When reading many of the articles that were shared with this course, I was also struck by and deeply interested in the comments sections. The effect of new technologies on community and empathy has been on my mind much of the time during the CoETaIL courses.
In the past I've focused on malicious and cruel comments in the general online community.
Now I've noticed something more subtle but potentially problematic in some posts and the comments sections of blogs about technology in education. (I'm sure the problem is everywhere, but those are the blogs that I've been reading.) The problem is taking the human need to "vent" and doing it in a public forum, especially one that is likely to be visited by the people you're venting about.
Venting may even be too strong a word; commiserate might be better. It is natural that experts in, for example, educational technology will sometimes be frustrated that not all teachers share their passion for the topic, or agree on its importance, or their competence in working with hardware / software. In the same way, teachers can be frustrated when their students don't admit to forgetting to do an assignment, or make learning a lower priority than the teachers would like, etc.
Still, whatever the challenges of getting some teachers to embrace technology, and whatever backwards examples of its application have been observed, it is counterproductive to post about it in public. Some of the comments speak negatively of teachers in a particular district or school, others lambast "teachers" in general for a variety of failings.
Many of us say things less diplomatically than we normally would when we know (or think) our audience agrees with us. However, when we skip qualifiers like "in my experience" or "some teachers" reinforces the tendency to be dismissive of the group as a whole, to pre-judge individuals we are interacting with for the first time, and to allow similar
Educators have a complex relationship as it is with those that would give them advice. I'm playing on stereotypes here, but we can be a notoriously difficult crowd when taking the student's role.
Yet teachers would be the first to say that learning is a lifelong process. We are passionate about learning, for our students and ourselves. Every teacher knows that she has lessons that could use improvement. We all have things to learn and most of us love learning. So why are we sometime such difficult students.
One reason is the importance of teams.
trust - advice
credentials / experts
shared vocabulary
common goals
tone of comments
generalizations
practicalities of classroom
presumption of good intent
No comments:
Post a Comment