Presentation Abstract
This presentation briefly overviews the cross-disciplinary, protocol analysis research design (combining English, Anthropology, and Social Psychology), pedagogical implications of ineffective "shareware" integration, suggestions for gaining and maintaining authority in distance learning environments, and suggestions for using the Myers-Briggs research to enhance virtual spaces. The second year of the study, professors switched classes, teaching the distant students directly, in order to examine changes in authority and to determine ways that teachers might achieve authority in a distant environment without being physically present. Direct engagement with the distant (now present) authority revealed much about how instructors can place a "present" authority into a distant environment, without having to actually travel to the distant site. Teachers administered the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to see if the groupings popular in the actual classroom, worked in the virtual classroom. Pitfalls, bloops and blunders are also mentioned in this presentation so that our mistakes need not be repeated. Throughout both years of the study, all students followed the same syllabus, use the same texts, worked in a group of four throughout the semester, and were given the same computer information and instruction. Only in the second year did teachers at remote locations "swap" classes, thus placing the distant authority directly in the classroom. Also, it was only in the second year that teachers utilized the personality indicator. Can students respect a distant authority? Can personality types help determine whatsthe teacher can expect in her virtual classroom? Answers were surprising.
Author: Linda J. Myers
Second Author: Philip Boshoff
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Target Audience: Not Applicable