Glendale
Community
College

WebDev
2001
Home

Dialogue Days Home

WebDev
2000

"I want to talk a little bit about this theme -- how it started, how it developed, and where we think it's going. Because like most good projects, I think it's changed over the last two or three months.

"First of all, obviously, as the Chancellor remarked, the key piece here is the communication feedback loop in the classroom. That's a key element in instruction. When that loop is strong, students learn. When that loop is incomplete -- and it can become so when students are afraid to speak up -- learning suffers.

"Despite our best efforts, students feel demeaned and humiliated when they offer wrong answers or ask stupid questions. I don't know a faculty member who hasn't said in the classroom, 'There is no stupid question.' And yet we still have students who say, 'I know this is a stupid question; maybe I won't ask it.'

"This also happens in meetings and other gatherings. So if you are in a committee, frequently there are times in which you are afraid to speak up or afraid to say what you think. And this has a very powerful silencing effect on us all.

"This experiment we're doing today with Personal Response System is an attempt to explore how to build a better, more complete communication link in classrooms and meetings. It's a bit of technology with which what we've tried to do -- and we're sort of incomplete on this one -- is to break the classroom boundaries too. I'll talk a little bit about what we were planning to do -- we were hoping to make this much more web enabled. We'll get there within the next two weeks."

Continue with:
Introducing The Strongest Link: Karen Schwalm [2]

or skip to:
The Strongest Link: Round One

Return to:
Event Agenda
Event Home Page