I watched last week as Gmail (the e-mail program from Google) went down and stayed down for quite along time. I watched, too, while the discussions of this outage nearly also brought down Twitter and Facebook, and I began thinking about how different our lives are today than they were just a few years ago. The dependence that many of us have on these simple and free tools to stay immediately connected with our friends, colleagues and coworkers is sometimes mind boggling.

A good example of the aforementioned dependence on immediacy is a line from one of the folks that I follow on Twitter, when he shouted out to his group that he was”Grinding teeth at Gmail outage,”  and asked them to ping him on Twitter if they needed to reach him. Apparently, whatever work he was doing during this outage required him to be immediately available to those around him, and without the tool of e-mail he felt the need to offer another path of contact. This says a real mouthful about where our work habits have come as a society.

What, though, does this further say about the state of Education now? And where is the process of teaching and learning headed? The type of immediacy that’s available in traditional live classroom settings can now be reached through a combination of communication tools that are taking over many financial and economic business channels.  It’s an immediacy too that doesn’t necessarily need to be found through the traditional “synchronous” (real-time) channels that current online educators recognize (i.e. chats, whiteboards and IM). Immediacy can be reached through simple webmail applications (that can also show you which of your contacts is on or offline in case you need a quick synchronous fix), or through short 140 word snippets sent out to groups of instructors, friends, colleagues and peers who can all then respond or add to the conversation.

Based on the findings of a recent  report on online education, conducted by SRI International for the US Department of Education sites: “On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.” With that  said, the web is in a place today, right now, where the popular academic goals of collaboration and immediacy have become relatively simple to achieve. I believe that there’s a challenge here for those of us in education to keep our eyes on this fast moving target and keep up with the times.