Oh!, how huge my frustration, no doubt shared by millions of other teacher-types, who are quite incredible interactors! Back in the early nineties, say 1992, my original frustration surfaced when I realized the potential of the web and also that web technique was not within my reach not without a major mindset operation and lots and lots of training. Now, with eXe, we can take our teaching online orders of magnitude less of both sweat and radically different skill acquisition. And, in the bargain, eXe allows the learning of good lesson and course principles which will serve both online and in the face-to-face classroom.
The real difficulty is to find people who have both the wish and the ability to teach. I’ll leave that very large topic until another time. Abandoned, for the moment, so that we can talk about the already competent face to face teacher [another time, remember] and the web.
But at least a preface about the the teacher as an existential “type”. There is, as far as I can tell, no theoretical limitation to human capabilities and inclinations as they are parceled out to us as individuals. In my own experience, however, there are existential and developmental limits on this special combination of human abilities and inclinations.
For example, the wish to interact with and nurture the becoming of others is relatively rare as a primary, or close to primary, individual drive (I am not here discussing the “wired-in” protectiveness that seems to be part of the human and mammalian package). Also, the wish to and ability to communicate effectively in multiple situations with varying ages, genders, groups and personalities is also fairly rare. While related, these two skills are more rarely found in one person. For a “teacher-type” add to these two, wishing to support/nurture the achievement/becoming of others and comprehensive set of one-to-one and group communication skills two other skills, the ability to “sense” and/or “deduce” the conceptual processing of another, and the ability to communicate about and structure situations such that the learner can move from their own position on something like a learning ladder of skills to a next level of learning . This, based only upon the teacher/student transactions and the information and learning experiences and informational materials provided to the student.
As you can see this is a relatively unlikely combination of human skills, having one may increase the motivation to develop another in the set but does not guarantee that that skill will develop.
I hope you now see that nothing in this teacher disposition (my reference to this set of motivations and skills) relates directly to mathematics, logic, technology. And, one could argue, for personalities inclined in this direction, the development of such skills would require a distinctly different set drives and predispositions than those which drive the teacher we have described above.
In short, I would argue that it is a very rare combination indeed that finds both in depth computer language skills (html among them) and teacher skills in the same person. Particularly in adults who received elementary, secondary and postsecondary training prior to, say, 2000.
It is far more likely, however, that such teaching inclined adults, those born before 2000, have acquired lesson design skills, and even curriculum development skills, on top of their “package” of skills and inclinations that move them to teach. The gift of eXe is that it allows such a person to put lessons and teaching online by means which are in reach. With eXe the face-to-face teacher can reach out to construct for her/himself a teaching and learning environment which can work work her/his live classroom or even for students who we will be doing online learning alone.
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Links
eXe blog
25tools for eXe and other online learning support applications. (All are Open Source, incidentally. There is now much less
in the form of technical or fiscal limit that stops the teacher type from trying to reach out online. Hooray)
