Yo, Professor!

It's fun for me to follow the fortunes of my most-visited post, "How to e-mail a professor," when a semester begins. It received quite a few hits last Monday and Tuesday, and several hundred yesterday. There's been steady interest today too — 67 of the last 100 visits to my blog have been to that post.

Many of these visits are via links in on-line course materials. Other visits seem to be a matter of people having been told what to look for (e.g, a Google search for "orange crate e-mail"). Still others are from students (and some profs, and perhaps a few helicopter parents) starting from scratch (e.g, a Google search for "write email to a professor"). It makes me happy to know that students are thinking about how to engage in the unfamiliar task of writing to their professors. In so doing, they're helping to lift, in countless small ways, the general level of discourse in their academic worlds. Not so far in the future, student e-mails to profs from Hotmail and Yahoo accounts for drunkenbum and thighmaster might seem as quaint as raccoon coats.

A new page that links to "How to e-mail a professor" went online today, from Information Technology Services at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "E-mail how-to's" summarizes most the points I make and adds a few cautions about confidentiality and spam.

Link » How to e-mail a professor, from Orange Crate Art

Link » E-mail how to's, from Inside ITS, UNC at Chapel Hill [Link no longer works.]