Cargile, Cook Kelli, and Keith Grant-Davie. Online Education: Global Questions, Local Answers. Amityville, NY: Baywood Pub., 2005. Print.
Online Education: Global Questions, Local Answers explores online education from a variety of viewpoints, with one commonality — all chapters refer to teaching online in a technical communication program. However, few chapters within this text are so exclusively focused on technical communication that the material is irrelevant to those who do not teach in a technical communication program. In fact, this book is less about teaching technical communication online than it is about developing an online program, nurturing that program, developing courses within the program and understanding who takes online courses and what their needs and wants are for the online courses they take. For anyone involved with teaching online, or running an online program, this text is an informative read. Even though it is six years old, the information is still relevant for it does not focus on any specific technology; instead, each chapter within the book is grounded in theory and application of general principles related to online education.
I did not read each chapter of this text. Instead, I read the intro and decided upon the chapters that seemed most relevant to my own research interests/needs and came up with the following chapters: 2, 3, 4, 6, 7 and 11.
Chapter 2 proved to be quite useful for me in that it explores, in detail, who took a particular online course. If I develop a survey of my own online students, this chapter will provide a template of types of information I might want to gather, including such things as student age, gender, workload, degree pursued, # of OL classes taken, why online?, likes of online ed, dislikes and advice for current online instructors (me – about the class I am teaching, or specifically about the MM project I will require them to complete). This chapter was pretty factual, about students likes/dislikes and thoughts about online coursework.
Chapter 3 gets relevant to actual online writing instruction quite quickly. Cargile-Cook encourages writing instructors to move beyond ‘objectivist’ instruction, claiming that teaching done through objectivist measures in insufficient for writing instruction (53). I entirely agree with this and cannot fathom of any sort of writing class where actual activities would involve much from an objectivist instructional slant. For a writing class to be effective, the class needs to be active. Students need to accomplish things. They need to actively participate in developing their own texts, assessing others’ writing and working with others in the development/revision of their own writing projects. On page 56, Cargile-Cook explains that a change in technology necessitates a shift in what was taught and how it is taught, which has always made me wonder about teaching writing and directly leads into multimodal composition. Since the act of composing can be so much more complex than simply typing text onto a page, shouldn’t a composition course expand its offerings of what composition means? How much purely textual writing do we read these days? A quick scan of the various windows open on my desktop show quite a variety of modes, including audio, visual, textual – and combinations of them all. Can’t the ideas behind a composition course also encompass other aspects of ‘composing?’ I believe a shift is in the near future, for without it, as technology continues to change what it means to write, the composition class will become further removed from relevance.
In chapter 6, Helen M Grady and Marjorie T. Davis provide guidance for teaching online, and, in particular, emphasize the idea of scaffolding. While this is an important concept in any writing class – the idea of building upon already existing skills and knowledge. In an online class, the importance is multiplied, for an instructor needs to develop scaffolding for students to simply understand the layout/organization of the online class, as well as how to navigate through the course and act within it. But my question here is about MM composition projects, as scaffolding for the concepts focused on within a composition course. If scaffolding, as defined, is “strategies a teacher uses to help learner span a cognitive gap,” (103) might not a multimodal project be a way to help writing students to better understand the concepts that a writing course focuses on? For example, if a student struggles with organizing a piece of writing, might not developing a story board for a movie version of the essay help with this? The concept of organization is the same — but the actual task is different, a scaffold of sorts, to help the learner make the leap with this one concept from one mode to another. Hmmm. In my mind, this works and makes great sense.
In chapter 7, Locke Carter and Rebecca Rickly encourage the online instructor to consider the various ‘gaps’ that occur within an online educational setting. This chapter really sums up nicely, my own concerns about developing a mm composition project for my online writing students. As Carter and Rickly explain, there can be issues related to physical space, virtual space and cognitive space, that all can negatively impact a student’s experience within a writing class. And when that writing class asks students to develop something that is far different than anything they probably have developed for a writing class — and encourages them to think of writing differently than just letters and words on a page — those ‘spaces’ can really become chasms. Any difficulty a student might have with a project will be amplified in an online learning environment. This is especially alarming for me if my students might be of the at-risk variety. These students are especially vulnerable, and I worry about that. The attention that I might need to provide my students as they work through a MM might become much greater than it otherwise would be, which could be concerning if a lot of students desire extra feedback or assistance, made worse by the multitude of ‘gaps’ that occur in an online course.
In chapter 11, by Phillip Rubens and Sherry Southard, many of the ideas of the book came together for me. The emphasis of the chapter was on students’ technological difficulties and their impact on an online course. During their research and course development, Rubens and Southard found that both the digitally rich and poor exhibited similar behaviors when they encountered technical difficulties (194). Obviously, I envision the worst and fear students having many technical difficulties when developing a MM project. From my own experience, I envision this behavior to include frustration, despair, uncertainty and anger about a project that they might feel uncertain about developing. But I am pleased to see that the digital divide did not cause different reactions from the two groups of users. The idea of scaffolding came up here once again, but more specifically in terms of scaffolding the course so that students get an opportunity to practice specific technologies within the first few weeks of a class so that they can practice those technologies that they will be utilizing later on in the semester. This thought has occurred to me in terms of exposing students to a few possibilities of ways they might develop a text multimodally. But I don’t want to encourage technological compositions, when a student might prefer a non-technological approach. So the idea of scaffolding possible compositional technologies might have to wait; I can see the value, but I can also see that this might encourage others to work in a mode that they are not comfortable with — which could be a good thing, but due to the ‘gaps,’ mentioned earlier, this could also cause undue stress for the students.
