I have first hand experienced the negative learning & motivational effects of lack of communication or personal connection in courses when the professor was 'absent' or 'generic' in his/her feedback. I have also experienced negative learning & motivational effects when one-on-one or small group interactions were not part of course work.
This lack of community and interaction made me feel isolated, unmotivated, and with very little relevance to my work. Author Kia Bentley in The Centrality of Social Presence in Online Teaching and Learning defines social presence as the ability to be 'real', 'known', 'connected' and makes learners feel they are treated as human beings. Professors JC Dunlap & PR Lowenthal write, “When their (learner) needs are being taken into account – the more they are likely to learn and learn to learn.”
Bentley further writes, "Social presence has been behaviorally described as relating to a "constellation of cues" in three general categories." Those categories are:
- Affective responses, ie, emotions, humor, self-disclosure, explicit use of feeling words, etc. An interesting blog assignment would be to ask students to reflect on a turning point in their personal lives and write about it. Surely, they will find lots of emotions to express in such a story.
- Open and interactive communications, ie, asking probing questions, agreeing or disagreeing, offering advise, self-reflection, etc. Reading and commenting on peer's blog posts must be integrated in course assessments; otherwise students will be hard pressed to do it. The RISE Model for meaningful feedback will help students stay on task when writing comments to peers.
- Cohesive responses, ie, personal greetings or referring to group as "us" or "we" for the purpose of sustaining relationships. One of the blog assignments can ask students to reflect on and share a group class experience or class discussion session. Ie, "in class we discussed/collaborated on/understood xyz"...have students read each other's reflections and learn different view points on same situation.
Relationships matter in every transaction, especially in a learning environment. Enhancing Social Presence in Online Learning: Mediation Strategies Applied to Social Networking Tools research from Tsai, Kim, Liu, Goggins, Kumalasari and Laffey (2008) “recognized community as an important factor for fostering interactivity or interaction among participation in an online learning environment.” Building community and establishing communication avenues are essential to building that relationship and social presence is how to do that in an online environment.
Bentley advises that a relaxed culture of acceptance and nurturing must exist yet "power and authority must be balanced with the values of community and co-construction." The other challenge is that of making meaning and awareness that emotional/intellectual interpretations of online exchanges can vary greatly from their intended purposes.
Tune in to next (and final) post on more promising ways to use blogs in blended learning arena.
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