Learning and Teaching Relationships
Established, developing, new, public-private, power
Social relationships between members of an e-learning community can impact upon the conduct of CMC.
Relationships intervene in two ways. First, the quality of achievement in any CMC environment may be influenced by the participants' history of previous engagement. Second, within the conference itself, the accumulating exchanges between participants may resource and develop stable understandings between individuals - new forms of relationship may evolve.
Established relationships
Established relationships are relevant because of their contribution to the 'common knowledge' of the participants. Discussion is grounded by what discussion partners already know, including what they believe about each other's knowledge and skills and understanding of the topic. The more investment already made by you and your students in constructing such mutual understanding, the easier you will find it to support fluent and creative exchange. In many learning communities, the typical features of a shared curriculum (lectures, readings and so forth) and a common course culture may sit behind this sense of common knowledge.
Developing relationships
However, such common experience may not always be present in a learning community - particularly where CMC resources support distance teaching or distributed classes. Extra care needs to be given to the 'social fabric' of the class. You may find that the momentum of CMC is enhanced if it is possible for you to supplement it with some more 'traditional' shared experiences, for example face-to-face meetings, field trips or 'away days'. The conference discussions will then be able to exploit the grounding of 'learner relationship' promoted through such activity.
If this is not possible then, at the very least, you should find it useful to provide a space (and some time) at the start of the course for participants to share information about themselves. A short course-relevant bio, with some information about hopes and worries, is worth encouraging, as well as the uploading of photographs. Not all people will want to provide the latter so it is perhaps best to make this optional - but put your own up!
New (or changed) relationships
A further issue for consideration is the evolution of the CMC environment itself, through your use of it with your students. New relationships may be established, existing ones disturbed. Patterns of familiarity may evolve through on-line exchange and this suggests the term 'relationship' because they develop as stable forms of exchange between particular individuals. Where several participants are concerned, we might talk more of a 'clique'. Of course, these may naturally evolve within face-to-face classroom settings also.
However, in the more extended world of face-to-face learning there will be places for privately-focused relationships to be developed and sustained outside of 'classroom' time. If your CMC environment cannot provide for this, there is a danger that other participants will be irritated by discussion that seems more relevant to the localised interests of particular individuals. Even where such personalised exchanges concern course content, they may be less useful to the full group.
Public-private
Fragmentation of this sort is less likely to arise if your conference participants have other modes of contact available. The development of more privately shared knowledge can then be achieved 'outside' in 'cafe' or 'special interest group' or other fora - to be agreed between yourselves. Otherwise, responsibility for managing such 'conversational tributaries' within the one conference rests back with you, or a designated moderator - who might need to be quite skilled in detecting where a discussion is becoming focused and more private in this sense.
Power
Finally, the tendency for CMC to encourage a lowering of inhibitions in relation to more usual 'classroom conventions' implies that traditional relationships may be coloured by this. The most interesting might be that between you and your learners. In conventional settings students and tutors may develop a degree of formality that signals a necessary interpersonal distance between them. Students may be less cautious in their interactions with conferences. You may need to prepare for this and to moderate your own contributions to either cultivate or discourage such trends - as your preference dictates.
Voices of Experience
A selection of 'Voices of Experience' - comments from learners and teachers - relating to this area are recorded in text format here (opens in a new window).
You can also access the sections for Learning and Teaching Relationships within each subject area case study, which include similar commentary, from the links below:
3: Applied Psychology and Computing
4: Psychology and Information Technologies
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