 Online Learning Update Ray Schroeder, editor, COLRS - Online@Illinois SpringfieldOnline Learning Update - a blog published daily since 2001 by Ray Schroeder, Professor Emeritus, University of Illinois at Springfield |
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Monday, November 14, 2005
The Distancing Question in Online Education - Glenn Russell, Innovate
In this article, I argue that distancing has as-yet unexplored pragmatic consequences in online education. As I have argued elsewhere (Russell 2004), distancing can be understood as a separation in time or space that reduces the empathy that a person may have for the suffering of others. Distancing results from human, mechanical, or electronic agencies. When one person walks away from another, uses mechanical means to travel, or uses online communication, distancing is likely to occur. Face-to-face communication, the standard of the traditional classroom, is the "paradigmatic social context and medium," and it is critical for interpersonal processes (Palmer 1995, 282). In contrast, online technologies have a reduced capacity to support affective relationships. As Nie (2001) explains, although people can convey emotion through technologies such as e-mail, the fundamentals of our socio-emotional well-being are found in something other than computer screens. The growing use of online education, including the development of virtual schools and universities, has not been accompanied by an adequate consideration of both the cognitive and affective domains. In particular, notions of empathy and responsiveness have not been sufficiently explored in classrooms where online computers mediate the geographic and temporal separation of students and teachers. Although I provide little new empirical data on these issues, I reconceptualize the problem of distancing, and I propose strategies for overcoming the problems arising from the use of conventional online models.
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