Departments

• Digital Literacy
• Miscellaneous Rants
• Story Telling as Teacher Inquiry

Clinicians

• Client Abstract Form
• Tx Plan (sample)
• Therapy Script (form)

Failure?#

I'm feeling almost like a edu-blog failure lately.  I know that I'm not capitalizing as much as possible on my class blogs but find that using a blog with a face to face class is much different from using a blog with a class that meets electronically.  My earlier intentions to write weekly reviews has fallen apart (at least three or four weeks ago) and what bothers me the most about this is that I'm missing an opportunity to make a visible, historical record of our experiences.  Even the computer class this semester, which meets electronically, has suffered because I see every one of the students in that class face to face in another class twice a week.  So, it's clear that while I made shifts in how I worked this summer with the computer class, those shifts were temporary and a wholesale transformation in how I think about communicating with my students hasn't really occurred.  That is, once I had them available to me in a face to face situation I reverted to my old habits of communicating in person, rather than online.  I don't mean to suggest that communicating in person is a bad thing.  What I do mean to suggest is that communicating in person is fleeting, temporary, able to evaporate into the atmosphere with nothing more than a memory and if students don't hear what I think I'm saying, or if I don't say what I think I'm saying, or if I just don't say it....there's no record of what has passed between us.  If, however, I say those things on the blog, students can revisit them for clarification, every student has access to the same information, and nobody has to rely upon their memories to conjure up what transpired between us.  The next logical question then is, "Why did I revert back to the old ways of communicating with my students?"  The answer, I believe, is in the question.  They are my old ways, the habits of a lifetime, what I've done forever and they are the easiest to draw upon in a moment.  But, because I've done that, students have no need to visit the blog, often haven't even read the instructions I do provide...because my way of working with them has sent the message that verbal (instead of written) transactions between us is the standard mode of operation.  It is a clear case of actions speaking louder than words.  So, if I want my students to use the resources I provide, I must provide useful resources and I must insist that they access those. My trip thinking (the thinking I'll do while my husband is driving this weekend) is going to focus on this issue....on the ways I must operate in order to capitalize on the technological resources available to me.

Posted by Karen McComas on 10/24/02; 6:57:35 AM to the Journal Department
Discuss |