Subject: Re: Ania, Farhad and David Kennedy
From: Wendy Lowe (wlowe@ca.oracle.com)
Date: Thu 11 Nov 1999 - 23:20:22 MET
Date: Thu, 11 Nov 1999 17:20:22 -0500 From: Wendy Lowe <wlowe@ca.oracle.com> Subject: Re: Ania, Farhad and David Kennedy
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Prompted by the recent remarks of Ania and Farhad: the issue Ania
raises is valid when she mentions that as teachers we try to control the
environment; perhaps the loss of control is what intrigues us in the
distance education setting and causes us to "worry".
Practically speaking, while working on distance courseware I began to
think of the issues that face students and teachers in the classroom. I
considered the distance to be semantic or else very simply the degree of
exchange between teacher and student.
I think what caught my attention was the fact that we talk about
designing distance courseware to minimise the distance "feeling" and yet
in classrooms that distance still exists. There has seemed to be a
preoccupation wiuth teacher/learner communication which in some distance
programmes is minimal.
But in some classrooms, the students might as well be a thousand miles
away, for all the connection they experience with the learning
material. That must be a combination of class size, teacher
personality, subject matter and perhaps learning styles.
David, thanks for those practical responses: now I wonder if anyone has
used similar tactics in the classroom, where some of the issues you
mentioned are not resolved by having a human in the classroom.
Wendy
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