Is e-mail really for old people? And happy 35th birthday e-mail!

How to keep up as schools in a world where even e-mail is outdated and social networking is the new big thing? Some schools say that the answer is setting up a MySpace page. Can it be that education has sunk to a new low? Or is this the new high in school/student communication? Nate Anderson wrote an article on arstechnica.com about this.

But the question how to communicate with the younger generation is also very actual for parents, they just don’t know what can be done with a computer. Jonathan Duffy wrote an interesting article on the BBC website called IT-support for your parents.

So what would you do as a school to communicate with students? And what is the future, because are we looking at MySpace as a way to hand in assignments maybe? Here are just a few other blogs talking about this subject.
chronicle.com/wiredcampus
blog.ilipra.org
librarianinblack.typepad.com

But is e-mail really that old (and therefore, maybe, for older people)? Some time ago I came across a post on the Official Google Blog which noted that e-mail turned 34 in October 2005. And because today it is exactly one year after: Happy 35th birthday E-mail!

Although Paul Buchheit, the writer of the Google blogpost, is a bit cautious to set a definitive date, he traces it back to Ray Tomlison: “…in October 1971, an engineer named Ray Tomlinson chose the ‘@’ symbol for email addresses and wrote software to send the first network email.”