September 2009 Archives

E-mail is my preferred form of professional communication. At work I rarely use my telephone and I even use e-mail to communicate with close colleagues I see face-to-face regularly.  I like having a record of my communications so I can keep track of multiple ongoing discussions and so I can search for information at a later date.  I really do like e-mail.  But, there are aspects of this medium that can undermine communication.

Earlier this week I answered an e-mail question from an online student who had asked about the way I present the course assignments and due dates in our class. My e-mail response reiterated where assignments were posted and I indicated that I had consciously chosen not to post assignment descriptions and due dates on the course calendar ~ based on my experience teaching online.  My student replied back that, "my years of online teaching had obviously not taught me anything since I was failing to take different student learning styles into account." Needless to say, I was quite upset with this reply.

I worked out this situation with my student by trading a few more e-mails and things are good between us now. But, this was a crisis in communication that was, I think, caused in great part by e-mail.  My initial reply to my student was rather impersonal and while I was right, I failed to read between the lines to see her honest struggle with my course.  Her reply to me was, I believe, nothing she would have ever said to my face!  Had we had this conversation in person after an in-class course, we would have made much better progress toward a resolution we could both be happy with.

In my 3-year role as an online lead instructor, problems with e-mail communication (and to a lesser extent, posts on discussion topics) were at the heart of many of the conflicts between students and instructors.

1. Students complaining that instructors did not respond to e-mails.
2. Students complaining that instructors were rude, dismissive or insulting in their e-mail communication.
3. Instructors complaining that students were rude, insulting or unprofessional in their e-mail communication.
4. Short e-mails answering student questions that fail to fully address the issue(s) or in other ways leave the student wanting more.
   

It is my firm belief, based on more than 10-years of online teaching , that nearly all disputes between instructors and students can be resolved if there is good, open and honest communication. Often e-mail works well, but not always. How can we improve?

A mantra I use regularly in my online classes is, "Send me e-mail with any questions or concerns." I try to encourage early and ongoing communication with my students. I endeavor to give my students the benefit of the doubt when their e-mails use a tone I don't like (though I do point this out to my students). I try to not to say  things in e-mails that I would not say if the student were sitting in my office.

I would love to know how you deal with these issues? What specific tactics do you use to foster good e-mail communication with your students?  Where have you went wrong and what did you learn?

I hope you will take the time to leave a comment to this post. You will need to register with my Weblog the first time you comment. I hope you will.

In Good Spirit,

Eric

Jacqueline Novogratz: A third way to think about aid - 2009

The debate over foreign aid often pits those who mistrust "charity" against those who mistrust reliance on the markets. Jacqueline Novogratz proposes a middle way she calls patient capital, with promising examples of entrepreneurial innovation driving social change.

Neuroskeptic~ The Man With Half A Brain

Roger appears remarkably unconcerned by his condition. He hardly ever complains and, in general, shows little worry for anything in life. Both of his parents and his sister fervently claim that "Roger is always happy," an observation that is consistent with our own impression. Moreover, based on his family's report, Roger is paradoxically happier now than he was before his brain damage. ... His premorbid disposition of being somewhat reserved and introverted has shifted to being outgoing and extroverted...

Can We Discuss This?- Inside Higher Ed

It's one thing to take responsibility for your own ill-conceived discussion plans, but what do you do when students are the problem? There are (at least) seven flavors of problem students:

• The brownnoser
• The polymath
• The pulseless
  
• The diverter
  
• The pariah
• The defiant
  
• The unprepared

Are Your Friends Making You Fat? ~ New York Times

The reason these people were the happiest, the duo theorize, is that happiness doesn't come only from having deep, heart-to-heart talks. It also comes from having daily exposure to many small moments of contagious happiness. When you frequently see other people smile -- at home, in the street, at your local bar -- your spirits are repeatedly affected by your mirroring of their emotional state. Of course, the danger of being highly connected to lots of people is that you're at risk of encountering many people when they are in bad moods. But Christakis and Fowler say their findings show that the gamble of increased sociability pays off, for a surprising reason: Happiness is more contagious than unhappiness.

'Inside of a Dog - What Dogs See, Smell, and Know,'  NYTimes.com

A human being experiences a rose as a lovely, familiar shape, a bright, beautiful color and a sublime scent. That is the very definition of a rose. But to a dog? Beauty has nothing to do with it; the color is irrelevant, barely visible, the flowery scent ignored. Only when it is adorned with some other important perfume -- a recent spray of urine, perhaps -- does the rose come alive for a dog.

How about a more practical object? Say, a hammer? "To a dog," Horowitz points out, "a hammer doesn't exist. A dog doesn't act with or on a hammer, and so it has no significance to a dog. At least, not unless it overlaps with some other, meaningful object: it is wielded by a loved person; it is urinated on by the cute dog down the street; its dense wooden handle can be chewed like a stick." Dogs, it seems, are Aristotelians, but with their own doggy teleology. Their goals are not only radically different from ours; they are often invisible to us. To get a better view, Horowitz proposes that we humans get down intellectually on all fours and start sniffing.

Plato vs Grand Theft Auto ~ Roger Sandall

Plato thought the characters presented should be exemplary, and that boys should model themselves on "men of courage, self-control, independence, and religious principle." And because first impressions are important, he believed that dramatic impersonations of rogues and scoundrels could be dangerous for both actors and audiences.

Schoolchildren "must no more act a mean part than do a mean action or any other kind of wrong. For we soon reap the fruits of literature in life, and prolonged indulgence in any form of literature leaves its mark on the moral nature of a man, affecting not only the mind but physical poise and intonation." (Book Three, 395, H.D.P. Lee translation)

Charles Darwin Film 'Too Controversial For Religious America' - Telegraph

The film was chosen to open the Toronto Film Festival and has its British premiere on Sunday. It has been sold in almost every territory around the world, from Australia to Scandinavia.

However, US distributors have resolutely passed on a film which will prove hugely divisive in a country where, according to a Gallup poll conducted in February, only 39 per cent of Americans believe in the theory of evolution....

"The film has no distributor in America. It has got a deal everywhere else in the world but in the US, and it's because of what the film is about. People have been saying this is the best film they've seen all year, yet nobody in the US has picked it up.

Man vs. God

We commissioned Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins to respond independently to the question "Where does evolution leave God?" Neither knew what the other would say. Here are the results.

Or link here to the TED site to see the video and follow the discussions.

Is This Your Brain On God? : NPR

More than half of adult Americans report they have had a spiritual experience that changed their lives. Now, scientists from universities like Harvard, Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins are using new technologies to analyze the brains of people who claim they have touched the spiritual -- from Christians who speak in tongues to Buddhist monks to people who claim to have had near-death experiences. Hear what they have discovered in this controversial field, as the science of spirituality continues to evolve.

Morality Play ~ Science News

[I]t comes as a surprise that the village boy ranks reasoning as the mother's best tactic for setting Xiaoming straight. His explanation: Someone who knocks down other children needs prodding from Mom to realize how it feels to be bullied...

Other rural Chinese kids, as well as city children in China and Canada, generally agree with the village boy's opinions, says psychologist Charles Helwig of the University of Toronto. His new findings support the idea that universal concerns among children -- such as a need to feel in control of one's behavior and disapproval of harming others -- shape moral development far more than cultural values do.

"It's remarkable how little cultural variation we have found in developmental patterns of moral reasoning," says Helwig, who presented his results in Park City, Utah, at the recent annual meeting of the Jean Piaget Society.

College for $99 a Month by Kevin Carey ~ Washington Monthly

In recent years, Americans have grown accustomed to living amid the smoking wreckage of various once-proud industries--automakers bankrupt, brand-name Wall Street banks in ruins, newspapers dying by the dozen. It's tempting in such circumstances to take comfort in the seeming permanency of our colleges and universities, in the notion that our world-beating higher education system will reliably produce research and knowledge workers for decades to come. But this is an illusion. Colleges are caught in the same kind of debt-fueled price spiral that just blew up the real estate market. They're also in the information business in a time when technology is driving down the cost of selling information to record, destabilizing lows.

In combination, these two trends threaten to shake the foundation of the modern university, in much the same way that other seemingly impregnable institutions have been torn apart. In some ways, the upheaval will be a welcome one. Students will benefit enormously from radically lower prices--particularly people like Solvig who lack disposable income and need higher learning to compete in an ever-more treacherous economy. But these huge changes will also seriously threaten the ability of universities to provide all the things beyond teaching on which society depends: science, culture, the transmission of our civilization from one generation to the next.

The New Literacy -- Clive Thompson, Wired Magazine

The first thing [Andrea Lunsford] she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That's because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom--life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

It's almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they'd leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.