Too tired to talk tonight!

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Wobbly moment

In discussing online facilitation with a colleague recently, my colleague said: 'I'd rather use any response from me as a fallback rather than a default'.

This caused me a 'wobbly moment' yet again. The question of how much to respond in an online course always arises for me. I think it's particularly important on this course, because of the nature of the subject matter. It seems to me that discussions about reflection and reflective learning might require a different type of facilitation.

On this course I have tried to be an equal participant, although as one of my past posts has indicated I'm not sure how successful this has been. However, I do have the role of facilitator on this course and I interpret this to mean supporting participants in their learning with all that that entails.

So my colleague's post has made me think about the way I interact online and why.

As a facilitator, I try to be 'present' - a 'leader' - not in any hierarchical sense, but in the sense of taking responsibility.

I try to empathise. I know that some participants will have problems with feeling of isolation, exclusion, insecurity, doubt about their personal/academic abilities and so on. I know this because it's exactly how I feel myself.

So I try to be inclusive - to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to enter into dialogue, ideally with other participants as much as, if not more than with me. I try to get a sense of the 'person' behind the screen and try to make personal contact.

Once the course has got going and everyone feels confident with each other, I try not to dominate the conversation and allow participants time and space to respond to each other. There is a difficult tension here between being 'present' and not being dominant. I still don't know how much is too much when it comes to posting. I still waver over how long to wait for others to respond to a post before posting myself. I still can't judge how much silence is beneficial in an online course or when silence becomes detrimental to the learning flow and process. I take each instance as it arises and respond according to my 'gut reaction' at the time.

On most courses I try to draw participants out through the use of open questions and keep the posting of my own opinion to a minumum, although I am aware that on this course, where I have tried to be an equal participant, I have posted a lot more opinion and done a lot less questioning than I normally do. Again, I'm not sure that this has been a successul approach. I hope that even when offering opinion I have been clear that it is only opinion and no better or worse than anyone elses and that there are no right or wrong answers. This is where the role of facilitator and tutor differ. If I see myself as a tutor, then my priority is that I have something to teach. If I see myself as a facilitator, then my priority is to assist the learning process. I know that all through this blog I have been using the words tutor and facilitator interchangeably, but I do see them as different and regard myself as more of a facilitator than a tutor, although obviously there is overlap between the two. I'm not sure whether my actions bear this out.

I also try to be aware of different learning styles and that some participants will learn through 'observing' rather than actively posting. This is difficult to judge online. How do we know whether someone is 'struggling' and needing support, or simply reading, wathing and thinking. 'Waving not drowning' comes to mind.

I suppose ultimately, I hope that a learning community will develop as the course progresses in which each member of the community takes responsibility for contributing to the learning process. Although there may be a core group that drives this process, everyone has a part to play and if the course were longer I would expect the core group membership to change over time.

030309 - I don't think my opinions have changed on this. I have recently facilitated on two online courses and I still always question whether my approach has been appropriate for the context. I suppose I always will!

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Issues with this blog

In writing this blog, I had hoped to explore the relationship between facilitator and participant and whether it's possible for a facilitator to be perceived as an equal participant in the learning process. I don't have much time on which to base my current thinking. I was 'absent ' for the middle two weeks of the course and we are still only in the middle of the last (fourth) week, so I'm not sure that my thinking is valid.

I have absolutely no idea how I am perceived - not only by the course participants, but also by the other tutors who I have also not met. Is it possible to ever really know this in a teaching situation? Is it important to know this? Well - yes - if I want to improve my practice.

The reflective writing exercise that I was engaged with last year and that participants are engaged with this year suggests that it's possible to improve our practice through this reflective writing process. By doing this we can explore alternative perceptions, question our own assumptions and identify possible different courses of action for the future. But all this assumes a willingness and ability to really confront ourselves. Is this really possible without the help of others? Don't we need dialogue with others to do this? And what's more, don't we need dialogue based on mutual trust and respect, which takes longer to establish than we have time for in this course.

There seems to me to be a real tension between the need for audience and dialogue in developing our reflective writing processes and the privacy needed in order to feel safe.

I realise now that whilst this blog might be a record of my thoughts about the course, it is certainly not a model of reflective writing and in fact includes little reflection - more it's just a process of highlighting ideas and questions as they arise - which is a normal way of working for me. I would not want to include reflective writing of the type that has been included in the Week 3 exercise for a number of reasons:

- Atkins and Murphy (1993) identify 3 key stages in the reflection process 1) inner discomfort and the experience of surprise 2) critical analysis of feelings and knowledge 3) emergence of a new perspective of the situation. In the last 4 weeks I have experienced these three stages in my life, but not in relation to anything happening on this course - so there has been no need for me to engage with deeply reflective writing in this blog

- I don't yet feel 'safe' enough in the course community to share my reflective thinking on a deep level. I think this would take a longer time than we have had. I have been so impressed by how open and honest people have been in their accounts. They have been braver than me.

- If I were to do any deeply reflective writing, I'm not sure that this is the place to do it.

So I'm not sure that this blog has served it's purpose. I don't feel that in any sense it has served to share my practice with other course participants - the actual discussion forums work better for that. There has been no dialogue here (no comments or response) so I have been writing for myself - which is fine, but wasn't the purpose. This blog feels too detached and separated from where everything is going on (do all journals feel like that?). The one time I posted an extract from it into the journals forum, I didn't get a response. So I am still no further in my understanding of whether or not a tutor can be perceived as an equal participant in the learning process, but I suspect not. Shame!

Since writing this I have started to blog publicly in the 'blogosphere' and I can now see that an audience makes a huge difference to writing, but also that the more open I am, the more feedback I get and the more confident I become in my own ability to communicate. However, it did take me quite a while to feel comfortable in my public blog, so I think my expectations that this could happen in a four week course were unrealistic. I have realised that for me there's a limit to how much I can write just for me without sharing my writing with others. I do have a few private blogs, but I don't write in them anywhere near as much as to the public blogs.

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Honesty and autonomy

There is a discussion in the Journals Forum about whether or not it matters if a student fabricates a piece of reflective writing where they are supposed to be talking about an incident drawn from their own practice.

This raises for me the question of the purpose of reflective writing and who owns it.

In their book 'Learning through Storytelling in Higher Education', McDrury and Alterio (p.170) discuss Sumsion's (2000) account of reluctant reflectors. According to this account 'two influences highlighted in this research were lack of student commitment to their profession .... and lack of commitment to reflection'. Under these circumstances a student might well fabricate a piece of reflective writing.

But a student might fabricate their writing for other reasons, not least for maintaining some sense of ownership over their reflective processes and some sense of privacy. If this is the case then I can relate to it and feel sympathy for it.In addition, who's to say that fabricating a piece of reflective writing can't be a powerful learning experience.

Could a piece of fabricated reflective writing demonstrate that the student is fit for practice? I would answer this with another question. Can any piece of writing demonstrate effective practice (as for example in the case of nursing or teaching)? Having a background in teacher training, I would argue that the only way you can determine that a student is fit for practice is to see the practice itself, not the writing about the practice.

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Tutor or Participant?

I have noticed that there has been a change in the way in which I am posting on this course. I am not sure whether this is because I am consciously trying to be an equal participant learner more than a tutor, or whether it's the nature of the subject (i.e. reflective learning) that has brought about this change.

So what is the change? If I read back through my own posts it is evident that I am making far less use of questionning than I would normally do when facilitating an online course. My normal style is to be reserved about offering opinion and instead to ask lots of questions in an attemtpt to include, value and draw out participant opinion.

On this course I feel that I have offered more opinion than I would normally and have done far less questioning. I think if this was a face-to-face course I could ask questions in such a way that it would be obvious that I was asking them because I am interested and not because I am a tutor. Online, it's difficult to know how you are perceived. If I could be sure that I was regarded as an equal participant as well as a tutor (given that this is what I am exploring on this course), then I would be more likely to ask more questions.

So by trying to be an equal participant learner am I short-changing course participants in terms of their expectations of a tutor and of their learning?

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Participant or Tutor?

I notice that the question of whether a tutor can also be an equal participant learner, sharing their reflective journal, is now being discussed in the Journals Forum. Whether or not you decide to do this depends on your purpose for doing it. It's been suggested in the Journals forum that we need an audience for our reflective processes and by sharing our reflective writing with our students we are getting that audience. Although this is of course true (or is it? - can we assume that students are interested in a tutor's writing and would bother to read it?), it would not be the purpose - at least, it would not be the purpose for me.

For me there are a couple of reasons for sharing reflective writing with students. The obvious one is to model good practice (once again assuming that the tutor is able to model good practice) - but more importantly the act of sharing reflective writing is a result of a given educational philosophical stance and may be (but not necessarily so) this would also be evident to students.

So for me, I do not wish to be seen as the 'font of all learning' (even if I could be) and would rather be seen as an equal partner in the learning process. This is because I know how much I learn from the learners I work with and also I believe that it is not in a learner's best interests to become dependent on a tutor.

Having said this, I recently signed up for an online Workshop on communities of practice solely because it was being run by Etienne Wenger. It was the fact that he is regarded as a world authority on social learning theory that attracted me to the course. So there is a role for an expert in the teaching position, but I do not think that the expert always has to be the tutor. I think this is also Etienne Wenger's view, which was evident in his self-effacing humility.

I need to do a lot more thinking about this.

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End of Week 3

Being away in the middle of the course is not ideal, but I have come back to a rich tapestry of ideas and a wealth of posts to catch up on. The interesting thing is that most of these are in the Journals forum - which is an unmoderated forum. This makes me wonder whether participants/students are better left to just get on with it and follow their own lines of discussion according to their own interests. Of course I know that this is oversimplifying the complexity of the situation, but it does make me question the role of the tutor - and how the tutor knows when to step in and when to stand back.

I suppose that ultimately this is down to professional judgement. I would love to leap into all this discussion and add my own ideas, but given that it has all developed in my absence, my gut feeling is that it would be inappropriate to now start posting.

I think I'll stand back for a few days and see how things develop. If I was a participant on the course and not a tutor, I would definitely be posting responses to the questions raised. So as tutors are we always on the edge of the social learning process?

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