Today I found this message in my in box, from a teacher whose students reacted negatively when she gave them printed versions of listserv discussions. I'm posting it here with permission. I don't have much direct experience teaching via listserv, and I don't really use e-mail to encourage communication within small groups. So I didn't have much to say. Perhaps someone else does?
I teach undergraduate education majors a course in young adult literature, and, although we havn't progressed to blogging yet, we do keep journal exchanges on the books we read through WebCT discussion boards. The students are in groups of 4-5, private, so they only post to a small subgroup of the class.
Since the semester has just begun for real, I thought it would be helpful for them to take a look at the print version of their postings during the past 2-week cycle and discuss ftf the ways they might want to proceed in the next cycle. So I compiled each group's postings and gave it to them to begin discussion. You'd have thought I'd thrown rats down on the tables. One student got really angry, said he never knew what to expect in this class and now he'd always be on guard from now on. Another said he felt that I'd broken his confidence--"It's one thing to see it back and forth on e-mail, but when you print it out like that, I feel violated." I have trouble seeing what all the bother is, but there obviously is something here--nobody from any other group saw anything that others in another group had written, and all students were aware from the first that I would be "lurking"--I don't want to get into their conversations because that changes them, but they know I'm there. There was nothing new in the texts, but the difference in medium really heated them up! How did a well-meaning professor go so badly wrong--any ideas?
Advice
If you ask me, these students got a damn good lesson that day. It may not have been a lesson they were comfortable learning, but good education never is. They learned that stuff they send out via email doesn't just disappear into a void; it's very real and comes back to them. If you ask me, they should be thanking her for teaching them something they desperately needed to know!
comment
It's always interesting in education the way unexpected things can happen. What could be happening here is that the students are exeriencing new ways of learning and they feel vulnerable, hence the kick back. Whilst I agree with the previous comment about the students learning a valuable lessson about writing in cyberspace being available in the future, I think it is also a valuable lesson for faculty to learn that when teaching in "new" ways you need to hand hold students rather more than you might expect and make sure that what you intend to do is transparent right from the start.
Perceptions of virtuality
While I haven't had a whole class get upset (and I haven't printed out their listserve discussions), the first term I used listservs 3 or 4 students complained in their course evaluations about being forced to read school email in a space they regarded as personal and social.
Last spring, all my students in one class had blogs. One student decided to link to his LiveJournal blog, which I read occasionally. When I referenced something he had written, he blushed, as though I had entered his intimate space.
In my current class, we use a listserv, a discussion board and we'll have group blogs. I no longer assume any of these tools are neutral, or that every student sees them the way I do. I make the explicit claim these are all now common tools for academic, professional, and civic discourse. This is the first course in first-year comp, so I assume there's lots of learning for them--and me-- about the norms of electronic discourse.
Another example: I've known students who think it's unethical to save material written in Instant Messages. They see them as phone calls where recording them would be a privacy violation. My point here is that we're all participating in the norm-setting process even as we teach and learn. And we all know "the course of true posting never did run smooth."