Yet another article on student e-mail in NYT (don't register if you don't want to, instead try http://www.bugmenot.com/)

To me, there are some shocking quotes in the article. To wit:

"Christopher J. Dede, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education who has studied technology in education, said these e-mail messages showed how students no longer deferred to their professors, perhaps because they realized that professors' expertise could rapidly become outdated. 'The deference was probably driven more by the notion that professors were infallible sources of deep knowledge," Professor Dede said, and that notion has weakened."

I hope Dede was quoted out of context, because this analysis strikes me as completely off-target. This phenomenon is an internet native/internet immigrant story. Students spend a great amount of time in networks such as Facebook or Myspace with, largely, other students. Lots of time in chat. All of these conversatons take place the audience in an electronic context, and the tone and sense of audience carries over when they contact their professors. I'm not saying that we should excuse this lack of awareness, it's just that there's a lack of awareness for both teachers and students at play here.