Saturday, September 20, 2003
Twenty degree forecast today- and twenty three tomorrow!! I went out to pick up the paper on the lawn this morning, and already it's looking shaggy and needing a mow. Walking back up to the front door, weeds have erupted in the front garden- I'll need to spend a morning or so on my hands and knees. My wisteria on the back pergola is plump and ready to burst into flower. I love my back patio: nothing better than sitting in the warmth of the late afternoon sun in summer, book in hand, and glass of white at the ready.
It's my step-son Dan's twenty-first birthday today. He hadn't really organised to do anything- says he will in a couple of weeks. Steve and I are going out for lunch with him; then he's going out with Steve and Steve's ex-wife (Dan's mother) for dinner. Twenty one! I find that my kid's birthdays are more meaningful for me than my own is. For the first few birthdays, I found myself looking at the clock and thinking "Groan- five years ago at this time I was having just a few contractions; ....or begging for pethedine" or whatever.
Now that the kids are getting older, there's a tinge of sadness too. Why didn't I enjoy them more, instead of wishing that their babyhood was over? When was the last time they nestled up on my lap- and did I realise then that it would be the last time? Especially because the marriage they were born into has broken down, there's a regret for the expectations and hopes I had then for the way I thought they'd be at 18 and 20. It's like there's a discontinuity between the way I thought the life would turn out for that little baby I held in my arms, and the life I now look around and see has formed instead.
Friday, September 19, 2003
Strange last couple of days. I had hoped to spend most of today working, but wasn't able to settle down to the computer until about 12.00 noon, then I need to go out again at 3.30. So much for my day "resting"!!
My 17 year old daughter had an "encounter" with a bloke on the train on the way home- nothing serious really- he kept putting his arm around her, trying to hold her hand, and was pretty sexually suggestive in talking to her. The complicating factor has been that the guy is intellectually disabled, and works in a workprogram at her school, doing mowing and gardening etc. He's about thirty- although I don't know how much age has to do with it.
She spoke to a teacher at school about it, who I thought handled it very poorly, saying that Martine should just avoid him around the school, which to my way of thinking, wasn't doing much in terms of duty of care to the students- I just don't think from a management point of view that they could afford to have the guy working around young girls. So in full dudgeon I sailed down to the school and saw the deputy principal ,who suggested that we take it to the police.
On the one hand, it seems very minor- I think that any woman of my age has been made to feel uncomfortable by a man at some stage. But then again, things have changed since that "oh well, that's just men for you" attitude of the 1960s. What I was particularly concerned about was that he was working at the school, and that unless formal steps were taken, there would be no record of his inappropriate behaviour.
But then I think of my friend Lynne (again!) whose son has intellectual disabilities, and how easily he could be caught up in something bigger than he intended. But then yet again (how indecisive I am!!) I'm aware of how ineffective Lynne and Graham are in influencing his behaviour without the bigger stick of the police and the law or other forms of external control.
I don't know. Anyway, the police suggested that she make a statement, and wanted her to go into St Kilda Rd to Crime Identification to draw up a computer image of him (even though the school and the sponsoring organisation could- and will- be able to identify him). It all seems so much for something so minor. I don't want the guy's life wrecked: but I don't want him working at the school, or any other school. I don't want him travelling up and down the rail line preying on young girls, but if he'd just been someone that Martine had never seen before in her life, I think I'd just let it go. It's the school connection that worries me. I was surprised that the police didn't see his intellectual disability as a mitigating circumstance. How much does the law apply to everyone?
I feel a bit like Helen Garner in The First Stone - you know, where she said that the university students were over-reacting in taking on the Master of Ormond College for his drunken groping. It's hard to know how much is "just life" and how the law fits into all that. But then I think of the prickling discomfort, the embarrassment and the shame that YOU as a woman take on when you're being harrassed, and wonder why that should be allowed to continue.
Hmmm. Happy days.
Wednesday, September 17, 2003
Lunch with my friend Lynne today. Great little café in Surrey Hills- the Cookbook Café. They sell cookbooks and serve food using the recipes in the books- great idea! We chatted all through lunch, then I dropped her back to her house. I said that I wouldn’t come in, but then we sat in the car in the driveway and talked for about 45 minutes more. How precious friendship is. We’ve been friends since 1978 when we started teaching together: we had children together; we still meet weekly- one of the real benefits from not working full time anymore.
Anyway, now reading an article by Oren, Mioduser and Nachmias (where DO they drag these surnames from??), also in that International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning http://www.irrodl.org in April 2002. It’s about The Development of Social Climate in Virtual Learning Discussion Groups. IF- big if- we decide to do a collaborative final assignment, this might come in handy later. They report on five different studies into social climate, looking at asynchronous, synchronous, ‘cafeteria’ area and MUDs. An interesting finding: anonymity supports the appearance of social relations and even affects the accomplishment of learning assignments. Hmmm. Social presence, in Gunawardena and Zittle’s framework seemed to be about salience, and reality- and yet the benefits of anonymity seem to fly in the face of this.
For myself, I am craving more of a sense of REALNESS; that I am talking to real, complete, textured, multi-faceted people. Is that a function of my age perhaps??? Thinking back on that Japanese documentary last night, the parents (backed up by a number of “experts”) said that their children couldn’t interact with real people, although they were active on the internet and in video games.
The authors of this article also seem to have an idea that social presence increases over time. I don’t think that’s been my experience in USQ courses- instead, people seem to go to ground as the course progresses so that there’s barely any conversation at all at the end of the course. I wonder if a collaborative assessment task at the end of a course would change that (I think that most of the courses I have seen have a collaborative assessment task, worth less, earlier in the course, but the main individual assignment at the end of the course.) In fact, there’s never had to be an “closure” type activities in any of the courses I’ve done (jees- I hate the term “closure”: everyone wants closure. Bali, September 11, court cases- perhaps some things aren’t meant to be closed. ) The reality has been that the course closed down weeks earlier, and everyone has well and truly left the building by the time the course finishes.
He’s discussing social equality within a group, especially the use particularly by men of the “separate” voice (separate, autonomous and independent) compared with the use of the “connected” voice (relational, connected, interdependent) often by women. He then goes on to talk about the danger of domination by an authoritative communication style, and the way it shuts other people down. Perhaps this is what I was talking about in my entry the other day.
Most of the online communities (all involved with books and reading) that I’m involved in have many more women than men, and the conversation patterns tend to reflect this connected voice. There are some women who are more “separate” in their tone, but there’s a lot of soothing, reconnecting and bridge building that goes on as well- by men as well as women. But I think I would agree that several of the few men involved are more forceful and definite in their opinions, and more belligerent in defending them.
Are any of you guys involved in any other online communities? How does the communication pattern differ from USQ- if indeed it does?
Did anyone see this last night? It was about Japanese teenage boys who disappear into their rooms for years as recluses. Apparently large numbers of them just go into their rooms, and don't come out.
What I couldn't understand was why the family would indulge them in this. Certainly, they were ashamed and wanted to hide the cameras and reporters from the neighbours. But why didn't they disconnect the power? It seemed that most of the kids were just sitting in their room on the computer or playing video games. Why did they take the food to their rooms? Why not MAKE them come out into the kitchen if they wanted to eat- starve them out.
Then I started wondering if there is something particularly Japanese about solitude and "differentness". For example, in Mishima's and Haruki Murakami's novels, there are often isolated men who lock themselves away from human contact. And what about monks and religious recluses- many societies have isolates who gain an almost mystical aura through the act of locking themselves away.
But the decision to become a monk or ascetic is a conscious, deliberate one. It involves leaving things behind: consciously taking yourself out and putting yourself into isolation, making a decision and facing the consequences. This Japanese phenomenon seemed so passive- just going to ground and assuming that the family is going to keep you fed, warm, watered.
As part of investigating it, the (British) reporter went to a cram school. They are horrendous- a bit like a learning camp; the kids have classes until about 10 o clock at night, then they're given a test. They are not allowed to go to bed until they pass the test (mastery learning, I guess). The last little kid tottered off to bed at 1.30 a.m. only to be woken at 6.00 the next morning when the whole thing would start all over again. The stuff of nightmares.
Anyone else see it?
Monday, September 15, 2003
Yesterday I caught up with the USQ Discussion Forums. I ventured further down the page and found Glen’s wrap up of Reflection 1. He mentioned the importance of keeping a reflective journal as the basis of Assessment 4 where we have to reflect on the experience of being a learner in the course.
I’m not sure whether I’ll post this in my blog or not, because what follows is rather bitchy, but not irrelevant to the experience of being a learner in an online environment. Ah, what the hell! When the introductory, get-to-know you messages were first called for, one participant announced his presence by a very long email about his current interests in online learning and an exhortation, complete with instructions, to embed a photograph into our messages. I had very mixed feelings about his contribution. On the one hand, I DON’T know how to embed photographs into messages, and can see his point about reminding one’s readers that there’s a person behind the words (part of “salience”). I think that what I bridled against was his approach that this is something we SHOULD do, rather than something we might like to do. His following emails seemed to focus entirely on how to embed the photo, rather than a reaction to what the person had written. If you can avoid eyecontact and shuffle away from people in a virtual environment, I felt myself doing that. Interestingly enough, his emails have dropped off dramatically after his early foray – for a reason I will discuss soon, but I wonder too if he was “told”???- and he’s been virtually invisible in the course ever since.
Part of my wanting to restrict my blog to people I wanted to have access to it was my fear that if I sent out a general invitation or plea that HE would be the only person who would respond, and then proceed to tell me how to do it (although I probably would have welcomed some “telling” when I was trying to work out the comments!!!)
I don’t know if he sinned against any of the rules of netiquette- I think that it’s more subtle than that, and I suspect that the online environment was irrelevant to how I perceived his approach. I THINK that he would be as pushy and bumptious in real life as well.
But then again, writing that, I wonder I am the same person online as I am in real life? I tend to live very much in my own head, and writing is an outlet for these tedious and tangled thoughts that I would not SAY out loud in a tutorial situation. I might share them with friends; with my husband (with whom I am now talking again, thank heavens!) but not in a group tutorial. And even though I’m writing them into this blog, I’m not sharing them with the whole group either- just inflicting them on a select circle!!! I’m conscious of being TOO lengthy, too talkative in Discussion Forums: I want to say things but I don’t want to inflict them on a whole group.
I think I’ve been fairly talkative in all of the Discussion Forums in the subjects I’ve done with USQ, with the exception perhaps of the Web Page subject. Part of that, I think, is because I am seeing this whole course as a reflexive learning experience: learning ABOUT online learning THROUGH online learning. There’s also the aspect that I’ve paid my own money for it, and chosen to do it of my own accord. I want to suck the whole experience dry!!!
Would I say as much in a face-to-face tutorial? Maybe, but only once I felt very, very comfortable and on top of the reading and discussion. It would take me a while, but once I’d ventured a few comments and IF they had been well-received, I’d talk more. But, equally, it might never happen if I felt out of my depth or overawed. Since I’ve got older, and particularly if the tutor was my age and the other students were younger, I might be more willing to contribute out of camaraderie for the TUTOR (where are my alliances, I wonder?)
What am I like as a work colleague? This is one of the things that I’ve found so difficult about the change in my health status: I feel disenfranchised from being a “real” participant at work because I’m there so rarely and feel left-out of the day-to-day swim of things. At conferences and workshops (not that I attend many), I feel compromised by the way I walk into and leave a room- as if somehow what I say or think has been undercut somehow by the evidence that “something’s not quite right”. I guess that this is something that I am just going to have to get used to, but I find it difficult. So there’s a certain comfort in the text-mediated nature of online learning for me- something that I’ve always viewed as a bit of a cop-out (“students with disabilities will not feel disadvantaged”) but which, at the bottom of my heart, I know has a grain of truth in it, even though I don’t want to admit that it applies to me.
I’ve never been the sort of person who thinks quickly on their feet- I can always think of the perfect riposte at 3.00 in the morning (after I’ve worked out my computer glitches!) and need to mull things over for quite a while before I can make a decision one way or the other.
Perhaps because I was sensitized to this person’s personality, I read his contributions to the Virtual Chats with a little more interest and venom than I would with others. And it was with some discomfort that I read in this weeks Chat (11 September??) that he has been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Conflicting emotions: pity, concern- yes; but also a feeling of embarrassment at the inappropriateness of bringing it up in a chat. But what understanding of “appropriate” was he violating? Was it just that it was a male form of cancer? Was it that it was the big C and not something like an ear infection? Was it because I felt as if I was eavesdropping? Was it because I felt an assumption of concern and closeness that I really didn’t feel- in fact, I wasn’t even in the chat, just reading it afterwards. Do I now have a responsibility to make contact, express something, for someone that I don’t even particularly like (based on the little contact I have with him?)
In one of the first subjects I did with USQ (Designing Instruction), there was a participant who started acting more and more inappropriately. She was very active in discussion, but started making stranger and stranger comments. I can’t think of examples, but it evoked the same sort of response in me as when Kevin Sheedy, the Essendon coach, started talking about seagulls in his analysis of a game. What the…?? I think that the moderator was just as perplexed, at first trying to illuminate what she was saying, but more and more trying to sideline her comments. Then she just disappeared. I don’t know what happened.
As an aside, I’ve been following the court case of that student who killed two people in the tutorial room at Monash last year. I must say that, organisationally, Monash is coming out fairly well in it: offering extra tutorial assistance, obviously treading very warily with this student- with some justification as it turns out.
There’s prickly, needy, demanding and difficult students face-to-face: there’s no reason why there shouldn’t be online as well (in fact, is it MORE likely in online??) I’ve been reading a bit about collaborative learning, and thinking about learning conversations, and there’s a sort of responsibility that if you’re buying into communication, openness and trust on the learning level, then you almost need to do that at a personal level as well. But then I come up against the idea of boundaries and appropriateness and the personal right to withdraw at any time. I can detect when I think they’ve been violated, but can’t sense their presence as an enabling thing. I don’t think I’ve explained this very well.
