0.6 Cunniff, d. (september 2011). university partnerships with  (Page 5/7)

As stated earlier, e-mail is being used in the E-mentoring program in the Central Valley of California matching university faculty to students in middle school and high school. Prior to the writing of this paper, as far as technology is concerned, this medium has been the preferred method in communicating to our adolescents. According to Dr. Ronald Berk of The Johns Hopkins University, these adolescents fall in the category of the network generation youth called “Net Geners”. These students, and now teachers and administrators, fall in the age group between seven and twenty-eight years of age. They were born into the computer age between 1982 and 2003. This includes students from the second grade through graduate school and our young administrators. He states that nearly ninety million or one-third of the United States population fall into this group (Berk, 2010). E-mail is being replaced by text messages sent via cell phones.

When partnering, the participants must take into consideration the backgrounds of the partner members. For the most part, university members are anywhere from ten to twenty or more years older than those in the school district. These differences, of course, will vary from school to school. With this in mind, from the university point-of-view, we need to take into consideration the best way to reach our targets, those being students, teachers, parents, and administrators in the public and private school sectors.

The Net Gener’s world is focused around social media including Facebook, My Space, and Twitter. They use iPods, iPhones, iPads, and MP3 players. To the extent that university faculty recognize these media will determine their effectiveness in relating to this market and their success as a significant and credible partner. They need to recognize that over ninety percent of the network generation is involved in the following:

• Computers
• Smart phones
• The Internet for homework
• Search engines like Google
• News Websites
• Multitask while texting (Berk, 2010)

E-mail

Electronic mail may be the most familiar technology to all computer users. Participants can send and receive email, cut and paste, and forward email. They can search the web as a recreational or research tool. This is a widely used vehicle for district, school and university communication. It may include:

• Communications to students, staff and community
• Requests for data, information, survey or input
• Responses to complaints
• Information to the community as to an event
• Problems to be solved.

Nu-fast and beyond

National University in La Jolla, California, has taken E-mail to another level. Here, faculty may open an account and have discussions in an asynchronous manner through discussion boards. These discussions can be open to faculty, students, as well as selected members of the community. It has been used with committees that involve members from across the state and nation. In some ways, it resembles a Blackboard or E-College online text chat for participants to text their opinions on various topics. Real-time video has been added with programs for classes such as Class Live Pro and Adobe Connect. Similar to Skype, this platform enables participants to see and talk with each other in live chat sessions. In working with schools, Nu-FAST enables participants to enter topic discussions at will, making participation convenient for classroom teachers, administrators and university faculty as well. The Adobe Connect provides a more personal interaction in that you can use webcams and have immediate responses with both voice and video in synchronous communication. An added feature is that all of these video sessions can be recorded and played back at a future date giving more flexibility to this communication tool.