Is it Now Negligent To Miss Online Notices?

Official notice in the U.P. College of Law is now largely disseminated through group or individual electronic mail (e-mail), posts on social networking sites and text messaging. Electronic mail and text messaging have replaced paper letters, and posts on social networking sites have replaced cork bulletin boards, with its beautiful displays of chaotic order – of differently colored and variably sized pins, tapes and paper here and there.

Although this manner of giving notice might afford many students quicker access to the information desired to be handed down by the administration, it imposes a quite irksome burden of having to religiously “visit” or diligently “police” one’s e-mail and social networking accounts. This method tends to discriminate against students who prefer to digest information the old fashioned way. Those students who need to read their cases and readings in print with a pen or highlighter in hand in order to absorb it would understand.

Somewhere amidst the ocean of messages, comments, updates and other alerts, the student has to detect the information being passed by the administration, usually through the student government representatives who, in turn, pass it on to the students at large. Once a notice is sent or posted online and the student misses it while it’s fresh, it most likely will get lost and drowned in that ocean, and with that, the student’s right too, to be informed of academic matters that concern him.

A source of disinclination with online notices is that academic matters get intertwined with the non-academic. It’s like bringing work at home; it cannot sit well for a person who is hardwired to work, and only work, when at the office; and to rest, and only rest, when at home. Online notice of academic matters is an intrusion into that kind of person’s private sphere. This sentiment, of course, is kept by an Internet habitué who principally uses it as a rest and recreational, and not a business, tool.

Not only a few times has it happened that additional assignments were sent through e-mail the night before a class, because of which, a student has had to withstand, the following morning, the agonies of failing to know that additional schoolwork was given under the cloak of night. Also, in the recent past, new scholastic delinquency rules were passed, notice of which had apparently been given mainly through electronic means. According to the rule-giver who must not be named, this constituted sufficient public notice to the students. The fact was not many learned of such new rules, until news of it spread like wildfire due to its harsh application.

Although online notices may be convenient for many at the receiving end, it isn’t for the old fashioned. To know what’s on the bulletin board, I need only my feet to bring me before it, and my eyes to read it. To know what’s online, I need not only a computer, but also Internet access, aside from my eyes to read it. This seems already too much diligence to ask from a student to know what he has the right to know.

Prof. Quimbo: “…for those who want to stop smoking, stop now or forever hold your breath.”

Raul S. Grapilon

Entry No. 5