Blogging down the barriers

I have been having just the best time, reading the writings of my students (and colleagues) on this blog. Something has happened here that I'm not sure the participants are aware of, but it is both significant and wonderful.

Supposedly we're all here to experience an immersion in Web 2.0 technology, but this blog was really an experiment to get out of the formality of the distance ed structure. One of the common complaints of distance learning is the isolation of the student from the academic community, in particular the classroom.

As a teacher, I love the classroom. I like its feel, its complexity, its energy when its filled with students, its quietness as students focus on their current projects, its chaos at finals time.

There's a great dialogue that happens in the classroom between teacher and student. But conversation is incredibly hard to generate in an online course, and we can blame the technology. The discussion boards that are the staple of asynchronous distance ed courses are a throwback to the primitive bulletin board systems that existed before the Web.

Yes, here we are, 20 years after CompuServe... and we're still communicating by posting "message threads?" Heck, a CompuServe thread was easier to follow than the posts in our discussion boards. Even when we tried to follow one thread with comments and posts, there was little sense of interaction. Posts were short and stilted, as if there was great pain in actually posting, and a significant number of replies were of the "I agree" category.

Each student seemed isolated, and when I'd comment on a post, I'd rarely get a response. It was almost as if the student had done their onerous task and couldn't wait to go somewhere else and never return. I could hardly blame them; even for me it felt like descending into a compositional dungeon.

So with Web 2.0 as an excuse I decided to throw caution to the winds and take the class on a field trip. It's been a more exciting journey than I ever imagined. Remember what the discussion board was like? Now look at the dialog going on here in the blog. Look at the length of each post. Good grief! A couple of posts contains almost as much content as the entire class's contribution to a week's discussion board from earlier in the quarter.

But what has really warmed the cockles of my heart is the quality of the writing. Your grammar has improved. Your spelling is better. Your thoughts are coherent and well-focused. Your conversations are more in-depth.

To be sure the entire class hasn't joined us on this journey, but that's typical of an online class. And it's their loss. For those of you who have contributed your thoughts, your hopes, your fears, and your experiences, I thank you for sharing. While I may be your instructor, you are doing a remarkable job of teaching yourselves and each other.

Say, this Web 2.0 stuff might not really be so bad after all!