Interestingly, teaching online requires “listening” far differently than one listens in a land-based class. Listening in “real time” in a land-based class is much harder to achieve, especially of late because EVERYONE is distracted.

But the sense of time pressure seems (paradoxically) to be even more prevalent among twenty-somethings. They are engulfed in a sense of the immediate that is very hard to penetrate, even with the most exciting of lectures. Most do not even “do” email because texting is more satisfying to them (for reasons which escape me).

That sense of the immediate and constant “busy-ness” results in a student who cannot take the time to listen, the sine qua non of learning. How I counter that online is through all the best-practices developed over the last twenty years, but also through the one area where one can catch a student’s attention: I make it personal.

Through one-on-one discussions with me, students are not throwing their ideas out into the sea of people who are half-listening. They are speaking directly to me about ideas that they choose to share with me. They know they are “listened to” (read) because I usually ask questions ‘backatcha’ so they can experience the total attention that is pretty much missing in most modern people’s daily lives.

ALL of the interaction of course is through writing, but the writing of students does seem to improve (sometimes dramatically) when their ideas are taken seriously in online discussions, perhaps because they have the space to listen to their own ideas! [Just FYI, all lectures are canned, and I do not interact with class discussions, so the time I spend teaching is almost entirely in the one-on-one teacher/student area. I also use the Virtual Writing Center for multiple drafts of student writing (for credit).]

A while ago I read a column in Writer’s Digest (since lost) about how you can over-describe.That was a revelation to me, since I’d been beat over the head with the show-don’t-tell method of scene creation. Pick telling detail and leave the rest to the imagination of the reader, this article said. I’ve since come to believe that’s absolutely right.

Here’s to the power of less!