Subject: Re: Summary #2 Transactional distance theory
From: Ania Lian (ania@lingua.arts.uq.edu.au)
Date: Wed 10 Nov 1999 - 09:20:51 MET
Date: Wed, 10 Nov 1999 18:20:51 +1000 (EST) From: Ania Lian <ania@lingua.arts.uq.edu.au> Subject: Re: Summary #2 Transactional distance theory
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On Tue, 9 Nov 1999, Wendy Lowe wrote:
> Ania Lian invited list members to differentiate between transactional
> distance and the teacher/learner distance as regards developing critical
> thinking (can I interject that I thought transactional distance was the
> distance between teacher and learner?)
Right: and what is this distance a function of? And in reposnse to the
question just posed, why should learning be conceived as about reducing
this distance? It may be that in (distance) education, any failure is a
less a problem in teacher-learner communication or maybe the problem is
more profound, as for example, it may lie in teacher's misunderstanding of
his function in the first place?
What I cannot understand is why the goal of critical thinking needs to be
seen as (or replaced by) a goal of management of the relationship between
learner and teacher, trying to make them listen to one another better as
if they ever could truly understand oe another and as if leraning was
mainly a function of this understanding. I do realise the potential
strangeness of my question. I will say it differently: if teaching is a
social affiar why does the pedagogy make it into a learner-teacher affair?
Ania Lian
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