to use e-mail may run counter to stereotypes. The most computer-savy students are not always the most enthusiatic when it comes to academic applications. Despite the common characterization of computer uses as predominantly male and young, Russett (1994) surprisingly found that female students were more open to the use of computers as an educational technology than males, and that students over the age of 30 were more positive towards the technology than younger students.
An obvious, but easily overlooked, factor that contributes to complaints and unhappiness about electronic communication is lack of access. Recipients of mail sent must be connected, if only indirectly, to a system compatible with that of the sender (Parker, 1992). Increasingly, this means connection to the Internet. However, here are many, including socioeconomic barriers impeding access. Students owning computers and modems are more likely to respond to instructors' messages than those who do not. If the school's computer lab closes at 10:00 PM, and a student gets off work after that, a connected computer at home would facilitate reading e-mail. Few public libraries in rural areas provide access to e-mail and the Internet, and not all urban neighborhoods have "Internet Cafes" where coffee shop ambiance is complemented by available computer terminals and access to the Internet. (Both Seattle and Colorado Springs are home to Internet Cafes).
Suggestions for More Agreeable Uses of E-mail.
There are some valuable suggestions offered for educational settings. Johnson and Bayless (1993) propose (ten)'golden rules of e-mail' ranging from the obvious, "help students access e-mail," to helpful, "remind students to write down their password(s)." Updegrove's (1991, 40) "guidelines for using e-mail" include:
Cover only one subject per message. Be diplomatic. Criticism is always harsher when written, and electronic messages are easily forwarded. Be calm. You may have misinterpreted the implied criticism or missed the ironic humor...
Several authors (Johnson and Bayless 1993; Hall 1993; D'Souza 1991) at least imply that they teach e-mail skills in their classes, rather than relying on others, thereby increasing their control over the learning environment. Students may experience their first successes using e-mail with the assistance of their primary instructor who is trying to build rapport in the classroom. Another approach would be to have a computer specialist from the school's computing services teach the technical dimensions of e-mail. Such specialists sometimes have the power to solve user name and password problems on the spot or they can make students aware of the "easy" way to print out mail messages, and those important but arcane commands that inform the user about disk space allocation, etc.
Implications for Geography
In geography, our interest in electronic communication is multi-faceted, and, we venture to suggest, more systemic to our over-all, highly information-resource oriented objectives than what one would expect to find in most other social sciences. In Geography, users are more likely to share location-specific information or geographic technology specific messages than other users. It is evident that electronic communication has been used in GIS (Geographic Information Systems or Sciences) contexts more so than in other subfields of Geography, presumably due to the proximity to and familiarity with computers and the need for the transfer of large data sets. The transfer of digital line graphs (DLGs), GIS coverages, or digital elevation models (DEMs) from remote computers is an example of a discipline-specific use. This is analogous to variations in expectations of student writing from discipline to discipline (Hay and Delaney 1995). Students may learn to write in English classes, yet the vocabulary and analytical methods expected in discipline-specific writing may be quite different from what is taught in creative writing courses. Qualitative and quantitative variations in the use of e-mail will tend to become less pronounced as its use spreads and as it becomes increasingly integrated into university and classroom routines and intermingled with other electronic communication modes particularly home pages and the use of the Internet.
The use of Internet resources adds a powerful and valuable dimension to courses in GIS. Students can take advantage of listserves and discussion groups to stay current, and to solve problems. Data available through the Internet gives the student an opportunity to work with "real" data, and to take control of course projects for more self-directed learning. Both of these learning venues can encourage students to become independent problem solvers, and enhance their effectiveness as future employees and graduate students.
Listserves like GIS-L and ESRI-L provide students with a window into the dialogue of GIS use and development. Questions posed by practicioners in the field, and answered by others, are a window into this evolving field. The fact that users of the technology are constantly learning new tricks and honing their skills is exemplary of "lifelong learning" that so many schools strive for. Web-sites for the US Census and other governmental agencies (e.g., UGSG, EPA) provide a source for up to date data for student projects in cartography and GIS courses. A major advantage to the use of these data sources is the need for students to build the data links to make this data useable. For example, state FIPS codes (Federal Information Processing Standards) to identify which data go with which states might be encoded as ASCII text for speed in sorting. The student's database might contain FIPS codes, but in numeric form. The need to build a simple linkage database is a great example of the problem-solving mindset needed in the field.
Through e-mail, students may acquire geographic and thematic data for map making and GIS, communicate with experts in their interest areas through discussion lists, and share their thoughts and questions with others, all processes which mirror (and prepare students for) real world social, political, economic and planning processes.
The need for acquiring electronic communication skills may be most obvious for GIS students. However, students in other classes cannot relax and safely ignore these new technologies.
In general terms, we suggest that our interest extends to
As Economic or Human Geographers we have a particular interest in the efficient or inefficient ways in which people (including students) organize their academic, employment and personal lives in time and space. nature and benefits of E-mail communication are well known. The asynchronous conveniences combine with the space bridging benefits of E-mail in increasingly "flexible instruction spaces" (or partially remote learning environments). (Krumme, 1996)
Undergraduate students at public universities come from many different socio-economic backgrounds and residential locations and integrate the time spent physically on campus into their daily routines in many different ways. A seemingly increasing group of students prefers fewer and longer periods of required presence on campus. With increased E-mail and computer competence and access at home and at public places (libraries, home work centers) in the exurban fringes and unabated if not increased job pressures of students, flexible opportunities for technology-mediated remote learning and a reduction in commuting needs for students coming from greater distances or subjected to tighter work/study schedules should improve learning climates. Such personal experiences in time/space logistics and substitution between physical transportation and electronic communications provide invaluable illustrations for class discussions, e.g. in Urban or Transportation Geography.
Finally, and at the most macro level, there is the pervasive interest of economic geographers in structural change and regionally differentiated economic development. The highly differentiated role of modern service activities plays a non-trivial role in such structural processes. Most of the productivity increases which give rise to such differentiation in the development of services and thereby regions arise from the development of communications technologies. Again, the "explicit" and "conscious" use of E-mail in economic geography classes provides ample materials for discussion about the economic and spatially differentiated implications of electronic communications and more efficient informational transactions.
Two Experiences
E-mail in University of Washington Geography courses
At the UW, e-mail was implemented by one of the authors in early 1994 to facilitate intra-class communication. The experience described in this paper is based on mandatory e-mail use in three economic geography classes. These courses are Economic Geography, an introductory class with 60-80 students; an intermediate level class, Urban-Regional Market Area Analysis, with 10-25 students; and Location Theory, an advanced class with 10-20 students. All three courses meet normally 3 times per week for 80 minutes (for 10 weeks). A graduate teaching assistant is assigned to Economic Geography, whose role includes grading assignments and examinations, leading discussion groups and conducting a wide range of trouble-shooting activities. A class-specific e-mail account and an automated distribution list ("listproc") were established in order to keep the large number of student-instructor exchanges separate from the professor's personal account, to facilitate the TA's participation in student communication and to accommodate the efficient (one-command) distribution of uniform messages and materials to the class as a whole.
During the first quarter of use, students were responsible for establishing their computer account and then subscribing to listproc. The process was arduous and it was mid-term before all had subscribed to the list. Thus, a year later, the instructor placed all student names and addresses personally on the list thereby reducing confusion and delays. It is hoped that, in the future, the manual transfer of addresses can be avoided through digital class lists supplied by the Registrar.
Students can use the address for the automated (and moderated) list to send a message to all subscribers. The list is screened in order to protect students from the consequences of their occasional errors (namely sending their personal messages meant for the instructor to the whole class instead).
Due to the cumbersome nature of the listproc lists, the instructor at least temporarily gave up this list in 1996 and used the address list function and blind copy mode in the Pine system thereby simplifying the process and avoiding long those long address lists in the message header.
The University of Washington maintains an effective, and rapidly improving UNIX-based electronic communication system supporting both e-mail and World Wide Web (WWW) home pages. The hardware has been upgraded frequently in recent years to accommodate the explosive expansion of e-mail use and home page construction on campus. The core of the campus information system is called "UWIN," for University of Washington Information Navigator, a cooperative system jointly designed and operated by the Library and the "Computer People." UWIN provides easy access to general university information, library catalogs and reference systems, time schedules, class enrollments, access to the Internet through Gopher and LYNX, and much more.
E-mail in UCCS Geography:
The author at UCCS first used e-mail in introductory World Regional and Economic Geography courses in the Fall of 1993. Initially, it was used as a substitute for other forms of document distribution. Like many other departments, UCCS Geography operates on a very small budget. Electronic mail has the appeal of lowering departmental costs, and coincidentally assisting the Computing Services department by demonstrably increasing computer use by students. Class handouts distributed by e-mail are viewed on-screen by students, or are printed at the computing center. Initially, students were given the option of using either e-mail or receiving dittoed handouts. Quickly (within less than a month), e-mail became the preferred method of distributing class handouts. After the success in Fall 1993,e-mail was incorporated into the "standard" tools in other courses. Subsequent courses to adopt e-mail include Cartography, Introduction to GIS, and Advanced GIS. These classes, ranging from 24 to 42 students, are scheduled to meet either once or twice a week for from 75 to 200 minutes.
A major logistical issue is getting students on the system for the first time. Several options exist for training students to use e-mail. They may be directed to sign up for a training session given by Computing Services. However, experience to date finds that unless there is a strong motivating force (i.e., grade) associated with the training session, few will find the time. A second option is to arrange for a member of the Computer Services staff to conduct a one-hour workshop in the computer lab. This method's success depends upon the experience of the staff member, most of whom are students. A third method is to reserve a computer lab and hold class there for an hour. This assumes that the faculty member is well versed in the mail utilities and computer operating system, but assures the greatest control over content.
Electronic mail to class members is facilitated through the use of distribution lists, where a single e-mail address is set up to direct mail to all class members' addresses. Students must also have the distribution list (and be taught how to use it), to communicate with the class as a whole.
Common Experiences
Despite significant differences between the UW main campus and CU's branch campus at Colorado Springs, there are similarities in e-mail use in classes. Student course-related messages seem to fall into a few broad classes:
messages about course content
messages related to organizing study or specialty groups
peer assistance on assignments
Students' questions to the instructor about course content may
be a "goldmine" for class improvements. An e-mail message
may be the only flag or signal that a student, or group of students,
is in need of further explanation. A prolonged illness, special
work or family commitments, the demands of an athletic schedule
or the lack of appropriate prior course preparation (especially
in upper division technical courses) may come to the attention of
the instructor and may give her/him the opportunity to provide
some targeted electronic tutoring or reading suggestions which,
without e-mail, might be impossible even if the need had been
recognized.
In UW's Economic Geography, students were required to "check in" once a week giving them an opportunity to ask questions about last week's lecture and to formulate their preferred examination questions related to recent course materials. This forced students to think actively of class materials as the basis of questions rather than as answers to yet unknown questions and provided very useful feedback for diagnosing the sophistication of the class. This prodding allowed students to empower themselves and actively think about the class as a whole. It also encouraged a few to violate "netiquette." Most transgressions were recognized quickly and apologized for, turning into a very healthy communications learning experience. Students' final evaluation of this weekly requirement was mixed; a minority of students was critical of the mandatory nature of e-mail use. Some were not prepared to move class interaction to a "remote mode", while others embraced and appreciated it (in glowing terms).
It is our experience that students do seem to communicate with each other (almost exclusively in pairs) to clarify or amplify course content, although the instructor may be unaware of this at the time. This seems to be especially helpful to "non-traditional" students, i.e., single parents or the full-time employed who tend to be more mature and less hesitant to make initial e-mail contacts. Another important set of communications that can be effectively pursued by e-mail is the organization and scheduling of student study or collaborative project groups and the allocation of related tasks. The increasing job demands of students make such scheduling increasingly complex and impossible to perform quickly after class.
A third type of student communication that is consistent with the findings of instructors in other fields is the sharing of student writing for comment prior to submission to the instructor. This works well when the e-mail system allows a student to reply to a message and include the original message text as part of the reply. This allows both parties to keep comments focused on a specific piece of text, although the text may need to be printed out for full comprehension.
Messages from instructor to students appear to fall into several broad classes:
class logistics
clarification or elaboration upon lecture and assigned material
answers to individual student questions
announcements of departmental or campus events
"side-shows" or optional information, such as articles from electronically available newspapers
E-mail is a useful method of communicating logistical information to class members thereby saving class time. Information can be covered more quickly with the assurance that all students will get a repeat message through their mail. Once students become accustomed to it, this is an extremely effective medium for distributing information necessary for a smooth-running class, such as recent additions to the library reserve list, reminders to bring specific equipment or materials, and updates or changes to assignments. If a class will meet somewhere other than in the regular classroom, an e-mail message can remind students of where to go. In classes with group projects, students can be informed of membership, tasks or responsibilities of such groups.
A second major use of e-mail is the clarification of material covered in lectures. An effective way of doing this is through the regular distribution of "study questions "that can be drawn upon for midterm and final examinations. This often leads to reciprocal questions. If one student asks a question, it might indicate that (s)he didn't understand the material, or wasn't listening. If several students ask for clarification on a specific point, this provides an opportunity to evaluate why communication was incomplete. E-mail allows the instructor to selectively cover points, elaborating on those that are essential to the understanding of a lecture. Readings might be prescribed to address specific points. If they are already available in digital form, the instructor can send it directly to the student. Less vocal students may prefer to avoid drawing attention to themselves in class. E-mail provides a "second chance" to ask a question that otherwise might never be answered. In addition, this allows the instructor to answer a question once. Students can then access the answer as many times as required, until it is deleted.
In addition to "broadcasting" to a whole class, e-mail provides an instructor with a very personal means of communicating with students. This is extremely helpful in large classes. An instructor may come to know a student by name via e-mail, and associate the quality of thought and communication, in a way that large lecture class environments cannot. This mode of communication is helpful for faculty members who may be asked to write letters of reference for graduate school or job applications. In this fashion, while e-mail may be "faceless" communication, it provides students and their instructors with a way of getting to know each other.
Class use of e-mail may also provide information to students about events going on beyond the classroom. E-mail provides a convenient "place" to post notices about departmental or campus colloquia and lectures. The ease with which materials can be distributed will tempt instructors to use e-mail for instruction beyond the syllabus. Students, on the other hand, need to know whether materials are 'optional' or 'required'. Few seem to appreciate having their electronic mailboxes filled with lengthy additional readings. Supplementary material should be carefully selected and always tied to the class. For example, Internet addresses can be distributed for data sources and on-line documents for writing improvement. These are appreciated if they arrive when students are working on their projects. It is also easy to relate resume writing assistance, or job postings, to an economic geography class.
"Sideshow" information available via e-mail provide a way for interested students to enhance their interaction and success as members of the community and workforce. The University of Washington maintains institutional subscriptions to electronic versions of newspapers, including the Washington Post and London Times. While students can access these news services directly, sending specific articles related to current class topics links course content to "the real world." This is possible because copyright laws are not violated as long as those articles will only be sent to university-based e-mail accounts.
The Effect of Messages
In evaluating the use of e-mail in geography classes, we have identified both positive and negative aspects. Starting with the positives, e-mail provides continuity in communication with individual students. This is useful for monitoring, prodding, inquiring or resolving misunderstandings and is especially the case for classes which do not meet daily, for project oriented classes, when the student is pursuing an independent study or an internship away from the campus or has missed classes and has fallen behind. E-mail also gives a personal touch otherwise not achievable in a large class. For example, one of the authors exchanged German soccer stories with a student who was known to him only through mail messages. More importantly, specific individual academic or personal concerns which drag on during the quarter can be monitored and later recalled. This vastly improved ability to pay personal attention to students results in a de-facto reduction in class-size. The more continuous communication effected through e-mail permits the teaching of a large class as though it was much a much smaller seminar, even if this means that students may be better recognized by their e-mail addresses than by their faces.
There is the flexibility of asynchronous access not otherwise available to instructor or student and quite evidently appreciated by both. One only has to scan the time stamp on student messages to realize that the sender is returning from a job late at night. Often, the instructor can make last-minute additions or alterations to a lecture to answer specific questions raised in such late-night messages. There also is the potential for almost instant feedback on assignments. An academic term (especially a 10 week quarter) is usually tightly scheduled and quick responses may be crucial.
There are also negative aspects to the use of e-mail. Not all students appreciate the fact that the customary relaxation after submitting examinations or assignments may now be pruned, nor do all instructors cherish the thought of the almost "continuous office hour" increasingly expected by (some) students. Taking advantage of the potential for communication may lead to increased off-hour "telework" , if the instructor is not disciplined about when to read and respond to e-mail (Hawisher and Moran, 1993). Another unexpected consequense of e-mail is that class attendance may be influenced. Students may feel freer to cut class if e-mail messages are available to explain main points. To counter this disquieting repercussion, instructors may have to check attendance or create additional incentives for personal appearance in class. A proactive response is presently contemplated by one of the authors. Given that we are all interested not merely in imposing new electronic media upon he educational process, but in their integration, students will be given an explicit choice of staying away from class (campus) on a particular (discussion and question/answer oriented) day. This changes the normal day student to a "remote" or "distance learner" on that day with specific, meaningful, e-mail-based tasks to be performed during a certain time-window.
Two other e-mail problems may not have immediate solutions. First, there is the almost built-in inequity in access often hidden to the instructor by the fact that students have e-mail accounts by the end of the first week of the term, but cannot use them at any other time than just before or after class, or in the middle of the night in campus labs. One emerging remedy might be the increased availability of inexpensive, second-hand computers with e-mail (and possibly text-only browser) capabilities. A second issue that is difficult to resolve is "nettiquete." Too large a percentage of students use the easy access and informality of e-mail to "flame" the instructor, venting frustration or anger. It is hoped that increasing familiarity with e-mail will reduce this latter problem. Communications that would occur only under very unusual circumstances are more common with e-mail. That students are clearly less inhibited and more frank in their communications is something that instructors may either have to address through guidelines or simply get used to.
student response to e-mail in classes
To gain a better understanding of how students respond to, and use, electronic mail a survey was administered in Economic Geography, Cartography and Advanced GIS courses at UCCS. The survey, distributed via electronic mail, was administered as an ex-post questionnaire after the end of the semester. The response rate for the survey was 55%. This non-response is likely to bias the results in several ways. First, students might be likely to consider an "after-the-fact" survey from a course they have already passed to be a low priority. Second, if students graduated, they would cease to use the University's computer system. Third, and possibly most important, is the possibility that non-responding students might have ceased to use e-mail. The number of students responding was 44, comprised of 29 women and 15 men. The results of the survey are summarized in table 1.
Question prior users new users overall
had used e-mail before this class 23
had not used e-mail before this 21
class
average response, self-evaluation 4.7 (n=22)
of competence, students with
experience prior to this term
(0 to 10 scale, 0 means no
experience
10 means "expert")
average response, use of e-mail by 7 (n=22) 6 (n=18) 6.5 (n=40)
end of this course?
(0 to 10 scale, 0 "the minimum", 10
every day)
average response, expected 3.8 (n=23) 4.8 (n=21) 4.3 (n=44)
difficulty of learning
(0 to 10 scale, 0 very easy, 5
neutral,
10 "impossible")
average response, actual difficulty 2.7 (n=23) 2.2 (n=21) 2.5 (n=44)
of learning
(0 to 10 scale, 0 very easy, 5
neutral,
10 "impossible")
average response, geographic scope 3 (n=23) 2.2 (n=21) 2.6 (n=44)
of use
(0 to 10 scale, 0 limited to
campus,
10 exclusively with off-campus
contacts)
students reporting contacts beyond 8 7 15
campus, but within state?
students reporting contacts beyond 7 4 11
state, but within US?
students reporting contacts beyond 3 1 4
US borders?
average response, how did e-mail 6.7 (n=21) 7.1 (n=21) 6.9 (n=42)
contribute
to the class?
(0 to 10 scale, 0 made it more
difficult, 5 neutral
10 made it far easier or
fulfilling)
has e-mail changed the way you yes (n=12) yes (n=8) yes (n=20)
interact with no (n=9) no (n=12 no (n=20)
people in different places?
Table 1: E-mail survey summary.
Interestingly, 70% of prior e-mail users, and 62% of new users, responding to the survey were women. This reinforces Russett's (1994) observations that despite the stereotype of males dominating the ranks of computer users, women are well represented among e-mail users in this sample. There was considerable variation in the self-evaluation of competence among those coming into surveyed classes. On a zero to ten scale (0 reflecting essentially no skills and 10 meaning "expert"), the average of responses was 4.7, ranging from 1 to 10.
Responses concerning the perceived and actual difficulty in learning e-mail indicate that students think e-mail is more difficult to learn than it actually turns out to be. Part of this is likely due to a relatively low level of computer use among geography students in lower division classes at UCCS. However, students learning to work with e-mail in their geography courses surprisingly indicated that they had an easier time learning the system than those having existing skills.
The use of e-mail at UCCS, according to this data, is relatively local. Of students reporting only on-campus use, eight were prior users and eight were new users. The average response of new users (2.2 on a zero to ten scale) indicates more "local" use than those with longer histories of use (3 on the zero to ten scale). Experienced users, those entering the class with prior e-mail use, tended to have a wider geographic scope of use. New users were almost as likely to have contacts beyond the campus within the state, but less likely to have contacts beyond the bounds of the state or the US. Students new to e-mail in their geography courses listed contacts in Arizona, California, Indiana, Nebraska, Utah, and Australia. Students with prior experience listed contacts in California, D.C., Minnesota, Texas, Australia, Scotland, and Sweden.
Discussion
As with many skills, students may perceive electronic mail to be more difficult to learn and use than it really is. With experience, students seem to realize benefits from this tool. Although a majority of respondents felt that e-mail contributed to their class experience, new users seemed to think, on average, that e-mail made it easier or more fulfilling than "old hands." However, students with a history of use had more contacts at greater geographic distance than new users. In addition, prior users tended to feel that this medium had changed the way they interacted with people at distance than new users.
Electronic mail may seem foreign to both students and instructors alike when they first encounter this medium. It takes some time to become comfortable with any new technology. Expectations, especially given the current state of technology, may be greater than reasonable. Students may have differential access to hardware, limiting the degree to which an instructor can depend upon e-mail for quick message delivery. As more students are assigned work requiring access to terminals networked into a common mail system, there might not be enough terminals to go around. Also, making the leap from "simple" e-mail access to full use of the Internet through software like Lynx or Netscape, may be limited by the cost of necessary equipment. E-mail use has already proven to be a logical step towards active use of the Internet.
E-mail can be more than just a delivery system. It allows students to access instructors more conveniently than the traditional office hours and classroom schedule can accommodate. It provides students with the opportunity to work more collaboratively, and to get quick feedback on their work. As interaction becomes more open in classes that are more network-oriented, there may be less dependence on meeting times and spaces. The evaluation of student work may also have to evolve from formal examinations and traditional term papers to a more open and "collaborative" evaluation of cumulative electronic documentation. Less obvious than organizational forms are the ways in which students learn. Hopefully improved information and faculty access will help students to move beyond "information" to knowledge, understanding and wisdom. In terms of Bloom's (1956) taxonomy of learning levels, we should work towards students moving from relatively descriptive, fact accumulation stages to stages of synthesis and evaluation.
Electronic communication gives instructors the potential to incorporate change quickly into their syllabi and to explain the need for such changes. Nevertheless, the instructor's preference for such flexibility may clash with the student's dislike of the resulting uncertainty.
At this time, it is difficult to predict how future changes will be manifest. It may be that organizational trends observed in the "real world" will invade academic environments. We may see more boundary spanning schemes, less succinct organizational or departmental boundaries, and more flexible organizations in education. E-mail and Internet access might lead to competition from other forms of learning. Distance learning may become a norm, eroding the traditional structure of "fixed" university or college infrastructure. At the present time, instructors have the opportunity to shape how this technology is used.
In evaluating and critiquing e-mail, students tend to either compare e-mail with less efficient modi operandi and find e-mail an attractive, efficient alternative, or they compare e-mail with the telephone, and consider e-mail an impersonal mode which is missing the inflections of the partner's voice...
Finally, there is the quo vadis? E-mail is increasingly well-established and there is little likelihood of its sudden disappearance. However, there are already other new electronic technologies which will affect e-mail use. Presently, a rapidly growing electronic communication mode is the World Wide Web's (WWW) use of 'home pages' to access and contribute to the Internet. Krumme, Nyerges and Zald (1995) define a home page as "an individualized, hyper-media document serving as an entry point to the Internet usually containing both, informational contributions to the Internet, as well as selective, purpose-specific and convenient access to Internet resources." Home pages are sufficiently flexible as both a mode of providing information to students, and as a means for students to express themselves and communicate with, but not only with, the instructor.
There are enough other similarities, complementarities and substitution potentials when comparing e-mail to home pages to ask the question: What have we learned from e-mail use which might help to make the adoption of home pages simpler, more effective, more pleasant and a natural next step in the inevitable electronification of the class room?
E-Mail and Home Pages: Supplements or Complementarity?
In the contemporary university and college environment, e-mail is already supplemented by educational television, newsgroups and World-Wide Web home pages. The potential spectrum of educational communications is large and rapidly evolving. The persistence of live performances of professors reading their lecture notes in front of students, who feel that they are better off in the class than in the library, should not mislead us into believing that teachers are invulnerable to the cost dilemma of the service sector. While the quality of education may suffer with declining personal attention, new technologies may compensate for such effects by improving the educational process in other ways.
E-mail is complementary to other forms of educational communication and has become an indispensable part of the telecommunications infrastructure. E-mail is used for downloading and saving data or information in one's own computer workspace. It may also be useful for communicating the address to an Internet site, including instructions for Internet use, and how to use Internet sourced information. This provides innumerable opportunities for class assignments, including transmitting information derived from the Internet to those students not yet Internet proficient; communicating with instructors, librarians, students or between students, sending messages related to the construction, evaluation and connection to students' class project home pages.
E-Mail or Home Pages: Substitution?
Our experience has already shown that, for at least some students, extensive e-mail use is indeed perceived as at least mildly intrusive, and that for even more students the need to manage the 'inbox' and read a barrage of messages from different courses and other sources all randomly mixed can become a severe headache. There are many messages which are presently sent to students' accounts (and this applies even more to faculty') which contain the kind of information which is more efficiently and much less intrusively posted in a home page or on an electronic bulletin board. However, ultimately it will be left to the students' initiative to get to that site and open that page, but the student can do it in a more deliberate way and will find a more organized system of information than he/she could possibly find even in the most advanced e-mail folder systems.
Messages will be on the home page at least for the duration of the quarter, possibly longer. Thus, students who join the class late will have access to those kinds of older messages which do not outdate -- at least not until final examinations. In fact, the use of e-mail lists may now be limited to very important and urgent messages, such as fundamental corrections or misunderstandings of class content or short-notice extensions of deadlines for assignments. It is likely that the modus operandi will be to post such top-of-the-news messages both on the home page under "What is New in Geog. XYZ?" in order to keep a current record, and to send them out by e-mail creating some desirable redundancy for less organized students.
Thus, the use of home pages as "course webs" may serve some new functions as well as some old functions, and these possibly better than e-mail presently does. The technical barriers students face are very similar to e-mail. It may be easier, with the initial stage of use being the passive absorption of information posted by the instructor. Introducing the home page as a way of presenting student projects goes far beyond this stage and may, in the foreseeable future, be possible only in small or upper-level classes. The need to teach students how to write and/or edit in HTML and adopt a hypertext/ hypermedia writing and organizing mentality may be beyond what a single instructor can accomplish in a 10-week course given all other materials to cover. On many campuses, no doubt, the lack of hardware will slow the invasion of home-page based instruction. Reading e-mail for 15-20 minutes per student-day puts different demands on the campus computer resources than course-web based homework. At the University of Washington, the lines of students waiting for their turn at the computer often look like food lines in Eastern Europe only a few years ago. Decreasing hardware prices and the inexpensive availability of second-hand computers which can run e-mail and text-based WWW-browsers may ease this bottleneck.
This paper described some of the problems associated with "hand-holding" students through the initial stages of e-mail use. Such personal attention by the instructor is difficult for a larger-scale introduction of passive or active Internet use. At the University of Washington, a strategic alliance between the Library, the provost's office and the dean for undergraduate education has implemented an increasingly focused initiative (the UWIRED project) which uses faculty/librarian teams to introduce (largely self-selected)students to Internet (and other networking) capabilities in(parts of) designated courses and newly established electronic "collaboratories" initially housed in the Undergraduate Library, but also planned for other sites, including the Geography Department. This collaboration between librarians and faculty in providing information retrieval, transmission and creation skills, appears to provide at least some remedy to the problems associated with the more substantive extensions of e-mail into Internet use.
The nature of attempts to ease the hardware problems will differ widely between campuses, depending on foresight and initiative, funding, organizational structures, technological preparedness and other factors. While the Internet potential is externally "imposed" on universities, the efforts on campuses to connect and to create contributions to the Internet are largely grassroots, by-passing traditional organizational structures and thereby creating often awkward funding and decision-making problems and processes. Initiatives, however may come from any part of the campus and sometimes are, sometimes are not recognized and supported by the administration.
Conclusions
The questions which this paper raises are not related to the "whether" of e-mail use in the educational and classroom context, but to the "how" and "when". No doubt, the same applies to the use of the Internet. The sheer number and complexity of the variables involved make it impossible to outline rigid, uniform guidelines and a precise adoption path, and leaves these decisions by necessity to individual instructors who have to explore, learn, experiment and find ways which enhance and not merely substitute educational communication processes. For many, these are hurdles difficult to conquer given all other demands. Low-key but effective institutional support, including systems, hardware and software support, and, perhaps most importantly, relieving instructors of he need to introduce students to technical skills will ease the traumas for both students and instructors.
As with many skills, students may overestimate the difficulties of learning and using electronic mail. After gaining experience, students seem to recognize many benefits. Although a majority of respondents felt that e-mail contributed to their class experience, new users seemed to think, on average, that e-mail made it easier or more fulfilling than "old hands". However, students with a history of use had more contacts at greater distance than new users. In addition, prior users tended to feel more often that this medium had changed the way they interacted with distant people.
Electronic mail may seem foreign to both students and instructors alike when they first encounter it. It takes time to become comfortable with any new technology. Expectations, especially given the current state of technology and university budgets, may be greater than reasonable. Students may have differential access to hardware, limiting the degree which an instructor can depend on quick message delivery. As more students are assigned work requiring access to terminals the shortage of access might become more severe. Also, making the leap from "simple" e-mail access to the use of homes pages through text-based browsers may not necessitate new technology but may require more terminals; full use of the Internet through graphic browsers may be delayed by the cost of necessary equipment. E-mail is a logical step toward active use of the Internet; temporary inequities of access will have to be tolerated and students (as well as many instructors) who resist the adoption of the new tools will inevitably be bypassed.
E-mail and home pages can be more than just delivery systems. They allow students to access instructors and their home pages more conveniently than is possible through the traditional office hour and out-of-class contacts. They provide students with the opportunity to work collaboratively, and to get quick feedback on their work. In the longer-run and at the more general level, there are signs in our present experience that new electronic communication technologies, together with other societal changes and pressures, will change the educational process not too differently from what is happening in the business world, and in health-care at a much larger scale. Already, boundary spanning schemes, diminution of the increasingly bypassed administrative hierarchy, and more flexible education, including more integrated remote-learning schemes involving e-mail, the Internet and electronic alliances with distant educational sites are a norm. We can expect our classes to become relatively less "classroom" oriented (in rigid time and space), more open and diffuse, with more continuity between academic terms and between the class and the community. We can expect our students (and faculty as learners) to involve more flexible collaboration with other resource persons through computer connections. Higher education in the US is constantly changing. Our simultaneous, but disparate, goals of facilitating educational growth while providing employment related skills have always been challenging. In the current climate of enrollment growth with "fiscal downsizing," e-mail and web-pages can be a positive set of tools for both faculty and students. We can communicate and distribute information to many students with ease and with immediacy. Information can be stored for easy access and update. Students may find, through these media, that class use of computing tools and may provide both an exciting learning environment and a set of experiences suitable for resume use.
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