The Presence of Online Teaching

The most important lessons I've gathered in the past five weeks relate to the concept of community in online learning.  As in the regular classroom, if one cannot establish a rapport with one's students on one level or another, it will be more difficult for learning to occur.

Along those lines, the tutorial that I found to be the most helpful was the shortest - but the most packed with ideas for establishing a presence.  Professor Curt Bonk's specific ideas for what to do to establish community in an online environment struck a cord with me.  I found them to be reminiscent of Harry Wong, my guru for advice as a beginning teacher in the physical classroom.  

"Accomplishments, identity, rituals, mission...all these things work together so that you can create a place..." (Bonk)

I loved how Bonk shared concrete methods to help a teacher move toward this highly elusive goal.  I am particularly excited to try the mentoring and awards pieces in my own online teaching, as I believe those two things in particular will resonate with high school students.

Additionally, I felt that Stephanie Trunzo's "Pedagogical Facebook and Twitter" raised some important insights for me as an online teacher.  In my past teaching experiences, I have expected the students to come to me.  The county provides and/or advocates certain platforms for my teaching, and while they are very similar to the spaces that students use already, they often are not as functional, attractive, or "real" as the ones that are prevalent in popular media.  One of the images in Trunzo's presentation included a student comment:

"With all the successful social mechanism models available on the web today, I still find myself amazed that an institution like NCSU uses such a poor tool [Vista] for on-line student interaction." (Trunzo)

What does it mean to a student when they come to school and are expected to participate in a copy of something they are already doing better in their personal time?  And what might it mean to students in terms of establishing community for me to meet them on their own terms rather than making them use my space - especially when those spaces can achieve the same learning goals?  While I know there are many other considerations that go into these decisions (especially for me teaching at a high school level), I was very intrigued by the overall theme and some of the questions raised for me by Trunzo's presentation.

 The other tutorial that made a real impression on me was "Creating Community with Second Life," but that is a topic for another posting...