The semester officially started yesterday. I'm teaching a Web-based technical writing class for the first time. I love teaching writing, so I've been a bit bummed out about the idea of not having the traditional student-teacher interaction to which I'm accustomed. On the other hand, I've been quite excited about engaging Internet technology as a full-time teaching tool.
Yesterday, I sent an instructional handout to my students. The handout tells them how to login to and navigate through our course site. It's pretty basic stuff. Now, for anyone who has taught before, you know that it can be difficult to get students to speak up during the first week or two of class. Such is not the case online. Within no time of emailing the handout, students started browsing the site and even introducing themselves. The introductions began without any sort of prompting by me. As soon as they found the blog section of the site, they just started writing. I'm still a bit in shock.
What makes the rhetorical situation of the online course so different than that of the traditional classroom that students are anxious to speak up? I don't know. But I do have a few ideas. Two, in particular:
1) The online course let's students create ideal personae. Unlike the traditional classroom, instead of feeling that their real selves--personality flaws and all--are on constant display, the virtual classroom let's students reveal to the public only those qualities that they want to reveal, those qualities with which they are most comfortable. Stduents feel less exposed online.
2) Given the (theoretically) democratic nature of Internet technology, maybe the oppressive structure of the traditional classroom is circumvented, creating an honest-to-God decentered classroom. Accordingly, instead of waiting for teachers to fill their heads with knowledge, students take a more active role in their education. If this is true, then teachers of online courses may finally become those facilitators for which process pedagogy has had them striving for nearly forty years.
I don't know if either of these points is relevant. But they seem very likely to me. In the end, however, I don't really care what drives the eagerness of students to participate in the online course. I'm just glad they seem to be excited it.
4 comments:
I am happy that your experience is delightful....
However, somehow I remain skeptical that technology will be the educational "savior."
While students may "feel less exposed online" and present an "ideal self," will they receive an honest education to whomever they are? While I certainly believe education should be abut growth, is this an honest development?
Will there be less participation over time since, to a degree, they can interface with the instructor at their choice?
Should education be democratic? Is this a form of leveling? Does a democratic or decentered vision of education mean that the teacher possesses as much knowledge as the student? Is it desirable to have a decentered education? If there is, then why is it important to have higher education at all?
I would be interested in knowing more about the choice of students-- why did a student choose to take this class online versus in person. Are these people more interested in education in the first place (hence they will do better)?
Just random thoughts. As you can tell, I am not a fan of online or technical education. I see it like I see the "automated" check-out lines in HEB and other stores. Do the other workers look to it and realize the machine is taking their job?
I am also skeptical about it because it reduces the communicative act between professor and student. But, I digress.
I'll respond to just two of your points for the moment, Solon. I don't think that the self-selected students who register for this class are more or less interested in education. Most are likely to be taking the class online because they like the convenience of not attending class at a preset time and place, not because of a particular interest in this kind of education.
And you're the second person today to mention the notion of teachers being replaced by technology. But this course is not automated, and it depends on frequent communication between teacher and student.
When I teach composition I prefer individual communication with students to a classroom of thirty people, and I continously emphasize to my students that I am available to discuss their individual concerns. I think that is the only way to teach writing. My hope is that this course will actually facilitate that individual communication better because there is no in-class lecture and students will perhaps be more inclined to contact me individually. But that remains to be seen.
As for the "virtual balls," I agree that the ideal persona has a lot to do with it. We see countless examples, good and bad, of people doing and saying things online that they would not usually do or say in face-to-face interaction. There is something about the fact that the person you're talking to is not looking at you that eases inhibitions. And I think that a reasonable relaxing of inhibitions in class can be useful. I, of course, don't mean that students should post inappropriate comments but that they participate in class with less fear of failure and more willingness to try things out and learn from that process.
It seems that we will be having a discussion in the difference between performance and expression. I think that rhetoric from a communication perspective favors the first and downplays the second while rhetoric from an English perspective downplays performance as it focuses on expression.
There are many entailments to this; unfortunatly, my 8am class forces me to discuss sometime in the near future.
Solon, to address your concern about democratic education, I will say that a decentered classroom doesn't necessarily put students and teachers on the same plane in terms of knowledge. Obviously, writing teachers have more experience and knowledge about writing than their students; however, that does not mean that students do not know anything. And that's what a decentered classroom opposes--the idea that students come to class as empty containers, waiting for teachers to fill them with knowledge.
A decentered writing classroom acknowledges that students have knowledge and have things to say, and it encourages them to write about those things. By doing so, students are more likely to engage the writing process, take some pride in their work, and write from a position of authority. If the teacher is the only person in the classroom with knowledge, then how can a student write with authority? And authority is important, for it's typically the consequence of students having something important to say. Consequently, writing in the decentered classroom is not just a classroom exercise; it's writing with a purpose.
In such classrooms, students are often the experts on the subjects about which they write. And they should be, else what reasons are there for writing? The teachers are more like coaches, helping students develop their arguments into more persuasive documents. To this end, peer review groups are also important, as they let writers share their work with real readers. And who better to assess the efficacy of written work than readers?
This is why, as Sarah points out, writing is best taught one-on-one, because teachers can read actual compositions and specifically point out what does and what does not work, as well as help them understand why. This really can't be done in a lecture-based, teacher-oriented writing classroom. Certainly, good writing may have some general principles and strategies that can be taught (in the traditional sense of the word) to students. But the more we talk about these things, the less our students are writing and, subsequently, the less they are learning.
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