only connect - progress - cmc - TUTOR/TUTOR

Home tutors, in Derbyshire at least, work in a very isolated environmentally Connect put two of them in contact via a range of channels which were certainly well used throughout the project and gave rise to a number of ideas about how that might be exploited in the future - with a function quite apart from the on-line learning we have been looking at here.

			Narrative

The use of CMC by the tutors went through several stages during the project. Beginnings After out first meeting I set up a mailing list using the facilities offered by egroups.com. the original idea was to provide a discussion area for myself, the tutors, Liz McQueen and anyone else we thought would benefit from being in the group. We also had direct access to each other via personal e-mail. It became clear early on that Liz would not be able to take part in this discussion group because DCC had not yet provided her with internet access in her work environment. There was immediately a huge amount of traffic on the list - amounting to several hundred mailings between that first meeting and the actual start of the project. There's no doubt that given the chance to communicate with each other a group of just two tutors had a huge amount to share with each other. It's fair to say that all of that activity produced a lot more heat than light and it was fairly clear that the inexperience of the tutors at using CMC was causing frustration. Many of the messages were several pages long covering several different points and causing the 'threads' to become entangled and some very important ideas to get buried deep in the list. This in turn lead to a fair level of frustration as both tutors felt they were putting in huge amounts of time to the project but that we weren't arriving at conclusions or firming up proposals. As I headed into this project I had with me a huge bunch of assumptions, some of which I had identified, others I hadn't. Having been used to using CMC in one form or another since 1985 it was a method that was second nature to me, its rules and conventions part of my daily work. This is not so for these tutors, or anyone else being plunged into the CMC environment. A knowledge and familiarity with the internet is no guarantee of skills in the use of CMC. Any organisation that decides to take any of these ideas further and exploit CMC with a group for actual serious discussion and decision making needs to look very carefully at the way they might set up a training program. There is actually quite a lot of research in this area and such organisations would do well to review it (as I will in my dissertation) before embarking on developing such a system. At this stage I moved into a furious phase of miss-guided damage limitation. I tried to lead by example, keeping messages short and on single points, sending long and probably inappropriate extracts from papers on CMC, attempting to re-direct the discussions onto threaded message boards while all the time trying to stay 'democratic' in my approach. None of this worked to the extent it needed to and it set a tone of frustration that coloured the project from that point on leading, in part at least, to the loss of one tutor and the disenchantment of the other. Further evidence of the communications melt-down came as I began to get personal e-mail messages from one tutor discussing issues that really should have been on the list, along with expressions of deep self-doubt about their ability to contribute to the project. This demonstrated to me that I had been unable to create the atmosphere of trust within this small group that was to be a key factor in its success. As it became clear that tutors had such different approaches, ideas and expectations of the project and the way the tools I was offering could be used I decided that I would no longer ask them to work together on producing the materials that would be used by the students. This may be seen as a defeat, to abandon the collaborative production of materials, but I was totally comfortable with this change in approach. As discussed elsewhere, the tutors were being dragged out of several comfort zones at once and if it was too soon to expect such collaboration then there were only two options - to pick up my ball and go home, or to move ahead without it. In terms of the stated aim of the project, it was still clearly possible to improve the educational experience of the students with the tutors working more in isolation, I just needed to accept that part of my dream of the sun-lit uplands of a learning community would have to be put on hold. Underway Once underway with the students on board things began to quieten down a little as there was a tighter focus moving away from the what-ifs to what-am-I-going-to-do-abouts and why-hasn't-this-workeds. Much of the communication settled into stuff about dates on which work might be expected and other minor administrative and technical matters. There was a fair burst of discussion about student motivation which will (might) be explored further in the dissertation, but the main thing that seemed to come out of this communication systems was not supposed to have been part of Only Connect at all. In their conversations, Mike and June began to discuss their various curricular strengths and the needs of their various pupils. It became clear that their skills were very differnet and complementary and that each had a lot to offer the students of the other in terms of curricular gaps. As a result of this they began to arrange swaps of students to try to make better use for their skills to improve the educational provision of the students.

			Possibilities

What has become clear to me as the project has gone on is that some of the problems home tutor isolation brings can be tackled using ICT and, specifically, CMC technologies. Let's look at this as a quite separate issue from on-line learning with the students. What we have is a 'workforce' of about 100 people spread over a county. Each is doing fundamentally the same (difficult) job, a job which requires a great deal of creative thinking and problem solving, which would benefit from the emotional and social as well as professional support of others. There are bound to be times when one tutor is tackling a difficulty that others have solved - be it to do with delivering a part of the curriculum that they're not familiar with or coping with difficult situations with students, parents or schools.

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