Open Conversation

Posts tagged communication

(This post was inspired by an open question posted by Iamlittlei)

In the classroom, the teacher/students relationship is complex. The teacher is not only teaching, but he is also the one to evaluate, to judge. 

If the fear of being judged (by the teacher, by others students), is stronger than the motivation to learn, evaluation become an obstacle to the teaching.

To change this situation, you need to establish mutual trust in the classroom. Trust happen when both side feel they can rely on each other. Creating such a feeling is crucial to the success of the classroom experience.

It all start by clarifying the meaning of the classroom experience : why are we all here now, sitting, 7 hours a day?

Classroom teaching, very often lack of meaning. Providing meaning to school is really the work to be done by the teacher, more than the transfer of information, because as Sugata Mitra has shown very nicely throughout his series of experience (see post), when there is access to the information and interest of the learners, the learning experience can happen.

Creating interest, motivation, meaning, is really what the teacher should build together with the kids.

Trust is then a matter of both side helping each other to reach the goal they have set up together.

Once you reached trust, the question of communication in the classroom, like Iamlittlei asked, become purely secondary.

You could even think of giving the class the task to solve their communication process by themselves (through a workshop or a group discussion). 

Note : If they solve it, make some inter-class communication and ask them to present the solution they found to an other class.

1. Markets are conversations.
2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
…
6. The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.

the cluetrain manifesto

I stumbled upon a few new “Did you know” clip today and really, it made me think that this is the new way to make a good presentation today:

- Quick pace

- Good music

- Data with short message

The success come from :

Visualizing the data for quick remembering

Add music to create emotion

Keep high pace to retain attention

Just mail Matt Cutts and the guys at unofficial google team :

Hi,

I have just watched the
http://www.firefoxfacts.com/2009/10/26/raindrop-makes-communication-easier-to-manage/

where the guy in the video give some clever insight about relevancy of mail as opposed to bulk.

Bulk / Spam is irrelvant mail.
Today, we have a very binary definition of Spam. Either is it spam, or it is not.
But it is not this way.
Beside the die hard spam, there is a huge amount of irrelevant email I get on a daily basis,
which is nice but not needed - not now, not in this context.

For some reason, gmail didnt invest into relancy of messages based on contacts.
I have work contact, I have close team contacts, I have friends, familly, ennemies etc.
My contacts are just reflection my life, the society I am in contact with and I am not willing to get communication with the whole society at once and without distinction who talk to me.


Buzz is the same : If I buzz about the last concert in town, why should people that I know and follow me - BUT dont live in the same town - should care about it? If I buzz about science, why people that dont like science should give a shit about it? I dont know only people with the same interests as me.
Same reason, why I dont follow back buzzers…
What about labeling users? or I dont know… something that would allow to get life more practical.

I also droped a notice about this on matt’s blog.
I have no idea how to get this sorted, but I think it is today one one the main issues in mail.

People should not need to become black belt @ Inbox Zero in order to survice communication - instead google should provide a cool way to deal with irrelevant bulk things from people.