Re: Face-to-face and net talke
brian_drayton@TERC.EDU
Wed, 20 Aug 1997 14:18:47 -0400
The importance of F2F is something felt by anyone who has participated in the construction of a network community. In the first LabNet project, we "seeded" the conversations by means of the summer workshops in which our teachers both worked on content -- physics projects, for example -- and discussed the pedagogical issues of project-enhanced teaching. One obvious point was that people who did not get involved in the discussions at these meetings did not get involved on the net, even though they had F2F knowledge of ALL the participants (at that time, the net group was more or less by invitation). Second, some types of conversation were easier to engage in than others -- A discussion that started with something quite specific, like "What is your favorite textbook?" seemd to encourage wider participation, and (as in a normal conversation) might either stay at the very initial stages, or might wander into important issues of curriculum, pedagogy, and (you might say) aesthetics.
The moderation could help, but I think sometimes people were rather dependent on the moderator, that is, the moderator can either play a catalytic role (get things rolling, or break a log-jam, and at some point step back) or become an essential element (and thus become one of the central voices of the conversation). Whether you like one role or the other for a moderator is an interesting questin all its own!
-- Brian (brian_drayton@terc.edu)
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