OnPoint- Guideline 2, Communication Venues

Today, we continue OnPoint, our bi-weekly series from Jason Ohler, an international keynote speaker, teacher, writer, researcher and Professor Emeritus of Educational Technology, who has been teaching online since 1982.

The following post is excerpt from Jason's latest book, and highlights one of the many guidelines for teaching an effective online class and engaging people socially via electronic means. The book, Digital Community, Digital Citizen (http://tinyurl.com/25b4h4j), explores how the internet and technology affect the very nature of learning, relationships, and schooling in the digital age.

Want to get in touch with Jason? Email feedback@moodlerooms.com.

Thanks for reading,

- Brad

(This is part of a series about guidelines for effective online teaching. Click here to see the introduction to this series.)

OnPoint- Guideline 2, Use as many communication venues as possible

Anthropologist Edward T. Hall (1966) appeared prophetic as his rules of proxemics, which articulated the ways in which human beings interact in physical space, played out in virtual space. Hall identified four kinds of human social space: public (one-to-many, such as a performance, lecture, or mass media broadcast), social (many-to-many, such as an open social gathering), personal (few-to-few, such as an invitation-only group function, predefined social group such as a family or a class of students) and intimate (one-to-one). Each communication space encouraged a different kind of narrative. Collectively they form the communication backbone necessary to sustain any community.

As people figured out how to craft narrative using computer conferencing systems and other emerging electronic tool sets, Hall’s structures appeared in virtual space. Humans, bound and determined to organize themselves as well as share their stories, crafted the emerging mediascape in their own image. We can post a video on YouTube video (public), invite public discussion about it (social), discuss it within the context of a university class (personal), and have a very private conversation about it with our confidants (intimate). The bottom line is twofold:

1. Members of “digital community” have pursued mass customization on a scale that seems to defy the odds, largely because the desire to do so and the tools to do so merged in the era of Web 2.0.
2. Students benefit from a multimodal approach—in terms of media and communication space. The more kinds of Hall’s communication you use, the more it feels like a real community.
   

- Jason