Teach42

Hrrrm… Interesting post by the Bionic Teacher: The Line Between Helping and Helping Too Much. Something that I’ve struggled with quite a bit, and am struggling with right now actually. Where’s the line between spoon feeding and making something painless?

I don’t believe everyone needs to be a geek. Most people can get through life quite happily without ever seeing the source code of a web page or typing into a terminal window. However, in my efforts to make things as easy as possible, I do wonder how often I’m hindering people’s own discovery process.

The BionicTeacher writes:

If we want teachers using computers we’ve got to get rid of the annoyances (well at least most of the major ones anyway). Anything that means teachers won’t have to spend time on non-educational computer uses should be done. Educational computer integration will really start taking off when it’s made as easy as blogging- and then we can work on getting more teachers blogging.

I think this begs the question, just how easy is blogging? Yes, it’s as easy as typing something in and clicking submit, but that’s only a small part of the process. That’s like saying driving is just as easy as turning the key and starting the engine. Or painting is as easy as grabbing a marker and drawing. While it may be technically true, there’s quite a bit more that figures into it. Aggregators, comments, formatting, spam, feeds, sidebars, blogrolls, and all sorts of other things figure into the equation too.

The reason I bring this up is because I’ve just recently become the Blogfather to a bunch of hard working dedicated bloggers, most of which had no idea what a blog was a few months ago. Many of them still don’t, but they do know how to post. Is blogging no more than typing into a text box and clicking submit? Personally, I think there’s more to it than that.

So the question becomes, how much handholding to people (particularly teachers) need? Where is that fine line between hand holding and spoon feeding drawn?

Personally, I do believe in making sure that the technology doesn’t get in the way. For example, if you want to teach people how to create newsletters, then make sure they don’t have to learn about mounting a server share point to do it. However, if you want somebody to establish a blog for the purpose of promoting conversations about classroom discussions outside of the school setting, then I do think people need to know more than just how to type and click submit.

Trust me, I do believe in keeping things as simple as possible. But if you’re teaching someone something new, then you don’t necessarily want it to be as simple as possible. As they say, make something foolproof and the only people who will use it will be fools. I think we have higher expectations for both our teachers and students. Most of the time, we don’t want them to just be able to produce something. We want them to understand it. Simplifying things helps people do things, but it doesn’t help them understand it.

There you go. In a nutshell: Help too much when you need someone to just do something. Back off when you want them to understand it.

Can someone turn that into something quotable for me?

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