Fall 1996
Vol 5 Issue 1
IN THIS ISSUE...
Learning Communities + Technology = Connectedness?
Egypt Calling!
Real CLOUT: Learning Communities and Technology -- Developing a Community of Learners
Computers and Integrated Classrooms: Educational Reform in Two Boxes
Using Technology in Integrated Learning Communities
Are We Really Connected?
What the Electronic Forum can Teach us about Learning and Community
Integrated Learning Garden on the Web
Studio II51
CGCC and ASU East at the Williams Campus: A New Partnership in Baccalaureate Education
SEE ALSO...
The Forum
Real CLOUT: Learning Communities and Technology --
Developing a Community of Learners
Dean Stover, GWCC
This semester, Geri Rasmussen, Margie Aker, and I are teaching CLOUT, GateWay Community College's learning community that blocks three classes together:
- CRE 101, Critical and Evaluative Reading
- ENG 101, First Year Composition, and
- COM 100, Introduction to Human Communication.
This past summer the American Association of Higher Education's Teaching, Learning, Technology Roundtable conference put the use of technology into perspective for me: Identify a content or skill area with which students have difficulty and ask yourself if technology can help them understand that content. Let me apply that idea to the composition part of CLOUT.
There are many things students don't understand about composition. Two issues students have difficulty with are (1) realizing that the audience is someone other than the teacher, and (2) getting students to act like a community of learners who can help each other.
Even though teachers can teach students those things in a traditional classroom, I think computer technology can help students learn those things in a more experiential and visual way. The technology we will use to help students learn those things will be networking software and Netscape. The networking software is Daedalus, which offers both asynchronous and synchronous communication in one software package. (You can also accomplish this by using electronic forum and having access to an WWW chat line.)
You are likely familiar with asynchronous communication on a network. It's like our A1 or Electronic Forum accounts; you leave a message at your convenience and others reply at their convenience. Synchronous communication or "real-time" communication is less familiar unless you have joined an on-line chat line, a MUD or MOO, but it is this type of communication that allows for a more student-centered classroom.
Using one part of Daedalus called Interchange, as a group, students can discuss topics, generate and develop ideas. The messages students write scroll by as fast as they are written; as students exchange or comment on messages, they will "see" how their words affect readers. And after students write their essays, they can put their essays on-screen for immediate feedback from other students, which will reinforce the idea that they can get help from the entire class.
We will also use this software to connect all three courses. We have planned a collaborative essay on gender communication issues. Students will answer prompts or questions we will post on Daedalus. The questions will start a synchronous class discussion about those issues. After that, we will assign students to subgroups. These smaller groups can carry on a synchronous discussion in order to focus on a topic that will suit the group. Students, then, will be on-line (within a classroom network) talking to each other and making connections between reading, writing and speaking.
I especially like synchronous communication for class discussion; in composition, for example, it does help students see the connection between writers and readers (see "Writerly Readers" by Susan Romero in Computer Writing, Rhetoric and Literature, http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~cwrl/v2n1/romano/romano_final.html). Students will hear from more writers about more aspects of their writing, they will see that the audience is more than the teacher, and they will actively help others develop and revise essays. As an aside, this issue of writer and audience, and what teachers should have students study in composition, is now the focus of much debate in composition (see "The Anthropological Sleep of Composition" by Ellen Quandahl in the Fall 1994 issue of JAC, http://www.cas.usf.edu/JAC/archive/qua142.html).
What synchronous communication will reveal to students is that writing is a social act; we develop our writing in response to cultural and social messages we receive (see Carolyn Knox-Quinn's "Authentic Classroom Experiences", in Computer Writing, Rhetoric and Literature, http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~cwrl/v1n2/article2/aspect1.html). By asking and answering questions about their writing, they are actively engaged in solving very real writing problems and in incorporating others' language and opinions.
There are other ways of looking at what computer networking does for any class. Teachers are less responsible for talking about the content or skills and more responsible for facilitating discussion and setting up experiences for the students to learn the content and skills; students will spend more time learning how to learn by doing. And because the teacher won't be as dominant a voice in this type of classroom, the class will become more democratic. Students and teachers will be working as a team where everyone is both teaching and learning.
This networking has other benefits for students, too. In "What Can We Do With Computers?" (http://www.daedalus.com/why.html), Fred Kemp states that writing will be "an active form of communication rather than ... a sterile performance to be graded" and there will be much greater participation. And networking gives students another "real world" skill that will help them in the workplace (see Carolyn Knox-Quinn at site mentioned above).
Integrating the World Wide Web into CLOUT is another use of technology that will reinforce and expand on those two problems for composition students: a student's sense of audience and how a community can help achieve a common goal. For CLOUT, a service learning project is one of the main ways we integrate the three courses. Students are given the task of developing an intervention strategy for students at a junior high school near GateWay. Students must decide on an appropriate topic, such as effects of gang involvement or teenage pregnancy, that they will present to the junior high students. To help our students discover and select topics, as well as provide them information about service learning, they will research service learning sites on the Web. These sites will not just provide information; one site will be a service learning listserv. We will have students join a listserv in order to exchange ideas with other service learners around the country, thus students will actively participate with an audience beyond the classroom that can help them (and vice versa) accomplish their service learning assignment. They will receive more feedback about their ideas or messages and will again be able to assimilate those responses.
What learning communities and technology have in common is that they expand on the pathways for communication; teachers and students are able to listen and respond to more ideas, more ways of looking at an issue or idea or subject. These pathways create a more engaged community that is actively concentrating on the social act of communicating with a wide and diverse audience. Collaboration and dialogue become essential tools to communicate effectively, and technology can help make that point to students and give them needed workplace skills.
So as learning communities and technology get us to rethink our approaches to student learning, and redefine our roles, there will be many other discussions about class size, about in-class time, about conferencing, about computers, and about human interaction. Through our social act of deciding how to change, we need to keep our eyes on the prize: helping students, and ourselves, become a community of learners.
Maricopa Community Colleges
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