Re: Distance Learning or the e-mail format...

["Bob Gorman" <bgorman@xxxx>]

--- In MWcybercourse@xxxx, "Edwin Pilobello" <edwinp13@xxxx> wrote:
> Hi Wendy,

........


I also have had direct experience with this format. The circumstances 
were this:

Two years ago I was teaching Math & Computers at a special needs 
high-school for so-called "learning disabled students". Mid-year we 
gained a new student with some "phobias". First, he was male-teacher 
phobic, and there were only 2 of the 7 teachers who were male. I was 
one of them. He needed his .5 credit in computers to graduate. It
then turned out he had a wide variety of "phobias", preventing his 
participation in many courses.

The plan we devised was this:
A. A one session (50 min.) face to face introduction. (The
expectation was that he wouldn't last more than 20 min.)
B. The bulk of lessons done thru e-mail.
C. Ocassional face-to face updates.

Here's what happened:
A. The first meeting went for 1 1/2 hrs (90 minutes) with his father 
waiting in the parking lot for the last 60 minutes of it. This I 
attribute to my personal experience of several years working with 
adults who experiened the trauma of incest as children, in a 
psychotheraputic setting. I set our chairs next to, rather than 
opposite, each other, with his closer to an open door to the 
classroom, and many other details, probably not easily transferable.

It went slow at first, but by actively listening to him, I found a 
point of entry to his world of meaning, and that was animation.

I used MswLogo as the language;
stepped him thru installing it;
and handed him a floppy with the installation kit.

B. We exchanged about 2-3 emails a week.
I was utterly amazed on day when he discovered, on his own, and used 
the SCROLLX & SCROLLY command to smoothly move an image!

About 6 weeks into this process, he had a "family emergency" which 
caused him to withdraw from all classes. However, it was a very 
powerful experience for me as to what works and what doesn't in an 
e-mail environment.

C. We did have 2-3 followup face to face meetings, and sometimes 
exchanged assignments and results through other teachers.

Bob