Emails – Personal and Impersonal Communication

Lawrence Williams (2001, p.49), discusses ways in which technology can be used to create a sense of belonging to a wider community. One of the ways this can be achieved in education through use of blogs and email. Email in particular is an increasingly popular way for teachers to communicate with students in both HE and FE sectors as it accommodates a professional platform in which to communicate at any time of day and to a large number of people.

One advantage of using email as a form of communication is that messages can be sent out to the whole class as a big group. Students can then either respond individually to their teacher or alternatively they might choose to ‘reply to all’ and send their reply message to the whole class. This is a good example of ways in which technology can be used to aid relationship-based teaching (see previous blog posts on relationship-based teaching).

For music teaching, email can be particularly useful as it also allows the teacher to send videos, YouTube clips or sound files to the whole group so that the same version or orchestral arrangement of a piece can be heard by the whole class.

A disadvantage of using email, however, is that the important communicative elements used during conversation can get lost. For example when sending an email, the receiver is not able to hear your tone of voice or see your facial expression. This may lead to the receiver misinterpreting your message and in unfortunate cases the receiver may even take offense to an email or message simply because they could not read the body language of the messenger.

 

Although offensive translations happen rarely during email, this could lead to a negative effect of the behaviour of the students or lecturer in the classroom.

To prevent offensive translations, it is important for the sender and the recipient to employ professional language at all times or where possible during email communication. Thus email is a most unique form of communication as it calls for impersonal language within the setting of it being an incredibly personal form of communication.

References

Williams, L., 2001. ICFT: Information, communication and friendship technology. In: M. Leask, ed. Issues in Teaching using ICT. New York: RoutledgeFalmer, pp. 49 - 60.