One Of The Last Institutional Vestages... E-mail

Okay, so it appears that The Rest Of The World Gets In The Way again (although it is the same post referenced the last time). Over the past couple of weeks I have been trying to get caught up on transcribing my dissertation interviews and reviewing my observational videos, so I haven't had time to work on my shingle. That changed tonight.

While it has been a while since I moved to my own domain (and if you missed the story, I recounted it again in the first entry of this blog - see Starting This Journey), I have continued to use my institutional e-mail instead of the mkb@michaelbarbour.com that I could have created. I continued to use my mkb@uga.edu e-mail address because I felt that the institutional label lent some credibility to my work as an academic. While still hold that view, I have become more and more concerned with some of the big brother features that are common with institutional e-mail accounts.

In the past, I always used a non-affliated e-mail account. I had (and still have) an e-mail account with the National Captial Freenet (http://www.ncf.ca) and I would always use that account on business cards and in correspondence, on websites, etc. - instead of whatever ISP that I had or whatever school account (secondary school or university) that I could have used.

However, over the past few hours I have really been thinking about this, and really this is the last institutional tie I have when it comes to my online presence. So I bit the bullet and switched. A colleague of mine set me an invitation for a GMail account not long after GMail got set-up. I responded at the time and created the account. Through a series of odd circumstances tonight, I decided to recall/remember (with the assistance of Google) my username and password for that account and see if I could mask my institutional identity within GMail.

Well, this was a message that I sent from my GMail account to my UGA account:

From: MICHAEL K. BARBOUR
Mailed-By: gmail.com
To: mkb@uga.edu
Date: Sep 19, 2006 9:25 PM
Subject: Test

Notice the from field. When I click reply, in the "To:" field appears mkb@uga.edu - as I was able to create that as the default "Reply to:" option. So for all exterior purposes, it appears as if I am using an institutional account. Granted, all of my in-coming mail still goes to the UGA server before begin forwarded to my GMail account, none of my outgoing mail can be seen from there.

Basically, I get to keep the credibility that comes wth the institutional label (and I'm sure that there are people who disagree with me on this point), but I get to by-pass actually having to use the institutional system.

Hopefully the continued re-design of my non-institutional homepage will go as smoothly as the transition to GMail did this evening, although I doubt it - as I had my colleague show me how to manipulate my image in Fireworks only to forget two nights ago when I went to do it again.

But that will have to wait for the next entry - in any regard, I am still planning and on target to release my new homepage before I travel to AECT.

Tags: AECT 2006, AECT, graduate student, graduate students, graduate school, higher education, education