Screencast-o-matic Instructional Tool Review

Screencast-o-matic is a videocapture program that records what you are doing on your screen and allows for a voice over to be added.  

Screencasts are widely used for demonstrations, presentations, and tutorials.  While not explicitly designed for classroom use, they are, among other uses, intended to show how to do something. I’ve encountered them in Old Dominion asynchronous classes before – such as the statistics class where seeing a problem being worked and explained was very useful. Since then I’ve seen ODU PhD colleagues discuss using Screencast-o-matic for their teaching assignments, so it was my first stop in comparison shopping.

Screencast-o-matic’s free version has the key features of recording the screen activity and narration and allowing for the video to be hosted or exported.  It also traces the cursor movement to allow viewers to easily see what is being clicked on.  The pro version (for $15 a year!) allows editing of the video and effects to be added.  It also offers hosting, passwording, exportability to Google drive, and two hours of recording (compared to 15 minutes for free).

Screencast-o-matic’s own site is http://screencast-o-matic.com/; however, I downloaded my copy from http://download.cnet.com/Screencast-O-Matic/3000-13633_4-75734109.html.  This is my go to site for software reviews and safe downloads.  

I spoke briefly with Wright State University’s instructional designers about what WSU uses.  They support two programs:  Tegrity which is embedded in our Desire2Learn LMS and Camtasia which is supplied to those designated as OL instructors.  They both have the advantage of being institutionally supported. Tegrity, however, does not allow exporting and Camtasia is, while the instructional designers consider it excellent, expensive for individuals ($300) and perhaps comes with too many affordances (distractions!). Their recommendation for small scale projects needing free and easy software is jing – a stripped down version of Camtasia. It, however, does not allow uploads to elsewhere, but simply provides you with a link.  

Screencast-o-matic, even the free version, allows uploading to Youtube and exporting in a variety of formats. Since I am starting from scratch and don’t need a smaller version of something I’m already familiar with, I preferred Screencast-o-matic. 

The free version is extremely easy to use.  It’s intuitive and elegant in design.  Once a screencast is complete the technology is virtually transparent.  To a student viewer, it’s a Youtube (or other type) of video that is watched, paused, replayed. Nothing new needs to be learned. For the creator, very little more is needed other than the type of preparation one would make to teach f2f expecting to demonstrate on a projected screen.  Having clicked record, you use your computer as usual, pulling up applications as needed.  So long as one moves through without long pauses, an effective classroom style presentation can be made. The only new skill is really more habit awareness  --  any mouse movement will be tracked with a yellow circle so fidgets show up.  Other technical aspects such as saving, processing, and exporting are simple clicks.  As far as I can tell, it is not a big bandwidth hog.  

It’s of value for many types of discipline and for mini-lessons and lectures, but in English it can be used as a means of demonstrating composing, editing, and revising.  Even seeing instructors correct typos can be a teachable moment! Showing how to build and experiment with text is something we don’t see often enough and performing it cold in a live classroom may be risky.  A recorded demonstration with narration of how and why I made changes to a sentence or paragraph would be useful.  Teaching paragraph coherence and seeing the sentences move around could be better than seeing two static versions. 

Basic tutorials and how to modules can free up instructional time and be maintained from semester to semester.  They are on demand, repeatable, and can be paused.   I would advocate for them in OL and f2f classes as a library and resource.  I’d have them available to all my students – juniors and seniors need refreshers too!

It’s sufficiently straightforward that I would advocate for using it as a student tool.  Since it’s free, I’d ask students all to download it and use it for the class.  A favorite assignment of mine is for students to write their own personalized writing manual.  It’s somewhat based on ELL language logs, but it asks them to create a list of stylistic tics they may have, things they always have to look up, and asks them to write at least two or three explanations of a grammar / mechanics issue they have – in a way that clicks for them.  They research it and teach it to themselves.  I see a Screencast-o-matic student-created tutorial as being a useful metacognition / reflective tool.

Additionally, I see it being used by students as a peer review tool.  OL peer review can be tricky – a writer who is not yet skilled may struggle to express what is wrong with a text. The usual reading aloud and discussing protocol is problematic OL.  I’ve long made peer reviews into a written out of class assignment for my students. This is in part to get them used to writing reviews, but it also allows for more reflection as well as giving the recipient a document to refer back to instead of trying to take notes / remember in an f2f review.  The students write a page review and supply a track changes copy of the paper along with comments (not edits).  I think Screencast-o-matic can combine the best of live and written peer reviews.  I envision the reviewer commenting on the paper with track changes and pausing to make oral comments or even demonstrate a suggested revision.  Students can see and hear feedback. The fact that is a recording means no changes are made in the recipient’s copy and ownership over the text and changes are still theirs.

The video review mentions a few other ideas for metacognitive student activities such as read loud protocols, diagnostic activities and so on.

Screencast-o-matic also help us meets several OWI principles.

OWI Principle 2: An online writing course should focus on writing and not on technology orientation or teaching students how to use learning and other technologies.

This software is easy to use and allows for tutorials to be created such that other tech orientation is minimized.

OWI Principle 3: Appropriate composition teaching/learning strategies should be developed for the unique features of the online instructional environment.

OWI Principle 4: Appropriate onsite composition theories, pedagogies, and strategies should be migrated and adapted to the online instructional environment.

Screencasts allow for the adaptation and even enhancement of peer review, editing, and the process of writing through demonstrations of process.  It also allows for more than migration since it is an on-line tool itself, it is inherently fitted to OL uses.  

OWI Principle 5: Online writing teachers should retain reasonable control over their own content and/or techniques for conveying, teaching, and assessing their students’ writing in their OWCs.

This software is not tied to an institution.  It’s useful if you expect to be mobile – are early in your career for example, or adjunct, or simply have concerns about intellectual property or continued access to a proprietary LMS.  

It additionally assists in meeting principles 11 and 13.

OWI Principle 11: Online writing teachers and their institutions should develop personalized and interpersonal online communities to foster student success.

OWI Principle 13: OWI students should be provided support components through online/digital media as a primary resource; they should have access to onsite support components as a secondary set of resources.

Overall, I highly recommend Screencast-o-matic for its ease of use, transparent technology, appropriate affordances, and creative possibilities in both f2f and OL classes. 

Digital Burkean salon, contact zone, community of inquiry, supportive space, illusion, panopticon…what is "community" and can blogs effectively create it in an OWC?

“Community” can make me shudder and long to escape.  It can feel overly-cosy, small-towny, and stifling.  A pastoral panopticon.  Along with Jeremy Brent, I can see it as an illusion, a mirage of a paternal aristocracy keeping the villagers and loyal citizens in their place… ah, we Brits are cynical! 

But community is also the spirit of the Blitz—of beleaguered Londoners pulling together in the face of overwhelming odds. It can be a powerful illusion—perhaps reified desire!—that gets us through a time of adversity – the genuine, if temporary community of boot camp.  It’s a shared need or shared interest.  Our combined voices can be polyvocal, supportive, protective and challenging. The shared communal space can offer an “I’m Spartacus” blog solidarity in the face of the panopticon.  As Kevin DePew and Heather Lettner-Rust argue, distance learning interfaces operate as panopticon, and I’d argue that the self-policed space extends beyond the on-screen class time and to the blog.

While I’d not say the community of this class is one born of dire necessity in the face of a shared enemy, we are a self-selected community with shared interests.  That said, we did not have to form a community; we could have gone through the motions, blogged as instructed, been cordial in class, and moved on.  However, we chose to engage. 

As part of an already existing community of ODU students, we were ready to use the non-mandated affordances at our disposal: the back channel and the class chat. However, while that is community, it’s a community of support and sociability, commiseration and conversation, rather than content matter and discussion based. Resources and ideas are indeed shared, but the focus is informal.  What makes the community gel is the shared tasks and goals – some skin in the game perhaps.  For me, true community involves collaboration and communal tasks, not just conversation or even shared goals. 

I’m a darned pinko, but I deeply hold that, pedagogically and politically, that we all contribute to the collective community. To me, what makes the community of this class work is not so much the blogs, but the shared tasks in Google docs. The creation of communal documents built through conversation as opposed to documents that are conversational replies to a document (blogs) were community in action.  In part, the synchronous and live creation was a factor. 

The blogs were more static and a place for longer more considered replies, but they were, at least to this member, out of sight and out of mind.  I think, should I have my students blog, I will strongly suggest setting up a RSS feed for the class so that we are alerted/reminded of new posts and replies.  Since we used a variety of platforms, the mix of follow choices, pingbacks, replies, e-mail alerts,  remembering to go and check the original list contributed to my own failure to post to others.

I’m not an on-line commenter in general. I rarely comment on blogs, discussion boards, and so on outside of classes.  Articles feel as if they are finished—the author is done and gone (there are many exceptions, but I’m generalizing here!)—and the comments sections feel artificial and beset with bickering and trolls.  This wider experience of the web, combined with how women are often treated online, means a wariness about commenting that perhaps transfers to other blog situations.  I do engage with people I know on FaceBook—the space feels conversational and open ended—and offers me the illusion of community.

Pedagogically, I agree that we should “Self-Consciously Define Class as Discursive Space Working Toward ‘Community’ (Amy 12), and bear in mind that what we are asking for in posts is that “They are writing assignments, albeit informal ones, conducted in a class for a grade” ( Amy122 ).  Students are not just posting, they are thinking and working.  Blogs are often used as part of the “writing to reflect” idea and I’d argue that they’re inherently a  social constructivist tool when used as such.  Porter notes that in FYC classes “the primary course content does not pre-exist the course; it is, rather, the students’ own writing, which emerges through the course” (18-19) and I’d suggest that this is especially true in OWC and that blogs (and discussion boards) are a key way that that content is generated.   Blogging is what I’d call performance writing—it’s public in a way that other (student) writings are not—and it’s also interactive.  Porter suggests that what colleges offer over self-study is “the social exchange, the enactment, the interaction that happened between content, instructor, and students, and that results, ideally, in learning” (17).

While I began this post with a kneejerk response about the downside of community, I would appear to argue against myself when I say that we should, as both E. M. Forster and Gerald Graff urges us, connect!  However, this connection with colleagues and students does the opposite and helps us collaborate and “move away from, ‘hermetically sealed classrooms’ that incline us toward a ‘Courseocentrism,’ ‘a kind of tunnel vision in which our little part of the world becomes the whole’” (Halasek et al 163).

What I would argue for as a form of community is not the cosy, stifling, conformity, but a robust community of inquiry as described by D. Randy Garrison and Norman D. Vaughan—one that is deliberately invoked and nurtured.  A community must be curated since, as Kevin DePew and Beth Hewett note, “communities are not an outcome that instructors can simply create by using a specific digital technology or adopting a specific pedagogical practice. Instead, creating community is a rhetorical act deliberately attempted” and as I noted in a class WebEx session “community will find a way with no affordances if it wants to exist, but the abundance of affordances won't invoke community.” We can lead students into the contact zone / salon / concernful / supportive space, but we cannot create engagement without considering the situation the students are in.  The kairotic moment is to no avail if they are disengaged.  The moment may be teachable to us, but they may not be reachable. 

“… two ideas that are essential two higher education—community and inquiry.  Community, on the one hand, recognizes that social nature of education and the role that interaction, collaboration, and discourse play in in constructing knowledge”  (Garrison and Vaughan 9).

So how can we foster this?  Joyce Magnotto Neff and Carl Whithaus discuss how simply transferring even a successful f2f process script activity over to OL can fail to build community if the students see no reason for the activity or discern the necessary OL adaptations / instructions as micro-managed.  “The steps for building an intellectual community or a community of practice and inquiry need to be more concrete…for students to conceptualize the value of an activity , its purpose needs to be made explicit in terms that they can comprehend in their roles as students and learners” (85).  In fact, the specific sample script Neff and Whithaus offer—a f2f class sharing articles via routing slips and added comments—while becoming article if literally transferred, can adapt well to blogging.  Without the literal “you must respond to each other”  that would undoubtedly fail to build true community, an assignment to read several and write a fresh blog post synthesizing the ideas or rebutting (respectfully) them may build robust communities. The blogs can thus become a rolling conversation extending beyond the class or beyond a discussion thread tied to an individual entry.  It becomes a Burkean digital salon where members may come and go, but the conversation continues, no matter how late the hour. 

The communal and collaborative work of  Kristina, Margie, Laurie, Daniel, Carol, Shantal, Ryan, Kelly, Jenny, Suzanne, Sarah, and Kevin in this class in the backchannels of Facebook chat and class page, in the belly-of-the-beast panopticon chat of WebEx, google docs, and Adobe Connect, as well as the blogs and class discussion is a genuine community of inquiry that incorporates humor/sociality, concern/support, intellectual challenge/debate./ disagreement, and it operates synchronously and asynchronously. We may converse orally in class, but we commune through text.

Works Cited

Amy, Lori E. “Rhetorical Violence and the Problematics of Power: A Notion of Community for the Digital Age Classroom” in Role Play: Distance Learning and the Teaching of Writing. Jonathan Alexander & Marcia Dickson, Eds. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2006. 111-132.

Brent, Jeremy. “The Desire for Community: Illusion, Confusion and Paradox.” Community Development Journal 39.3 (2004): 213-223.

DePew, Kevin Eric and Beth Hewett. Foundational Practices of Online Writing Instruction. Unpublished manuscript.

DePew, Kevin Eric, and Heather Lettner-Rust. "Mediating power: Distance learning interfaces, classroom epistemology, and the gaze." Computers and Composition 26.3 (2009): 174-189.

Garrison, D. Randy, and Norman D. Vaughan. Blended Learning in Higher Education: Framework, Principles, and Guidelines. San Fransisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2007.

Halasek, Kay, Ben McCorkle, Cynthia L. Selfe, Scott Lloyd DeWitt, Susan Delagrange, Jennifer Michaels, and Kaitlin Clinnin. “A MOOC with a View: How MOOCs Encourage Us to Reexamine Pedagogical Doxa.” in Invasion of the MOOCs: The Promise and Perils of Massive Open Online Courses. Steven D. Krause & Charles Lowe, Eds. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2014. 156-166.

Neff, Joyce Magnotto and Carl Whithaus. Writing across Distances and Disciplines: Research and Pedagogy in Distributed Learning. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2007.

Porter, James E. “Framing Questions about MOOCs and Writing Courses” in Invasion of the MOOCs: The Promise and Perils of Massive Open Online Courses. Steven D. Krause & Charles Lowe, Eds. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2014. 14-28.

No boys in our clubhouse!

Burgess, Kimberly R. "Social Networking Technologies as Vehicles of Support for Women in Learning Communities." New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education. 122 (2009): 63-71. Web. 28 May 2014.

Burgess focuses on challenges facing women in online (OL) classes, and suggests using social networks as a means to counteract the “male, patriarchal, communication paradigm” of most OL instructional designs (63) and to complement the inclusive, peer-based style women prefer (63). The article provides context about women, social capital, and networking, and then considers methods for and implications of incorporating social networking into OL classes.

The focus on “data and rationality” in OL design means those “socialized to value relationships and connections are marginalized” (63). Women tend to use relationships for support rather than leveraging them for advancement. While men have long used professional networking (“weak ties”) to career build, women tend to network with women they know socially or familially (“strong ties”). Burgess suggests OL spaces that are “interactive, user-driven, and spontaneous” (65) such as blogs can form a network for women. The potential anonymity of virtual identity allows for advice seeking that may not feel wise, safe, or relevant in more formal spaces, and women “can express themselves authentically, free from social cues and the hierarchy and domination of male-centered spaces” (65).

However, as Burgess points out, this is problematic. Privileging women and eliminating men is not realistic nor does it mean safety. She cites the work of E.J. Tisdell who argues this construction of safety ignores other forms of power and is one of white privilege (66). Anonymity and virtual identities also mean there a woman-only space cannot be guaranteed. The separation of spaces may “exacerbate the inequalities between men’s and women’s networks” (66). It may also replicate an existing inequity in mentoring where by men get one-to-one professional mentoring and women get safe zones.

Bringing social networking into OL classes assists women in increasing social capital in two key ways. It increases instrumental, affective, and access networks, and emphasizes building “weak ties” (66). Burgess offers several strategies: Create external profiles and follow each other; define community early in the course; create a class network outside the course formal space; blog to reflect; model networking in class activities; and build sources of future capital. Burgess stresses that instructors should “not create or encourage participation in networks that reproduce current systems of privilege” (69).

While the article doesn’t focus on OWI per se, many of Burgess’s strategies inherently involve OL writing and community building. My OWI nursing class is likely to be predominantly female -- some f2f sections were 100%. In light of the OL hostility that women often experience and as a product of single-sex education myself, I was interested in the benefits of women only spaces; however, I agree with Burgess that, ultimately, segregated spaces are counterproductive.

Equipping women with social capital through their OL classes is a sound goal, but her ideas are beneficial for all students. I’d recommend this article to colleagues who’d appreciate a refresher in some of the networking challenges faced by women, and who are looking for community-building suggestions for their OL classes. 

Pedagogy and Profession

Griffin, June, and Deborah Minter. "The Rise of the Online Writing Classroom: Reflecting on the Material Conditions of College Composition Teaching." College Composition and Communication. 65.1 (2013): 140-161. Print.

Griffin and Minter (G&M) wrote this survey at a time “when the field seems poised to pivot.” They report on surveys about conditions of OW instructors, and examine “important shifts in literacy and technology” (141).

Digital Literacies and Emerging Technologies

Beginning with a reminder of Yancey’s digital literacies as “textured literacies,” G&M explore 21^st century changes in how we write and read as well as how we collaborate and research, and apply these changes to OWI pedagogy. Reading, as well as writing, has become social, and they suggest that “social reading assignments make reading more writerly” (142).  They recommend several tools that “may be said to walk the line between reading and writing” and that call for a genuine collaboration rather than a simple division of labor (143).  

They revisit Yancey’s concept of screen literacy and apply it to touchscreens, smartphones, and tablets.  Students may compose on these devices, and while touchscreen technologies may seem antithetical to accepted composing practices, the new technologies offers new methods. For example, dictation software or apps offering brainstorm opportunities. Nonetheless, OWI is not inherently cutting edge, and many OL classes are “built around fairly traditional text-based assignments” (145).

Teachers and Learners in the Online Classroom

“Issues of access in online courses are strangely, simultaneously invisible and extraordinarily pronounced” but our failure to address them means students may drop out (148). G&M summarize survey data about OWI faculty and student populations, and discuss the benefits and challenges of OL classes for students.  Some non-academic barriers to success for “at risk” students (transport, childcare, shift work) can be minimized with an OL class; however, OWI can create barriers for ELL students, those with lower academic skills, or those with weak digital literacy.  Data show that OWI classes are especially difficult for students to persevere with if they are already in some way at risk. This is “especially troubling given that one of the touted benefits of OWI is increased access for historically underserved students” (147). A significant gap in OWI is attention to the needs of students with disabilities – universal access is far from universal.

The Material Conditions of Teaching Writing in Increasingly Digital Learning Environments

G&M review institutional issues faced by OWI professionals working in an increasing corporatized higher education. They address MOOCS, flipped classrooms, “restructuring” or “unbundling” of labor, class size, intellectual property rights, and pedagogical expertize versus “content provider”, need for training, compensation, and resources, and workload issues. They remind us of the student workload and their “literacy load” -- how much are we asking them to read / write to “compensate” for the lack of f2f? The ability to track progress and outcomes data is vastly enhanced by OWI – and the data can be used pedagogically and to make a case for resources. 

G&M offer a thorough, yet concise, review of the field and current issues.  In addition to pedagogical concerns, they make a compelling student and teacher-centered case for resources.  I urge everyone to read about these professional issues.  

Surprised by Pedagogy!

Stevens, Carol J., et al. "Implementing a Writing Course in an Online RN-BSN Program." Nurse Educator 39.1 (2014):17-21. Web. 31 May 2014.

The article discusses the writing pedagogy issues faced by the nursing faculty of Arizona State University (ASU) as their program shifted from a traditional model at its inception in 1999 to a 100% online program by 2011. Drawing on research about the need for writing in nursing, the authors make a case for collaboration between campus departments to create effective classes that integrate an outcomes-based model with a WID approach (18-19). The authors observe that “few online RN-BSN programs integrate writing instruction into their curricula,” despite professional practice documents calling for “clear and effective communication” as a competency, and a discipline-wide understanding that writing and critical thinking skills are key in a health-care environment (17).  

As ASU migrated their traditional RN-BSN program to be fully online, they took the opportunity to use the increased necessity for writing in an online environment (both for instructors and students) to re-evaluate the program.  Previous attempts to improve writing via rubrics and feedback on completed assignments were deemed unsuccessful (18).  Collaborating with their technical communication (TC) faculty, they instead integrated scaffolded, workplace-based assignments (for example, a researched proposal to a supervisor for a patient information resource) requiring a variety of audiences and forms of evidence.  The TC members drew on the WPA Outcomes for first year composition as they developed the course. Outcomes were consciously “mapped to the nursing writing course…to articulate how the course met disciplinary outcomes for writing (genre, rhetorical concepts, disciplinary conventions, and critical thinking)” (18). 

Scaffolded tasks were handled via sequenced steps on discussion boards.  Students analyzed audiences and contexts more effectively as well as critically thinking about their research process and findings (19).  The discussion “facilitate[d] engagement with the planning stage of the writing process,” and allowed feedback to come earlier in the process (20).  Stevens et al argue that the goal of “students understanding how writing and communication contribute to professionalism was met (20). While the three-year assessment was primarily based on anecdotal evidence, a formal longitudinal assessment is under development at ASU.

While I’ve found many separate articles about online writing, distance learning for nurses, and WID nursing issues, articles that combine the three are less readily found.  The recent date of “Implementing a Writing Course in an Online RN-BSN Program” suggests this is a gap in the scholarship. While the ASU course design pulls heavily and admirably on writing pedagogy, it is offered in multi-sections with a full-time TC faculty member as course-leader and sections taught by part-time “faculty associates” all working from the same “shell” (20). Further, the class enrollments are higher (capped at 30) than those recommended by OWI principles. Nonetheless, the article offers a clear overview of a WID class in an OL environment. Further it models collaboration between faculty from different disciplines who found commonality between their disciplines’ values, and were pleasantly surprised to find they had unexpectedly achieved the “development of RN-BSN faculty writing pedagogy” (20). 

Anonymity In Blended Learning

Miyazoe, Terumi, and Terry Anderson. "Anonymity In Blended Learning: Who Would You Like To Be?" Journal of Educational Technology & Society 14.2 (2011): 175-187. Web. 28 May 2014.

Miyazoe and Anderson examined effects and learning outcomes of allowing students to be anonymous/pseudonymous in forums and blogs of their blended classes. Drawing on existing research showing anonymity mitigates anxiety when submitting work to an instructor in f2f classes (blind submissions) and when doing peer reviews, they ask whether online anonymity can be similarly beneficial.

The authors suggest increased freedom may aid comments and encourage lurkers to participate. A pseudonym allows for an online identity / reputation to build as opposed to all posters being “anon,” but, at the same time, the anonymous online environment assists in “masking various social barriers such as age, gender, social status, and language proficiencies” (176).

Online freewriting and other informal writing--with their decreased emphasis on correctness--may benefit from the freedom. At the same time, process writing with its interactivity and focus on revision also benefits from the anonymity.

They also discussed earlier research showing that, when an option, concealing gender is often selected by women. Anonymous women’s comments also received more feedback than when they posted as female. Mizayoe and Anderson designed a study that asked:

• What are the participatory behaviors of students’ in face-to-face (with real names) and online (with pseudonyms) in blended course designs? 
• How did the students perceive and evaluate the different online writing tools using pseudonyms?
• What are the students’ learning outcomes? (177)

The object of study was three ELL sections offered by the same instructor. The class included f2f class lessons and online writing sessions. Students’ online identities were concealed from all (including the instructor until the end of the semester).

Students reported feeling less embarrassed by mistakes and less inhibited in stating opinions. Female participation was markedly higher in frequency and volume.

Crucially, the authors observe that online writing’s “nature of discourse changes from writing to speaking to what is referred to as writing speech” (183) and the usual meta-language of comment/critique is hard to differentiate from writing it is commenting upon. This is one area where “efforts in reproducing classroom strategies may not work with online writing tools” (183).

Mizayoe and Anderson’s findings are persuasive, and meshed with my own experiences of online writing where I usually use a gender neutral name. Among many examples, the notorious treatment of women bloggers who venture in to tech territory, for example, also, if anecdotally, jibes. Nonetheless, as Mizayoe and Anderson note, anonymity can backfire leading to trolling and flame wars.

It’s important to note that the students are not US students, but ELLs, and the authors are based in Canada and Japan. Some of the participant comments focused on the social discomfort /inability to criticize the work of others, and the social/cultural rules that inhibit opinion. As a member myself of a “polite” culture, the Canadian/Japanese participation experiences perhaps resonated more; however, the freedoms afforded to comment and be seen objectively without gender/social standing being factored in are likely to hold true in the USA.

Review of "Being a Supportive Presence in Online Courses: Knowing and Connecting with Students through Writing."

Diekelmann, Nancy, and Elnora P. Mendias. "Being a Supportive Presence in Online Courses: Knowing and Connecting with Students through Writing." The Journal of Nursing Education 44.8 (2005): 344-346.

This article appears as part of a regular series, “New Pedagogies for Nursing,” in The Journal of Nursing Education. The authors begin with the premises that online courses are valuable and that being a supportive presence to students is crucial. Teachers may, however, “struggle with how to best know and connect with students from a distance” (344). They argue that writing responses to students is a method of being supportive.

Using a method called Narrative Pedagogy, they use “Concernful Practices” to build relationships with distance students. Narrative Pedagogy requires a “shift in teachers’ attention to language” (344). To substitute for the f2f rapport (voice, expression, chatting), teachers respond in a more personal tone than they might usually do in an academic setting. They couched the academic answer to queries in a friendly and personalized response. “Cutting to the chase” is seen as a temptation to OL efficiency but as detrimental to communication and learning. “Eclipsed communication” may ignore the students’ real concerns and focus on the literal answer (345). Replying to the students’ anxieties may not necessarily be a longer response, but the teacher should focus on the “meanings and significance of their responses” (345). The article offers several examples of student queries and how faculty responded to them using personalized “concernful” messages. These communications let students know they are being listened to as well as simply answered.

Narrative Pedagogy asks teachers to “reflect on how practices, such as knowing and connecting, influence the nature of the experience they co-create with students (345) and to be conscious of how they use language from the students’ point of view.

The article is a useful reminder that our students are an audience – moreover, and audience of whom we are asking cooperation. Building rapport in a regular classroom is often a function of personality, and the article gives pedagogical reasons for allowing personality into our OL environments. The article specifically focuses on one-on-one student interactions and answers to concerns; however, combining these techniques with “Dear Class” letters could prove to be a valuable community building strategy. The article assumes the reader knows what Narrative Pedagogy. I needed to look it up at the US National Library of Medicine and found that it is nursing education specific and “is an approach to thinking about teaching and learning that evolves from the lived experiences of teachers, clinicians, and students.” While “concernful practices” initially sounds rather jargony, the action of mindfully fostering “knowing and connecting” via writing is a useful corrective to the possible impersonality of OL learning spaces. While using theory, the article is brief and is primarily a praxis piece. I would recommend it as refresher in the importance of being “human” with our students both OL and f2f.