During this past school year, I spent several weekends touring colleges with my older son. Dorm rooms looked very different from the days when I was in college--and I'm not talking about the difference in electronics. 
I went to school before the dry-erase board appeared on the scene, but we all had message boards hanging from our dorm-room doors. We could wipe them off with a wet paper towel. These boards were the primary means that students had of keeping in touch with each other; an awful lot of the messages would read something like "I was here. You were not." They were also a handy place to put phone messages, as our dorms still featured banks of pay phones that accepted incoming calls. And some students used them as a way of telling their friends where they'd be: "I'm in the laundry room."
Times have changed! While many families I know still depend on their kitchen whiteboards as message centers and family calendars, and they're great in conference rooms and classrooms, you won't see so many of these boards on dorm-room doors. College students don't seem to need to leave each other written messages; they're using cell phones to contact each other. Since cell phones come with voice mail, the whole idea of written phone messages has become obsolete as well.
While I think it's great that cell phones allow people to always be in touch with each other, the messages, doodles, and jokes that students used to leave each other on the message boards were a lot of fun. I guess that's what facebook is for.
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