A professor I work with recently decided to use Ning to create an online social network for a course. Like Facebook, Ning provides a space where users can communicate and share links, images, and videos. However, Ning allows instructors to create a space that is used exclusively for course-related collaboration and is only accessible by their students. This increased level of privacy and focused purpose helps everyone involved maintain boundaries between their academic and personal lives.

Shortly after the course began, the professor noticed many of her students were having trouble with basic tasks such as uploading images, embedding YouTube video clips, and writing blog posts. The professor told me, “I have a blog and I’m almost fifty. I was shocked that my students have no experience with blogging.” I wish I could say I was as shocked as she was. Unfortunately, I know this problem all too well and I’ve been writing about it periodically for the past year. Back in February of 2008, I wrote a post about the importance of defining computer literacy. My major complaint at that time was the lack of agreement on a minimum technology literacy level for college students. The lack of computer-literacy requirements and classes to support students who don’t meet such requirements places an unfair burden on faculty. Professors who wish to use new technology in their courses wind up serving as tech support for students who lack a fundamental understanding of interactive media.

Back in November, I also wrote about the misleading stereotype of the tech-savvy millennial learner that I hear about so often at conferences. As much as people love to refer to today’s twenty-something college students as “digital natives,” many of these students are more like “digital resident aliens.” They’ve learned just enough to get by, but ask them something that’s not in their phrasebook and you’ll quickly see how superficial their knowledge really is.

Sadly, the lack of a well-rounded technology education isn’t just failing students in the arts and humanities. Students pursuing technology-focused degrees are also suffering. An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education recently noted that many Web-design instructors are not preparing students for the demands of employers in the field. In “Colleges Get Poor Grades on Teaching Web Fundamentals,” the author cites a survey developed by Leslie Jensen-Inman, an assistant professor of art at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Jensen-Inman interviewed thirty-two professional Web designers and discovered that universities are either encouraging students to overspecialize in a particular piece of software or programming language or teaching outdated tools and techniques that are no longer relevant in the working world.

As a part-time Web-design professor, I found this article vindicating, because it supports my belief that students need a broad range of up-to-date knowledge to become successful designers themselves. In addition, I think the basic skills and knowledge that aspiring Web designers need are becoming increasingly essential for all college students. Knowing how to manage digital files, maintain a blog, participate in an online discussion, embed media in a Web page—these are all skills that will prove valuable no matter what a student’s career aspirations might be. Now we simply need to recognize that this knowledge won’t reach critical mass by osmosis. Hundreds of hours of Wii Tennis or text messaging or Twittering might do a lot to reduce technophobia in a new generation of students, but it doesn’t necessarily increase their understanding of how interactive media works and enable them to transfer knowledge from one tool to another.

Many instructional designers might disapprove of the idea that we should relegate new-media education to a single “Technology 101” course. Instead, they often support an integrative approach in which technology is used across the curriculum as a means to an end for a variety of disciplines. I agree that it’s wonderful to see faculty using technology to improve learning in a variety of subject areas, from philosophy to chemistry to mathematics to the fine arts. However, I think attacking the problem from both sides could help ensure the push for technology integration doesn’t always come from the top down.

A Technology 101 course could help ensure today’s students can live up to the tech-savvy stereotype we’ve already forced upon them. With a little support from the bottom, we might finally see more students pushing faculty to use new tools and helping instructors improve their technology literacy. Until then, I’m afraid we might be stuck in an inefficient, reactive model that attempts to support students once assignment deadlines are looming and panic has set in. This approach is a bit like asking students to drive cross-country after giving them the keys to an eighteen wheeler and an 800 number to call if they have questions as they’re barreling down the highway. Will some of them make it? Sure. But a little driver’s ed up front could prevent a lot of disasters down the road.

Conventional wisdom views language as a device through which thought is actualized into spoken or written word, as a tool that simply assists in the representation of something that precedes it. To paraphrase a science mentor and dear friend of mine, “We do not create the world through language. Language and explicit knowledge are the poor symbolic systems we use to try and communicate about the real creator of the world: implicit rules and knowledge that are metasymbolic.”

I disagree with this assessment and see an important, fundamental feedback between metasymbolic, implicit rules and knowledge on one hand and language on the other. Understanding language formally as a symbolic, self-contained system that is governed simply by syntactical and grammatical rules is narrow and fails to recognize that language does not only express thought but also guides it. Such a failure underestimates language’s potential to both enrich and stifle thought. With this in mind, the belabored arguments below are meant to support a single simple statement:
The task of developing rich (and ideally multi-) language skills should be undertaken not only by language or creative writing majors but by all, since one’s level of linguistic skill provides the basis for critical and creative-thinking development, which is fundamental to all human endeavors.

By the time in our lives that critical thinking and reflection have become prominent aspects of our being, both the use and understanding of language have themselves become implicit, creating the illusion of a given language’s “naturalness.” Those who speak and write fluently in more than one language often discover aspects of thought and feeling that are much more accessible in one linguistic scheme or another, destroying this illusion. I, for one, think and feel differently, express myself differently, and focus on different aspects of my experiences depending on whether I "function" in Greek, English, or German. I can think of several words that exist in one language and not in another (especially words with subtle shades of meaning) that not only suggest differences in how thoughts are expressed but also support the formation of different future thoughts. For example, there is no Greek noun that can capture the meaning of the English "privacy," while the English "hospitality" and the equivalent Greek "filoxenia" (literally and clumsily translated as “friendship towards strangers”) clearly put emphasis on different aspects of the concept they describe. In both cases, the linguistic differences reflect and support attitudes towards privacy and guests that are fundamentally different between the two traditions.

The drawbacks of formal approaches to language come to the forefront especially when trying to address prosody and metaphor, linguistic devises that account for a large portion of communicated meaning and of language use and creation in general. All the  formal “substitution” theories of metaphor accomplish is to create a model that is “Ptolemaic” in its complexity and uselessness, trying too hard to stick to existing ideas, simply because embracing different ones would require thinkers to enlist the help of unfamiliar intellectual traditions. But I will reserve this topic for a future post.

Winograd and Flores (1986) observe that even sophisticated linguists are puzzled by the suggestion that the basis for the meaning of words and sentences cannot ultimately be defined in terms of an objective external world. Words correspond to our intuition about “reality” simply because our purposes in using them are closely aligned with our physical existence in a world and with our actions within it. But this coincidence is the result of our use of language within a tradition (or as some biologists may say, of our “structural coupling” within a “consensual domain”).  As such, this reality is based on language as much as it reflects it.

Ultimately, language, like cognition, is fundamentally social and may be better understood if approached as a “speech act” rather than a formal symbolic system, a move that introduces the importance of “commitment,” as described in speech-act theories of Austin and others. Both language and cognition are relational and historical, in the larger sense of the word. As Winograd and Flores note, the apparent simplicity of physically interpreted terms such as "chair" is misleading and obscures the fact that communication through words such as "crisis" or "friendship" cannot exist outside the domain of human interaction and commitment, both of which are intricately linked to language (as speech act) itself. This apparently paradoxical view that nothing (beyond simple descriptions of physical activity and some sensory experience) exists except through language describes the fundamentally linguistic nature of all experience and motivates me to approach moments of understanding (i.e. “understanding” experiences) as the achievements of explanatory (i.e. linguistic) acts.

The power of language to create, rather than simply express, thought and meaning may actually be more easily recognized through an examination of the relationship between explanation and understanding. The writings of Gadamer (1960), Ricoeur (1991), and others, have expanded our conception of explanation, illustrating that it cannot be approached as simply the result of and subsequent to understanding. 

Explanation and understanding are both products of thought, “moments” of knowing that constantly interact in a productive feedback. This feedback is manifested as communication, reflection, etc. and has explanation, rather than understanding, at its center. In this scheme, explanation is linguistic in nature (whether as discourse—with someone or within—or text) and understanding is cognitive/phenomenological (whether as thinking or thought). Explanation (interpretation) is not seen as a post-facto supplement to understanding but as belonging to understanding’s inner structure, an integral part of the content of what is understood. I see Gadamer’s efforts to recover the importance of application (“understanding always involves something like applying the text to be understood to the interpreter’s present situation’”) as evidence that application is the ultimate explanatory act. As an "explanatory achievement," understanding is the fruit of explanation, "being realized not just for the one for whom one is interpreting but for the interpreter himself." This essentially argues that understanding is “explaining to self.”

If, along with Gadamer, we conceive every statement as an answer to a question, what we understand as a statement’s meaning is an answer, an explanation. And even though the moment of understanding often seems to occur without explicit interpretation/explanation, it is always preceded by an explanation to self, motivated by the hermeneutic question that has to be asked and be answered in any event of understanding.

The understanding/explanation dialectic parallels the one between thought (understanding) and language (explanation). A thought that cannot be “explained” linguistically (to self or others) is better approached as intuition, not as understanding. The revelatory moment of experiencing a work (linguistic or otherwise) that manages to say to us what we could only intuit is what transforms our intuition into thought, helping us escape the prison of our previous language (and thoughts), and being verbally reconstituted through our new language, enriched through our encounter with the work. Our interaction with the work gives us the tools to explain our intuition to ourselves and turn it into a thought, with our newly found understanding being the culmination of an explanatory moment, however “implicit” or “concealed” this moment may seem.

This is just a blog post rather than a piece of academic writing, so I will allow myself the luxury of closing with strong words: Language must be recognized as our means of formulating thought, with all understanding viewed as the result of explanatory moments whose ontology is linguistic. Explanation and understanding, in turn, must be recognized as being tied into a continuous and dynamic feedback loop that develops through the initiation of acts of explanation. With Winograd and Flores, I reject cognition as the manipulation of knowledge of an “objective world,” recognize the primacy of action and its central role in language, and conclude that it is through language that we create our world.

References

Gadamer, H. G. (1960). Truth and Method. 2nd edition (1989). New York: Continuum.

Ricoeur, P. (1991). A Ricoeur Reader. M. J. Valdes (ed.). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Winograd, T. and Flores, F. (1986). Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design. Indianapolis, IN: Addison-Wesley, Pearson Foundation.

Acronyms are introduced regularly in many contexts, not only to facilitate repeated reference to certain terms but also to imply wide acceptance of and add an air of importance to proposed ideas, processes, or methodologies. Instructional design loves acronyms. The buzz-cronyms of the hour include BD, PBL, TBL, and LCI (or LCT) (clues below).

Contributing to this long list, and in many ways consolidating it, I propose ADCL or Assessment-Driven Collaborative Learning. Details will be published in one of the 2009 volumes of Symposium, the journal of the College Music Society. In the meantime, here is a teaser:

ADCL incorporates features of backward design and project- and team-based learning in contexts that highlight student responsibility, all materialized through a series of graded team projects and enhanced by instructor guidance and feedback throughout the project-drafting process. Such design supports a) student motivation and engagement, b) meaningful instructor-to-student and student-to-student interactions, c) instructor- and peer-led learning, and d) formative and summative assessment, by wrapping a course around a single set of manageable, self-contained, resource-supported, and interrelated group assignments. Group assignment responses are drafted and submitted online in instructor-moderated discussion forums.

Evidence, collected over two years of using this technique and formally comparing it to more traditional instructional methods, suggests that ADCL maximizes a course’s learning impact and utilizes the instructor’s expertise and time most effectively and efficiently.

So no, we may not need one more acronym, but I believe we can do with one more effort to improve our students’ learning.

More next time…

When I began my undergrad in 2002, I was a fairly shy kid and had moved to a college two states away where I didn’t know anyone. I never would have thought that in three years I’d have been a founding member of an environmental club, vice president of a literary magazine, and the organizer of a writer’s group.

It’s difficult to overstate how much of an effect these student organizations had on the trajectory of my life. The environmental club implemented the college’s first recycling program, for which we needed to interact with college administrators and county officials. This was my first experience navigating different levels of organizational hierarchy to implement a program. We also networked with regional environmental advocacy to educate students about issues and mobilize them in petition and letter-writing campaigns, which provided me a taste of politics.

My role in this organization was one of the first items on my resume and gave me something to talk about in my first few job interviews. I likely would not have been seriously considered for my AmeriCorps position after college without it. But not only that, it provided me with leadership skills, teamwork experience, and a broad knowledge base in a subject other than my academic major.

The benefits of a traditional college experience are not limited to what students get from classes. College life provides an abundance of other enrichment opportunities, such as performances, symposia, and student organizations. And I worry that online students don’t have as much of an opportunity to tap into those activities.

Even if we accept that the majority of online students are nontraditional learners who are taking classes online precisely because they have complicated schedules that would not accommodate these activities, I wonder if more could be done to promote a well-rounded education among online learners.

Let’s look at student organizations, for example. In many ways, college campuses are unique environments as crucibles for grassroots organization, be it an activist political organization or a Frisbee club. It’s obviously easier for the first buds of a student organization to form on a traditional campus as classmates make small talk, share interests, and become friends.

But it’s important to remember that student organizations don’t simply emerge from the ether. There are physical and bureaucratic structures on every campus that promote their existence. There are designated meeting spaces for these organizations to use. There are bulletin boards used to advertise meetings and events. There is funding set aside for student-organization activities. There is a procedure in place for the college to legitimize the organization.

Without these physical and organizational elements, campuses would not enjoy the level of student enrichment they do today. And I fear that as universities expand into online classes, they’re missing opportunities to provide the full student experience to their online learners.

Of course, there’s nothing to stop online students from using third-party social-networking Web sites right now to form student organizations. Students can use something like Facebook’s Group feature to organize and Skype’s video conferencing for meetings. But the farther students need to reach outside their institution’s online learning environment to form these groups, the more initiative it takes, and the less likely they are to do it. I think we’ll only see a richness of online-student activities that approaches that of traditional students if we offer a comparable infrastructure to that of the brick-and-mortar institutions.

But how would one build a comparable infrastructure online? Perhaps each college or academic program could operate its own online discussion board, linked to existing student accounts, providing students the opportunity to share resources, experiences, and ideas.

As these discussions expose shared ideas, desires, and interests, students can form groups that meet synchronously through applications like Wimba. Tools like Blackboard Community System, a comparable software package to Blackboard Academic Suite, allows student groups to have their own uniquely branded space within the online learning environment. A student group using this as its hub could provide information, create discussions, or set up Wimba sessions for audio and video conferencing.

There are innumerable tools that could be integrated with the online learning environment in innumerable ways. But I hope that as online education progresses, extracurricular activity becomes more and more a standard part of the experience so that online learners have the same opportunities for growth that I did.

But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
Luke 10:29 (NIV)

Recently I spent a week in small-town central Illinois, helping to support my mother and arrange her affairs after the accidental death of my stepfather, who raised Belgian draft horses that he sold to the Amish community. He, like most in the area, was a blue-collar man, working with his hands to create a life for himself and my mom in the challenging economic reality of the region to which they’d only recently relocated. Once, it was relatively simple for someone with a high school education to make a living in the factories and farms of downstate Illinois; those days have passed, their memory fading like the day’s last light over the prairie.

The cities of Decatur, Mattoon, and Charleston and the surrounding countryside are struggling to stay afloat economically, and it was impossible for me to shake the sense that rescue for them would be long in coming, if ever arriving at all. The industrial jobs that once supported the economy have been lost to globalization and outsourcing, large agribusiness corporations have swallowed up independent farms, setting prices and dictating what and how to plant and harvest, and the small businesses that supported and depended upon the larger economic engines have largely disappeared, leaving deserted storefronts and rundown homes behind. If the jobs that once supported the region are not coming back, what hope is there for the people that remain?

Education is the only hope. Only an educated people can grasp and make sense of the geopolitical and economic forces that have swept through their communities and mount informed responses to them. Only an educated populace will elect and hold accountable lawmakers that will act in the people’s best interest. Only an educated people will be able to effectively re-create their towns and develop strategies to attract and keep new industries and investment. Education alone may not be enough, but it’s the crucial foundation upon which any hopes for reinvention and revitalization are dependent.

And it will have to be online education. The need is so pervasive, the cost to travel to centers of higher education so prohibitive, and the resources so limited that classroom education cannot be the solution for adult students, who must balance dreams for a better life in the future with the pressing demands of the here and now. A single mother of three working long days for minimum wage doesn’t have the money or time to travel an hour each way to attend a night class. A farmer whose schedule is dictated by the whims of weather or interrupted by illness or injury of his livestock can’t be expected to show up every Wednesday night at six. Both, however, can learn online, asynchronously and at a distance. Up until now, I’ve been an advocate for online learning mostly on a theoretical basis; what I saw and heard downstate convinced me that what we do is essential and will only become more so as the economy worsens and global competition increases.

At the memorial service for my stepfather the pastor spoke about the nobility of hard, manual labor. I think there’s nobility too in empowering ourselves and others through education. At DePaul we talk a lot about using higher education to lift up the disadvantaged. I’ve usually thought of those unfortunates as residing in some shadowy elsewhere, but they’re all around us, sometimes just outside the reach of our vision.

But we can expand our horizons online. Online in distant, isolated, small towns and farms students log in and become our close neighbors and broaden our university’s reach and mission. While questions of how to attract and bring more of them into our community of learners and how to make our education affordable to them must be answered, my experiences of the past week have convinced me that our mission can and should embrace and uplift an ever more diverse group over an ever widening region. Just over the horizon the light has faded for many small Midwestern towns and cities, filled with people for whom online learning could bring a new dawn. It’s imperative that we work to bring about that brighter day.

My mother is a serial entrepreneur and has worked in retail for many years. She often says that the toughest thing about her line of work is the demand to always be “on”—to be perky, pleasant, enthusiastic, and accommodating at all times. Now that the new quarter is under way and I find myself teaching again, I’ve been thinking a lot about the similar pressure for instructors to be “on” when interacting with students.

The last time I taught, multiple students noted in their evaluations that I seemed annoyed and impatient when answering their questions. It came as a bit of a shock, particularly since my previous round of evaluations had turned out so well. After a healthy dose of denial, anger, bargaining, and depression, I traced my steps and recalled a few instances in class when I was visibly frustrated with students who weren’t keeping up with a tutorial. I also knew I’d been particularly bad about reminding students if I’d already answered the same question multiple times, and I had probably mentioned more than once that certain mistakes on the assignments could have been avoided by reading the assignment instructions more carefully.

I usually find that I’m in a great mood for the first few weeks of the quarter. I answer repetitive questions with glee. Students who don’t follow directions don’t keep me up at night. Nothing can dampen the feeling that I’m living my dream of being a professor and that I’m single-handedly changing the world. But the honeymoon doesn’t last forever. Like a Starbucks barista at the end of an eight-hour shift or a J. Crew salesperson who has just been asked to fold the same twenty pairs of pants he just folded two hours ago, the normal wear and tear of the job begins to drain my reservoir of patience. Eventually, it gets harder to answer the same question five times with a smile. It gets more painful to grade assignments in which students disregard the rubric I so meticulously and lovingly constructed. By the end of the quarter, it can be difficult not to take things personally that have little or nothing to do with my abilities as a teacher.

When I reflected more on what went wrong during my last term in the classroom, I realized I wasn’t just in a bad mood. I had also brushed off a critical task that I had performed the quarter before: asking my students for feedback before the middle of the term. The first time I tried it, I worried that surveying my students would draw attention to my lack of experience. I didn’t want to seem needy, but I was even more afraid of waiting until the end of the quarter to find out what my students really thought of me. So, I gave them an incredibly simple survey with only two questions:

1. How challenging is the course so far? (This was a multiple-choice question.)
2. Do you have any suggestions on how I can improve the course? (This was an open-ended question with a comment box.)

This survey was helpful in two ways. First, I learned that I was flying through my software demonstrations and needed to slow down. Second, I showed my students that I genuinely cared about them and wanted to make the course the best it could be. While I can’t say that my little survey made all the difference in my evaluation results that quarter, I feel certain that it played a significant role. When I taught again, I was a bit overconfident, having passed the last quarter with flying colors. I meant to ask my students for feedback but never got around to it. I told myself the students wouldn’t complete it, that I should have done it the week before, or that I should wait until next week. It was always the wrong time to ask for feedback, and before I knew it, the opportunity had slipped through my fingers.

This quarter I’m determined not to make the same mistake. I’ve already asked my students a few simple questions and their responses have helped me correct a few small problems that would have magnified over time. I made sure to include a question about my attitude and patience level, and I plan to offer the survey again to help me snap out of any funk that might set in as the quarter progresses. Asking for feedback early on also goes a long way to foster goodwill. Because I teach in a creative discipline, I have to offer a lot of criticism to help students improve. I can tell them all day long that they shouldn’t take this criticism personally, but giving them the opportunity to critique my teaching helps me lead by example. It also gives the students a chance to blow off some steam before the final evaluations, and I’d much rather get the worst over with early and in a survey that no one has to see but me.

Surveys can be conducted through Blackboard, but it can be difficult to convince students that they are truly anonymous. DePaul employees have the option to use QuickData, our home-grown tool that allows faculty to create surveys by completing a few simple forms. Because these surveys can be taken from any computer and don’t require students to log in, faculty might find they get more frank and honest feedback. For instructors outside DePaul, Web-based survey tools like Survey Monkey and Survey Gizmo offer a similar promise of anonymity. Of course, giving students the freedom to say whatever they like about their instructors has its downsides. However, I find it’s better to embrace this early in the quarter when there’s still time to do something about it. Hopefully, the result is a better learning experience for everyone and fewer disgruntled students venting several weeks’ worth of frustration in a course evaluation that will be read by department heads.

My students aren’t really my customers and I don’t like to think that I’m obligated to put on a happy face at all times and serve them like a Ritz-Carlton concierge. However, I do think student feedback is essential if I’m going to become a better teacher. When this feedback comes only once at the end of the quarter, it’s easy to feel defensive and powerless. That’s why it’s so important to ask students for regular feedback. It might make me seem a bit needy, but that’s an adjective I can live with, and I know my mom would agree. But just to be sure, I think I’ll send her a survey.

“Change,” a slogan of the Obama campaign, is undoubtedly winning its own presidential bid in the buzzword competition. The word “change,” probably of Celtic origin, is defined as an action to make different or to shift from one to another (Merriam-Webster OnLine). It can mean anything from a slight alteration to a radical transformation. When it comes to education, I think that change is, in fact, the ultimate goal of teaching and learning: change from unknown to known, from viewing things from one level to viewing them from another, and from systematic knowledge acquisition to an individualized, conscious battle of lucidity (Morin, 1999; George Siemens 2008). And that ultimate form of change as a result of learning is called “transformational learning.”

About a month ago, I attended a session on language learning and VoIP at the Wisconsin Distance Learning Conference. The presenter, Kerrin Barret, shared the findings of her dissertation studying a cross-cultural language-learning community supported by synchronous VoIP. Although her focus was on the role of VoIP in improving cultural and linguistic competencies, she found (with pleasant surprise, I am sure) that transformational learning occurred across participant groups in the online English-language-learning program, which involved teachers from the United States and students from Taiwan and mainland China. One of the themes that emerged from her study was that by participating in this online program, either as teachers or students, her study population became interculturally competent, which made them view the world as well as themselves differently. This perspective change echoes Merizow’s definition of “transformational learning”: a “disorienting dilemma” occurs in an adult learner’s life to cause her or him to reflect critically, with the end result that the individual’s conception of him/herself and worldview is inexorably changed.

During the presentation, I asked Kerrin, the session participants, and especially myself a question: should transformational learning be made a specific goal of our programs? The follow-up question in my mind was: will making it a goal of the programs give them a better chance to achieve the result, since curriculum design is becoming more and more goal-driven? At that moment, two examples came to my mind: my Chinese language class and DOTS, our faculty development program. For the former, I always wanted to make the class go beyond just the words and grammars; and for the latter, we have been striving to make an impact on faculty’s view and practice of teaching instead of just developing a couple online courses.

In seeking an answer to my own question, I thought about why transformational learning has not been made a goal of either my class or our program. I saw two reasons: 1) the goal seems to be so far above the ground for any teacher and student to achieve over the course of a class or a program; and 2) desirable as it is, making a class or a program a transformational learning experience to anyone doesn’t seem to be a demandable task, nor can it be measured easily with any form of standards. And when it comes to faculty development, a third reason is that faculty are put off by being preached to, which they see as humiliating.

This debate of “to be or not to be” is actually well documented in the literature of transformational learning, where two seemingly different views of transformational learning are presented: one view, represented by Mezirow, emphasizes rationality or rational, critical reflection; and the other, led by Boyd and Meyer, stresses the intuitive and emotional nature of the transformational process.

As a big follower of Etienne Wenger, I tend to agree with Boyd and Meyer because, as Wenger pointed out, “learning cannot be designed.” (Note: he didn’t say instruction cannot be designed, so that’s no job-security threat to instructional designers.) “Ultimately, it (learning) belongs to the realm of experience and practice. It follows the negotiation of meaning; it moves on its own terms. It slips through the cracks; it creates its own cracks. Learning happens, design or no design.” (Wenger, 1998)

If the result of transformational learning is so personal and hence uncontrollable, what can we, the educators, do to help one achieve this ultimate form of learning? Despite their different views on the process of transformational learning, all researchers and theorists seem to agree that educators play a significant role in the student’s perspective transformation, and “fostering transformative learning in the classroom depends to a large extent on establishing meaningful, genuine relationships with students” (Cranton, 2006, cited by Karrin 2008).

“Relationship” is the key word that I picked from this passage. As factual information becomes more and more accessible to everyone in its various forms of presentation, the role of educators is changing from knowledge carriers to relationship builders, trust agents, mentors, and role models for students. A class or a program provides us an opportunity to serve in that support role of difference-making.

If change is now a dream of all Americans, a dream of a transformational change as a result of learning should, then, be a “secret” goal of all American educators. It is an explicit but unstated goal with the greatest reward for both the teachers and the learners. The “medal” was awarded when a student in Kerrin’s study said, “I feel from learning I am different”; my dream came true when a student wrote me a card saying, “you taught me more than Chinese but how to be a considerate and caring person;” our goal was met when faculty said in their interviews, “DOTS makes me think about teaching differently.”

As a graduate student from the writing program working at IDD, I often wonder how much time it makes sense to devote to copy editing the online-course syllabi and modules that come across my desk. I sometimes think I’m being too stringent in my attempts to apply the rules of the Chicago Manual of Style. I have a tendency to get lost for upwards of half an hour at a time trying to resolve ambiguities of correct hyphen and comma use. (I’m still not sure if I should use a comma before a coordinating conjunction connecting two imperative clauses.)

Generally, the amount of attention that gets paid to a certain text’s punctuation, grammar, and accuracy is proportional to the number of people we expect to read it. An article in a national news magazine is rigorously scrutinized while an e-mail to officemates may not be reread once. Given that logic, it doesn’t seem to make sense to go over every course module with a fine-toothed comb.

However, I think everyone involved in producing a class should have a healthy amount of fear of students misunderstanding the course content. I bring this up because I think there’s a sense that proper grammar and punctuation, while important in order to appear professional, are purely cosmetic—at best only necessary to make a text easier to read. But something as simple as a hyphen or a capital letter can make a sentence mean something entirely different than what is intended.

In neither speech nor writing is meaning in the words alone. For example, in speech, we can distinguish the White House, the building where the president lives, from a generic house that happens to be white, by using stressed and unstressed syllables. “The white house” is not the same “the white house.” Say it out loud; you’ll hear the difference.

While we use and interpret stressed syllables naturally in speech, in writing, we have to rely on visual elements to make sure our audience reads the sentence the way it is intended. When these are absent or inconsistent, the writer loses control of what the reader interprets.

If, for example, someone referred to the syllabus for an online course as “the online course syllabus,” there’s a very real chance that the reader could interpret it instead as a course syllabus that is online, possibly assuming we are talking about a face-to-face course in which the professor posted the syllabus on Blackboard.

To prevent this kind of miscommunication, the phrase must be hyphenated as “online-course syllabus” because the words “online course” function as a compound adjective to modify “syllabus.”

Perhaps I am trying too hard to justify my existence as a writing student working at IDD. But since instructors are often trying to differentiate subtle shades of meaning and convey complicated ideas, I think every effort should be made to eliminate the potential for this kind of misinterpretation. Remember that in asynchronous learning it’s harder for students to ask and get answers to questions when they’re confused.

Of course, much of the time, students will be able to tell what you mean by context, but not always. And I think we should be on the lookout for the situations where a comma, a hyphen, or a capital letter can keep students from misunderstanding the class concepts.