Communicating Effectively - Individuals & Groups

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Subject: [PD 3451] Re: Day 3: Facilitating Online PD for Distance Educators
From: Marcel Kielkucki mkielku at kirkwood.edu
Date: Wed Jun 17 11:30:06 EDT 2009

I want to address the how to communicate portion of this discussion. One of the best ways to communicate is by using your email, as it's quite similar to using the discussion items in many online courses.

Also, it's critical if you're attempting to teach good communication skills to insist that students use proper grammar in their communications, and that you as an instructor/facilitator do likewise. If you get a response with abbreviations, etc. ask them to send it back correctly.

One method that you can use to get students to respond to you is to try as best you can to force the student to respond. Phrase your replies/responses to a student with a question they have to answer back to you.

I look forward to seeing everyone else's thoughts as well.

Mr. Marcel Kielkucki
Kirkwood HSDL Coordinator

Subject: [PD 3453] Communicating Effectively
From: Jackie A. Taylor jackie at jataylor.net
Date: Wed Jun 17 12:43:15 EDT 2009

Michael and All,

Michael, thanks for picking up the communications angle. You wrote:

"One of the best ways to communicate is by using your email, as it's quite similar to using the discussion items in many online courses."

I'd like to share a PD tool with everyone that I adapted from Rochelle Kenyon on communicating effectively in email discussions (also pasted in below for convenience):

http://wiki.literacytent.org/index.php/Effective_Email_Posts

(feel free to edit - I'm always looking to improve!)

Also, I use a similar tool as Professional Development Editor for ProLiteracy on creating quality discussion board posts. Do others use tools like rubrics or checklists to help participants create effective, quality communications? What are your thoughts about this?

Jackie Taylor, jackie at jataylor.net

Subject: [PD 3454] Re: Day 3: Facilitating Online PD for Distance Educators
From: Kathy Olesen-Tracey ktracey at cait.org
From: Wed Jun 17 12:52:54 EDT 2009

While I completely agree with the convenience of email as, I want to share an interesting point. My 16 year old son has NEVER sent an email. Today, the communication method of choice is texting, social networking, blogging, and using tools like Twitter.

Email is now looked at like a way that "parents" communicate. Our younger students often don't have email accounts which are really sued, but they blog, Facebook, and Twitter. Trying to place an entire thought in 140 characters or in a text message is a problem that carries over to the writing skills of our students.

Just a thought :-)

-- Center for the Application of Information Technologies

Subject: [PD 3455] Re: Day 3: Facilitating Online PD for Distance Educators
From: Marsha Connet lakeshorestudio at sbcglobal.net
Date: Wed Jun 17 13:08:11 EDT 2009

Hello-
I couldn't agree more about txt-ing vs emails. Many students never email and many don't have access to computers, where as they do have cell phones and can txt and twitter and even Facebook.

The other think I've noticed is the abreviations they use creep into writing assignments. A tough habit to break!

Marsha Connet
SE Regional Consultant
Wisconsin Literacy, Inc

Subject: [PD 3456] Re: Day 3: Facilitating Online PD for Distance Educators
From: Melinda Hefner mhefner at cccti.edu
Date: Wed Jun 17 13:12:39 EDT 2009

As someone mentioned in an earlier post, providing multiple means of communication is important in delivering effective online instruction. Among some of the communication tools in addition to e-mail, I invite learners to communicate with me and with one another via: Pronto--an instant messaging systems that interfaces with Blackboard--I use this a lot!! I can have a history of chats with each learner so I can easily keep up with what's been said in case there is any confusion. Also, even if I'm not online, learners can Pronto me and leave me a message while I'm offline. Learners interact with me much more via Pronto than they do any other way. They tend to use e-mail or the discussion board only when I require that tool to be used for posting items.

Voicethread for collaborative communication--Used correctly, this is a great way for a cohort to communicate about a given topic in a collaborative way.

Facebook--You would be surprised the learners who prefer social networking as the primary means for communication. If you're not familiar with Facebook, it's actually a wonderful central location where learners can communicate. It has a decent chat feature, message feature, image and video capabilities, etc. You can easily avoid any of the unnecessary or distracting applications and set up a Facebook for each class in addition to having students use their own private Facebooks. We're in the process of piloting an application that allows Facebook to interface with our Blackboard courses.

Course discussion board

Google Docs presentations has worked well for some learners.

Even with very diligent and conscientious learners, sometimes they simply are more responsive using an alternative communication tool. What I want is effective communication that leads to understanding and learning regardless of the tool. While I certainly have my favorites, I allow for quite a bit of flexibility about which communication tools the learners use.

Melinda

Melinda M. Hefner
Director, Literacy Support Services

Basic Skills Department
Caldwell Community College and Technical Institute
Hudson, North Carolina

Subject: [PD 3459] Re: Day 3: Facilitating Online PD for Distance Educators; shift happens
From: Holly Dilatush holly at dilatush.com
Date: Wed Jun 17 13:24:01 EDT 2009

On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 12:52 PM, Kathy Olesen-Tracey <ktracey at cait.org>wrote:
While I completely agree with the convenience of email as, I want to share an interesting point. My 16 year old son has NEVER sent an email. Today, the communication method of choice is texting, social networking, blogging, and using tools like Twitter.
Email is now looked at like a way that "parents" communicate. Our younger students often don't have email accounts which are really sued, but they blog, Facebook, and Twitter. Trying to place an entire thought in 140 characters or in a text message is a problem that carries over to the writing skills of our students.

Interesting discussions, all, Our daughter is 24, and condescends to using email for us (parental units) and for prospective employers (she's a recently obtained her master's and is job hunting and emailing is a requested form of communication).

I hope that emailing is practiced in career exploration courses; it is my experience that it is still an assumed ability by many employers [although I'm intrigued by this, and it makes me want to conduct research to find out!].

Our daughter, Amber, also laments the writing skills of her peers. As a recent graduate teaching assistant, she was appalled at the "writing" submitted by 18 to 24+ year-olds.

Relevance... How do we make writing skills (any skills we list as teaching/learning objectives) relevant? We might each answer this question in different ways. My mind goes immediately to PBL and collaborative projects, learner-centeredness, students teaching students (and using Web 2.0 tools, students often teaching 'teachers'). Have students create presentations and have students devise the rubrics to analyze them. How does writing affect the results? How doesn't writing affect the results? As I typed these last several sentences, my mind is now thinking how rubrics should/could be PowerPoint presentations, audio recordings/podcasts (using my Olympus teeny tiny voice recorder, or with my headset and WavePad, video demos with my new FlipMino digital video recorder possibilities, one tweet at a time on Twitter, and so on)... this in itself is an illustration of the evolution of technology in *my* reality. I would never have predicted this ten years ago!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U was shared by someone in a post earlier today; it's been a few months since I had last viewed it (sorry, I do not remember who to credit with sharing

and the "shift happens" concept... things are indeed shifting, and at least in my worldview, shifting more rapidly than I am comfortable with. shift happens.

Personally, imagining a world without email is rather unfathomable at this point in my life!

Personally, I still shy away from cell phone texting, primarily because I'm not adept and it is too time-consuming.

Personally, I definitely shy away from telephone more than I used to; email has become a preferred and primary source of communication. This disturbs me in an unarticulated way.

Shift happens, whether we plan the facilitation and PD implications or not, it's happening!

Holly


Holly (Dilatush)
Charlottesville, VA USA
holly at dilatush.com

Subject: [PD 3461] Re: Day 3: Facilitating Online PD for Distance Educators
From: Katrina Hinson khinson at almanid.com
Date: Wed Jun 17 13:53:31 EDT 2009

I think the communication issue is an important one to address and it has myriad faces to it as well. I mentioned this is an earlier post today - one of the newer forms of online learning is m-learning - which utilizes hand held devices. For some students, all they may ever know is what fits in the palm of their hands and thus that's how they learn to communicate. As facilitators, that is something else to consider. Even as professionals, we're all often on the go - moving from one place to another - but I'm guessing a large percentage of us always have our cell phone with us. Can you imagine downloading a podcast of the latest professional development techniques and listening to it on the way to work? That's definitely an option. Talk about fresh ideas being at the forefront of your thoughts when you turn your door knob to walk into your classroom; but, it does bring inherent problems as well. Like computers, not everyone uses the same type of cellphone or rather don't have the latest models with all the bells and whistles, etc. Again, it's about being flexible and adaptive and ensuring multiple modes of delivery for content in order to reach the largest possible audience.

I do have a Facebook page and I'm always looking for Groups to join. I looked recently for Adult Education and found so very little and I thought that was sad - because there are so many adults on Facebook! There were some literacy sites for specific agencies but nothing 'big' like the discussion boards / email discussion we're having here. In some ways what I was looking for was to see if these same 'lists' had migrated to Facebook yet. Again, it's about access. So many people use Facebook - simply because it is their social network - they're looking for connections and they're not thinking about discussion boards or emails per se.

Communication in and of itself is changing - both in the manner in which information is convyed as well as what is conveyed. Texting something definitely teaches you to be concise and to point - especially if you're paying for each word you text.

Another issue that affects communication in the online world is gender and ethnicity as well as how individuals perceive what is or is not private and public information. A colleague and I are looking at these very issues as part of our doctoral work and we're finding that all of these are places of collision where ideals meet/collide...sometimes for good and sometimes with disatrous effects. Facilitators of online learning and teachers alike have to be cognizant of so much more than the words they're typing text, using images or video/audio clips.

Regards,
Katrina Hinson

Subject: [PD 3463] Re: Day 3: Facilitating Online PD for Distance Educators
From: Melinda Hefner mhefner at cccti.edu
Date: Wed Jun 17 14:28:40 EDT 2009

Katrina,

I am fascinated by the concept of m-learning and would love to see an entire discussion devoted to this. Additionally, I think that the issues that you and your colleague are looking at for your doctoral work are very timely and a vital part of this conversation. I would be very interested in hearing more as you further examine those issues.

Melinda

Melinda M. Hefner
Director, Literacy Support Services
Basic Skills Department
Caldwell Community College and Technical Institute
Hudson, North Carolina

Subject: [PD 3475] Bridge between old and new
From: Bonnie Odiorne bonniesophia at sbcglobal.net
Date: Wed Jun 17 16:23:59 EDT 2009

I totally agree with the presentation of 18-24 yr. olds, who don't check their e-mail and so don't get univerity or teacher communications, and don't know how to write a sentence without 'you' and text slang. They don't seem to have checked their in-boxes since year zero. And here we are, e-mailing away (I, too, prefer it to phone. My thumbs must not have evolved for texing, and I still can't imagine Twitter. "shift happens" was on the "Did you know" You Tube clip; the other that person (Melinda) suggested was Academe, which is particularly relevant to me. There are many in our university culture who are trying to adapt (there was a time when--brain lapse--Second Life?--that virtual world where people had avatars and was supposed to be an up and coming force in education, and all of a sudden people evacuated it..) but most of us are still trying to be bridges between old and new.

What does this mean for professional development? We are that bridge. Our faculty development head did a seminar on "what do you do if you don't lecture" the responses were as if the concept had never entered their minds--others had great, creative ideas, and others such as I had an "I could have had a V8" moment: I knew it, I just didn't always do it. I think the same is true for technology and PD, and technology and adult learners. They are not (for the most part) 18-24 yr. old kids who fit the profile of the students Melinda referenced in her "Pay Attention" reference. Here, perhaps, we're preaching to the converted, or the want to be converted are learning new things. Our job is to show how a particular medium or tool can enhance, enrich our learners' experience, and our own! I am one who beieves, to reference the last post, that computers are in themselves kinesthetic, but they don't enhance kinesthetic learning unless the learner can use some kind of hands-on simulation.

I have to respond to the needs of our faculty who maintain that our students must learn academic writing or will never "make it," and convince students it's not so bad, liike learning a foreign language. It's like adapting their personal style to the classroom--or the workplace: there are accepted standards of behavior or communication which, until the workplace/classroom is not multigenerational with both students and faculty--that is to say, never--will always be needed in the "real" world. Sudents, as well as educators, need to "bridge the digital divide" and I'm not talking about lack of access here, though that is still a reality. I still remember a very determined student who had to do her course at the Internet Center at her Housing Development because she didn't have Internet access or a computer, and yet she still accepted the challenge. And the more we vary our courses--as long as the media have a pertinent link to the content--the more engaged we and our students will be: we will no longer be doing the same old same old, but looking at old problems with new perspectives.

Bonnie Odiorne, Ph.D. Director, Writing Center Adjunct Professor of English, French, First Year Transitions, Day Division and ADP Post University , Waterbury , CT

Subject: [PD 3485] Re: Communicating Effectively
From: Bowen, Barbara bbowen at ric.edu
Date: Thu Jun 18 00:11:21 EDT 2009

Although I am a novice in the use of this amazing technology, I am very much interested in the posted communication about these electronic media and the implications for more effective instruction and information sharing. I am lurking in the wings but keeping up daily with all of the postings, and daring to ask a question: Within institutions, large or small, where individuals are revolving in their own cycles of work, how can communication be organized to share work on a daily or weekly basis in order to coordinate efforts that could be more collaborative toward solving aspects of mutually systemic problems? We are over-meeting, and still are unable to cover/discuss our intersecting spheres of work. Is there a better way to share our work in-house, day-day or week-week when meeting just isn't enough? Emails have become a collection or file of correspondences but do not allow for the collection of shared ideas and solutions.

Barbara Bowen
RIAEPDC
Providence, RI

Subject: [PD 3487] Program staff communicating effectively and getting work done, including OPD, using workgroup software
From: David Rosen DJRosen at theworld.com
Date: Thu Jun 18 07:57:17 EDT 2009

Hello Barbara,

On Jun 18, 2009, at 12:11 AM, Bowen, Barbara wrote:

Within institutions, large or small, where individuals are revolving in their own cycles of work, how can communication be organized to share work on a daily or weekly basis in order to coordinate efforts that could be more collaborative toward solving aspects of mutually systemic problems? We are over-meeting, and still are unable to cover/discuss our intersecting spheres of work. Is there a better way to share our work in-house, day-day or week-week when meeting just isn't enough? Emails have become a collection or file of correspondences but do not allow for the collection of shared ideas and solutions.


There is free or inexpensive online software, sometimes referred to as workgroups. Examples include: Officezilla, Community Zero (inexpensive), Google groups, Yahoo groups and others. They are designed to address the problem you have described, and also the problem of people who work at a distance. These can all easily be used in blended models that have some face-to-face and some asynchronous online work. They have features such as file storage, calendars, asynchronous threaded discussion areas, user profile areas, and more. The Learner Web, a national demonstration project with regions across the country and several people in each region uses Officezilla, webinar conferencing, phone conferencing, email, phone calls and face- to-face meetings. The ALOPD group that produced the Design Elements document we are discussing did this using Google groups and Google docs, no face-to-face meetings (other than the presentation of the document at the AALPD pre-conference at COABE).

I haven't done it, but think it has some interesting possibilities: combine the work your team needs to do _and_ professional development in the same work group platform. Define professional development as part of your daily work. Have discussion threads, files, and URLS (links) devoted to professional development within the program's, institutions's or agency's work group. It means that PD is part of the job, not pushed to the side for later.

Here's a caution, however: using workgroup tools doesn't necessarily make less work. It just means fewer face-to-face meetings, and possibly less (or, if used at a distance, no) travel. They also enable you to put everytning (minutes, discussions, useful documents, PowerPoints, audiofiles, links to web pages, etc.) in one place.

Is there other workgroup software that participants in this discussion would like to recommend?

David J. Rosen
DJRosen at theworld.com

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