Some academic e-mail systems offer a taste of what this could be like.
Who is Meg Worley, and what advice does she give students regarding academic e-mail correspondence?
It came with other academic junk mail he easily tossed aside — "Join this honor society, or that one.
Over the past decade, academics have used mailing lists, discussion boards and learning journals, but these have usually existed behind university firewalls.
But then I got the most intriguing note from Thomas Haigh, a technology historian, chairman of a professional group dedicated to information technology history, and "career academic"— via e-mail.
Western Governors University (www.wgu.edu/wgu), for example, assigns students "mentors" who act as guides through the school's academic programs; e-mail and telephone connect student to mentor and student to student.
Survey recipients were identified through GEM clinical and research contacts, primary searching of hospital and academic websites and organisational mailing lists, including a mailing list of clinicians and researchers on the VNI database to which GEM staff were blinded.
Encouragement toward accessing the homepage was limited to advertising through physician mailing lists, academic journals, and commercial medical journals.
The details required on the form will include the name of the student, current academic status, a contact mailing and physical address and a contact telephone number.
In the academic hospital, invitation e-mails were sent to the secretaries of the departments, who forwarded invitation e-mails to the individual e-mail addresses.
