Accept no substitutes

Month: September 2013

Email Gets Failing Grades. I speak for #noemail

#noemail is stylish. Who knew? Courtney Rubin reports in this past Sunday’s NYTimes Style section “Email Gets Failing Grades”.
I’m quoted as:

Paul Jones, a professor at the University of North Carolina, does not think they should have to.

“E-mail is a sinkhole where knowledge goes to die,” said Mr. Jones, who said that he gave up e-mail in 2011. It was a radical move, not least because Mr. Jones helped write the code for the university’s first e-mail program 30 years ago. “I’m trying to undo that sinful work,” he said, joking.

E-mails to him receive an automated reply: “Goodbye E-mail, I’m divesting,” plus some 20 ways to reach him. About the only person frustrated by this, he said, was a department head who wanted to know “how will you possibly read our important departmental announcements?” Mr. Jones said with a laugh.

But in his quest to eliminate e-mail, Mr. Jones may have a surprising obstacle: students. Canvas, a two-year-old learning management system used by Brown University, among others, allows students to choose how to receive messages like “The reading assignment has been changed to Chapter 2.” The options: e-mail, text, Facebook and Twitter. According to company figures, 98 percent chose e-mail.

My responses here later.

20 years in 5 minutes and #noemail at Duke

I had a great time this Monday at the RTP Foundation taking part in 5 minute talks on open source projects called “RTP 180: Open Source All Things.” While I talked — slightly over my 5 minutes, I’ll admit — just over 60 slides representing about 1% of the projects currently hosted at ibiblio.org passed by on the screen at about 3 seconds each. That could have been a little fast for some people, so I’ve reposted those slides here:

On Wednesday, I took the #noemail message to the Duke Libraries as “Imagine Life without Email” where one former ibiblian and current Duke Libraires developer taunted me by sending an email in my presence with not one but two attachments. Will is, of course, the source of his own pain as Oscar Wilde observed “We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.”

Slides from that talk are here (note that Is Good doesn’t trust Google Docs but I assure you this link is fine):

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