Steve+Heuristic+3

** As an educator, you value-add through your relationship with learners, so consider the ‘voice’ of your computer mediated communications. ** In face-to-face as well as online teaching, it is the quality of the relationship between teachers and learners that differentiates between mediocre and excellent pedagogy. Bennett and Lockyer (2004) summarize 5 dimensions that mediate between learners and desired learning outcomes. These are Tasks, Resources, Activities, Schedules and Interactions. Given that tasks, resources and activities are ubiquitous and freely available on the Web, it is the dimension of Interactions that distinguishes quality education, and creates a good learning experience. For online courses, interactions, and thus relationships are mediated by CMC’s (computer mediated communications), so this heuristic focuses attention on the nature of online communication, and how it can build pedagogical relationship with learners. Bennett and Locker (2004) outline some dimensions of CMC’s that are further considered here. Communications may be:  o ** Proactive or Reactive – ** Communication may be proactive and offer encouragement to students, or it may be reactive and respond to emerging issues.  o ** Asynchronous or Synchronous – ** Asynchronous communications permit flexible contact not bound by schedules and can use tools such as emails, blogs and wikis. Synchronous communication is real-time and demands more targeted activities, generally group based.  o ** Public or Private – ** Emails and phone calls can offer individual contact where it is important to preserve the privacy and confidentiality of the communication, whereas group aims can be furthered by public communications.
 * Heuristic 3: Draft **

Web 2.0 offers a variety of tools for CMC’s, each differentiated by the above dimensions. Emails, for example, are private asynchronous tools while blogs and wikis are public asynchronous tools. Forums and video conferencing are examples of public synchronous tools. It may be valuable to consider the tools that support CMC’s in terms of what kind of relationship quality they can best support, and whether the tools can be differentiated on ‘relationship grounds’ rather than just the mechanical features described above.

// Text types // (Wikipedia, nd) is a textual analysis term that refers to language features that characterize texts with different communication purposes. // Descriptive // text types aim to show rather than tell the reader what something is like, and rely on precise use of adjectives, similies and metaphors to create images that ‘bring a text to life’. // Narrative // text types aim to tell a story, and relate a succession of events. The // Expository // text type aims at explanation, the analysis and synthesis of complex facts; and the A// rgumentative // text type aims to persuade and offers subjective judgements and evaluations. It may be possible to apply a similar type of analysis to CMC’s, albeit in a more subjective and informal manner. To differentiate this analysis, lets term it ‘// Computer mediated voice type’ //. The genesis of this idea originated with the author noticing that cross-posting between different CMC media in an online university course demanded a change of ‘voice’ (described in Garlick, 2010 “Putting on my blog voice”).

Salmon (2000) offers some pointers regarding qualities of online communications.