Don’t know what to say this week. The flood of emails created a range of emotions for me. There was a certain voyeuristic pleasure in following the responses whether humourous or vitriolic. Listening now to the recording of the Elluminate session I’m now trying to recall what similar power plays I have pulled over the years – sometimes unconsciously.
Then Lisa again provoked my interest in another thoughtful post about control by personality. The closest I came was to look at how my expectations, demeanor and yeah my teaching style changes depending on the audience. I would readily adopt micro management techniques with mostly teenage students and very communicative and collaborative approaches with adult learners of English as a Second Language. Both seemed relatively successful according to feedback. Wendy, in the Moodle Forum, called this “structure.
Regardless, the power over a student’s ability to progress further or not was never far from the surface.
In the online environment the ability to rely on “personality” is more difficult as spoken words look very different on paper and out of context.
November 8, 2008 at 5:20 am
[…] as well as perceived and actual power.” A link to Wendy’s post appeared in The Daily. Grant shared his take on the week and linked to Lisa’s post to discuss ‘personality’. […]
November 17, 2008 at 12:03 am
Interesting point about difference between teenagers and adults but I do wonder if we should be more collaborative with teenagers than we are – what do you think?
November 17, 2008 at 9:52 am
Thanks for the comment Sarah. In the context of my younger students they come from particularly difficult educational experiences and have enrolled in a course which is assessed mostly by external examinations. This context meant we often imposed more “rules” than we would normally (at least in the beginning)and then relax as the students became more used to our way of doing things. The exam constraint never went away and probably wont in the foreseeable future. Always a pity when exams drive the pedagogy.