The Tyranny of E-mail – Let’s go to the Piazza!

E-mail is probably the worst way to have an argument. Both sides tend to end up constructing long, winding and complex arguments that neither side really reads, rebutting the points that they feel they can and disregarding the rest. In truth, e-mail is the digital equivalent of “You said what?” when arguments start to fester.

It’s a shame, then, that we use such similar mechanisms in on-line fora. One student posts something, another student responds and addresses points, student one addresses some and ignores the rest and off we go. It’s a fundamentally competitive mechanism, because we do not provide an intrinsic mechanism to allow for modification of an existing statement in a way that doesn’t either appear to favour sycophancy or belligerence.

Tools like Piazza, where you can construct good answers and questions in collaboration with staff oversight, provide a completely different approach. You do not have to superimpose your answer or rebuttal over someone else, you can work with them to arrive at a new, joint answer. This is a completely different approach. It’s not even like Wikipedia where you are all sharing the same working space – in Piazza you have student space and staff space, you can provide a student refined answer and a staff refined answer. Students can work together to come up with a question and staff can work together to refine their follow-up question or teaching points.

Where all students have access to working on a common question or answer, no editing action (given that you’re reading and otherwise participating) can indicate agreement (or lack of significant dissent) but no giant bread crumb trail has to be followed. If things start heading a way that you don’t agree – join the editing process. (Falling back on staff oversight if the collaboration does happen to fall apart, but being able to constantly update and edit that staff oversight.)

Collaboration is built into Piazza as a base concept. It’s a fascinating tool and it could be handy if you find yourself having to act as the fight stopper in your on-line fora or student e-mail exchanges.

Pass me an oyster knife, I’m trying to bring a student out of their shell.

Teaching across many cultures can be challenging. Usually, when we talk about cultures we’re talking about country, race, religion and upbringing – at least that’s what it seems to devolve to. It’s easy to point to a group of students from a given culture and say that they have behaviour X. Often, willingness to participate is listed amount these. Now, while certain cultures may have general tendencies, there are many students who just have difficulty in participating. Limiting it to one group is missing the point, in my opinion.

Let me, then, step back from my introductory statements about culture based on country or upbringing and split students into the only two cultures that matter for this post: students who will willingly participate in class and students who won’t.

It can be difficult in a large class to get to all of the students to participate in class-wide discussion or sharing of opinion. Students can choose to make it harder for me to do this in very simple ways. Sitting in a middle row, halfway in, makes it very hard for me to walk up to you and ask you what you’re doing. I prefer a more open class, which is smaller of course, as I can assign some work to the class during the lecture (something small) and then walk around and talk to people. Once I start people talking in a semi-private space, I may be able to get them talking to their neighbour, then their locale, then it’s a much smaller step to get them talking to everyone and participating. My experience in intensive teaching in Singapore shows that me leading people from individual discussion with me up to working in groups is very successful in opening people up. You can see more about that here.

In a large class in a big traditional lecture theatre, as I said, this is harder. However, just because I can’t get to a student doesn’t mean that nobody can. Students almost invariably have a student near them and this where, rather than me using my natural abilities to bring a student out, I can ask students to work in a group. This is far less intimidating because:

1. Students are generally less scary than lecturers.
2. Their views are in a far more controlled space and they aren’t having to talk to a very large group.
3. A small enough group makes it a conversation rather than a presentation.

Of course, there are problems with this as well:

1. Students may feel more pressure because of the intimacy. This can be helped with prior exposure and training in tutorials or by the demonstration of positive exemplars in the classroom.
2. Students may still not say anything. In this case, I try to make the discussion have a hand-in artefact associated with it – at some stage, they’ll have to talk to each other.
3. This does put pressure on students. This is a hard one, as my discipline has group work built in as a fundamental requirement. Students have to work with other people, make presentations and generally get on with people as part of their process with us. So, while I respect that some people don’t want to participate, this will be a problem for them at some stage. I’m trying to provide a safe and comfortable environment for this, so I’m ok with this to an extent.
4. Students may just talk and not do the work at all!

I don’t mind 3 much, as long as I can regain control. Students talking is better than students sleeping, in some ways, although my goal is still to get everyone working! What is everyone else’s experiences with this?