The timing couldn’t have been more perfect. As I read the first chapters of Schwier’s Connections, I felt as if he was responding to my previous post, validating my feelings while gently explaining the facts. His main point? Mediated communication is fundamentally different from other types of interpersonal communication--not necessarily better, simply different. Online connections can help support existing relationships, while also encouraging new relationships to gestate and grow. This much seems obvious. For me, it’s the virtual learning communities, specifically the style of learning that they encourage, that is taking some getting used to.
I’m one of the people that Schwier refers to, a learner who has been trained to expect lesson content to be prescribed and coherent, and who still sometimes sees social learning as an intimidating prospect. I’ll admit, though, that after a year of mostly online classes at PSU, I’m beginning to get my bearings. I enjoy the freedom of making decisions about what I’m going to learn and where my personal academic focus is going to be. I think this kind of learner responsibility is assumed in graduate level courses, but I recognize that VLCs encourage it in a unique way. Sometimes it doesn’t matter if we arrange our desks in a circle, our instructor sitting beside us as an equal; the physical presence of authority is often still there. In well-run VLCs, on the other hand, it is as if the instructor has stepped out of the room. Student-student communication can happen in a direct and unobstructed way, where content is navigated together as connections are built.
Thinking about the role of the instructor in a VLC presents us with a while different viewpoint. Schwier points out that a community of learners is not always appropriate; instructors must take into account the learners’ starting point and move from there, even if they had originally expected something different. This is nothing new, simply standard procedure for a teacher who has ever put together an elaborate lesson plan masterpiece, only to realize in the first five minutes of the class that it will never work. Once the VLC is established, however, the teacher takes on a very different role than he or she would within a traditional classroom, depending on the boundaries of that particular learning community. For instructors of non-digital natives, it seems as if half the battle is helping students understand that they are in control of their learning and encouraging the community to grow and learn from there.
