Yeah, I know, it’s been awhile. I took a break without announcing it, because I didn’t realize I was doing it. I was actually working a lot on presenting/organizing a number of workshops for the Program for Online Teaching last week, then dealing with incoming students all weekend since classes began yesterday.
This evening I presented an “Online Interactivity and Learning Styles” workshop at San Diego City College. As often happens at these things, one challenging participant made me think hard about what I’m trying to do.
I didn’t come in as an evangelist for online teaching. After giving an assessment (based on literacyworks‘) and going around the room with everyone’s results, I discussed students’ various learning styles according to Gardner’s multiple intelligences. My goal was to introduce attendees to this concept, then move into the results of EDUCAUSE’s 2005 book “Educating the Net Generation“, talking about how our younger students think and how we can create greater interactivity online through the many tools the web has to offer. We’d then have fun looking at cool tools. Well, that was the idea.
One participant was there, he said, because he was unsuccessful teaching online. I assumed he wanted to improve, but as I continued my presentation (and responses to his ongoing comments) it became apparent that he did not think anything he did online would ever be as good as what he does in the classroom, that I was there to convince him otherwise and that I was failing. After arguing about it and taking up a lot of my workshop for his (admittedly very important) issues, I was left with a few premises:
- Some people shouldn’t be teaching online.
- These people might not know who they are.
- People who don’t want to teach online shouldn’t do it.
- The topic of a workshop doesn’t very much matter if someone really wants to discuss something else.
To ease my mind, I have devised a quick survey, which is by no means finalized, and I’m not happy that the Javascript I stole makes the answer window too narrow, but there you are.
My main point, as always, was that the pedagogy comes first, and the technology second. I got the feeling, as I often do at workshops, that the attendees felt a bit overwhelmed by the variety of methods and tools I was showing them. At one point it became apparent that they thought I was telling them to do more, when I was trying to tell them to think differently. The tools were just to be selected based on their own needs.
Next time, I’ll be framing this differently. And learning to say much sooner, “if you don’t enjoy teaching online, perhaps you shouldn’t do it”.
